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Comment by CapitalistCartr | Hacker News Reader

I wonder how other languages compare to English. I know English is far from pure.

"The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don't just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary." -- James Nicoll

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Subtlex has done word frequency counts in a number of languages:

Dutch - http://crr.ugent.be/programs-data/subtitle-frequencies/subtl...

Chinese - http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2880003/

Greek - http://www.bcbl.eu/subtlex-gr/

There's a few others (Polish, French, etc) but I can't find the links for some reason.

Zipf's law [1,2] generally holds for a corpus in any natural language and can be applied to a lot of other things outside linguistics as well.

[1] Zipf’s word frequency law in natural language: http://colala.bcs.rochester.edu/papers/piantadosi2014zipfs.p... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zipf%27s_law

What do you mean by "pure"? Lack of loanwoards? Lack of any linguistic changes (e.g., sound, meaning) for existing words? Lack of any innovation, i.e. no new words for new concepts/objects? You could try to find some of these things in languages spoken by rather isolated groups. Yet I don't think one should call such a language "pure", implying some kind or (moral) superiority.

Compared to Classical Latin for instance, I can sort of intuitively see how a "purity" comparison might make some sense. The grammar is more rich and precise, suffixes and prefixes attached to primitive roots are more regular in terms of meaning. Meaning is very decoupled from word order, which allows much richer possibilities for rhyme and prose. If the restored pronunciation is anything to go by, then the pronunciation is very regular. Then again I'm not a linguist.

I would say it's like arguing whether Python is more "pure" than Perl. They're both Turing complete, they express very similar concepts but I'd wager most people would concede that Python feels "purer".

Isn't the 'purity' of Latin due more to the fact that we just don't have much data on the languages that informed it? I'm sure Latin borrowed heaps of words and grammar from other languages, but those languages are mostly lost to history now, since the people who spoke them didn't conquer and hold the Mediterranean for one thousand years.

Language purity isn't related to moral superiority; it's a matter of the degree to which a language follows it's own rules and patterns, mostly how much of the vocabulary is native, i.e. how much of the vocabulary is "borrowed" from other languages. Since English is the result of a "forced merger" between a Germanic language (Old English) and a Latin one (Middle French) we are already screwed in that respect.

An interesting and large list of "English" words from other languages: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lists_of_English_words_by_coun...

I like to shampoo my hair on my veranda in the jungle, then put on my cushy khaki pyjamas, while smoking a cheroot.

It's nirvana.

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