How the words we teach English language learners changed

Re:How the words we teach English language learners changed by conductr on Sunday August 02, 2026 @02:52PM (#49147213)

I always hear a phase that goes like “we have a word for it in Language, …”. You almost never hear it said where English is that language. We just don’t have many words or don’t like adding new ones very frequently, it seems.

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Re:How the words we teach English language learners changed by ndsipa_pomu on Sunday August 02, 2026 @03:37PM (#49147578)

English tends to just borrow/steal words from other languages if they're useful enough. It could also be something to do with the lack of consistency of english rules so it's not so easy to create new words.

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Re:How the words we teach English language learners changed by kevin_thibedeau on Sunday August 02, 2026 @07:00PM (#49149288)

You can wordificate cromulent lexemes with abandon. The English language don't care.

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Re:How the words we teach English language learners changed by teddyh on Monday August 03, 2026 @12:18AM (#49151173)

any noun can become a verb if you don’t care enough

— <https://blog.linguisten.de/post/183704949120/any-noun-can-be...>

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Re:How the words we teach English language learners changed by eudamoniac on Sunday August 02, 2026 @04:45PM (#49148134)

English has more words than any language on earth. People don't learn or use use most of them because they will be labeled pretentious.

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Re:How the words we teach English language learners changed by poncho_romero on Sunday August 02, 2026 @05:40PM (#49148639)

I wonder if despite our large vocabulary, English speakers tend to use a small subsection of it because there are so many non-native speakers. It seems to me from reading and watching people from decades ago that the language was more complex. (I don't mean this as any knock on people who speak English as a second language.)

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Re:How the words we teach English language learners changed by KPGv2 on Sunday August 02, 2026 @05:50PM (#49148733)

We don't use most of them because no one could learn them all. There's more than 100,000 hanzi recorded in Chinese. Some quick googling suggests educated Chinese people know 8,000, and the average Chinese person knows around 3,500.

So 3–8%.

Nothing to do with pretention and everything to do with impossibility :D

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Re:How the words we teach English language learners changed by fragmede on Monday August 03, 2026 @05:10AM (#49153171)

Sounds... load bearing. Worse than being called pretentious, someone's gonna come along accuse you of being an LLM if you use words that aren't part of the normal lexicon.

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Re:How the words we teach English language learners changed by eudamoniac on Monday August 03, 2026 @11:25AM (#49157043)

Utilizing a breadth of vocabulary won't evince your being an LLM. None have such a habitude. You'll merely attract invidious barbed tonguelets.

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Re:How the words we teach English language learners changed by KPGv2 on Sunday August 02, 2026 @05:50PM (#49148727)

> you almost never hear it said where English is that language

I'm willing to bet it's a combination of two factors:

1. you are consuming these things in English, and English natives are less likely to say "English has this word that those other people don't" because they fully understand English so it doesn't seem inscrutable, but some other language is kind of "magical an mysterious" to them. See, e.g., the urban legend that the Chinese word for crisis is "danger" and "opportunity." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_word_for_crisis There's a whole cottage industry around "that foreign language is so cool compared to English"

2. "this language can say X but another language cannot" is invariably wrong

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