# How many words are there in Icelandic?



## 涼宮

Good evening 

I consider Icelandic an alluring and marvellous language and it seems to be a language which has the fewest loanwords(as far as I know), which I will learn later, but at the moment, I would like to know if there is an estimated number of how many words there are in Icelandic. Since Árni Magnússon Institute is the authority of the language, perhaps they have a register about it. 


Thank you in advance


----------



## Alxmrphi

Here is an article on that topic.
You can view it in English or Spanish through Google Translate (but the translation is bad at times, so be careful!)

Also, be aware that the title translates as something like "What are some words in Icelandic?" in English (so I expect it will in the Spanish version) but that's a bad automatic translation of the Icelandic question, which does say exactly "How many words are there in Icelandic?". Either way, it's impossible to tell with a lot of certainty. It's avoidance of loanwords does not mean less words than in other languages, as it's so compound-friendly. Sometimes it's weird to think of a new word as an actual "new" one. For example not long ago I learned the word for plumber was _pípulagningarmaður_ which is just _pipe-fixing-man_, and to see it as a completely new word (after having experience with Italian's frustrating insistence on completely new forms for related concepts) is quite weird. 

Dictionaries don't really include a lot of compounds that seem so obvious, but they should really be their own words I guess. The dictionaries will contain the most common ones, but Icelandic doesn't have such an academic backing as English does, not having its own version of the OED. Many a time I look in three dictionaries and end up having to ask an Icelander for the meaning of a word, showing fairly often there are many gaps, so even statistical study isn't anywhere near what I would call perfect.

A good example is actually in the Icelandic article, there's a word _augnablikssamsetningar_ which means "instant/moment-compounds" that is used to describe some words that are only used very briefly. I would be very surprised to see that word in a dictionary. It exists in about 10-23 (Google's results often change and contain duplicates) results on Google, but there you go, still recognisable due to its compound nature.

Oh and I stumbled upon (in that search) the true English translation of the original Icelandic question here.


----------



## 涼宮

Takk fyrir!  Sadly they do no have a more accurate number, I consider that 600,000 words is a small number for such an old language  But that website helped me more to know about Icelandic. Thanks for the web.

Sjáumst síðar!


----------



## Alxmrphi

涼宮 said:


> Takk fyrir!  Sadly they do no have a more accurate number, I consider that 600,000 words is a small number for such an old language  But that website helped me more to know about Icelandic. Thanks for the web.
> 
> Sjáumst síðar!



Well, Icelandic isn't really "older" than English or Spanish. I mean, you could say "English" had its origins from 550AD in various dialects, to then be considered "Old English" (with variations) around 700AD. It wasn't until 900AD that the West Norwegians sailed out to colonise Iceland. Even then that's only "separate identities of language", all Indo-European languages are the same age if they go back to the same source, so it's no older than Castellano or Irish, Farsi or Sicillian. Either way the 600,000 only goes up to the mid-80s and there was a huge 'boom' in the way the culture opened up and started translating its own versions of words. That plus the fact that one word in Icelandic can cover multiple meanings where a word in English needs more. So with a verb like "halda" you can have a phenomenal amount of meanings depending on what particles you use with it (and this goes for many many verbs, not just _halda_) So consider:

Icelandic: halda (yeah I know other words in Ice. can be used to translate the words below)
English: think, believe, suppose, figure, reckon, maintain, keep, hold, argue, insist, claim, cover, abstain, celebrate.

See? So for let's say "*claim/maintain*" you would say "*halda fram*" in Icelandic, or for "*celebrate*" it'd be "*halda upp **á*" or for "*support*" it's "*halda uppi*". So all these Icelandic alternatives are their own expressions, but the number of actual words in the language that are non-combinatory doesn't really matter. Icelandic is so rich to have vast compounding alongside the ability to combine particles to express even more meanings. But there's not always a specific issue of having to only use one form as there are synonyms. Like if you didn't want to repeat "halda fram" to translate "_claim/maintain_", you could use another verb like _*fullyrða*_, so it's not "poor" in that sense.

What is important to remember is English went a bit overboard in its adoption of words leading to masses of what can be considered unneeded synonyms, and it got rid of thousands of them already, and then where new nuances developed, it kept some and there are now formality differences, archaisms etc, which also exist in Icelandic, but not as readily.

The assumption that less roots in a language means it's in some sense impoverished, because it "should" have more, is quite odd because it's only looking at a really obscure view of how a language can show detailed nuances. I'd be tempted to say the newer the language the more rich its lexical root stock would be (therefore many more words), while an older language would have more of these phrasal structures and idioms like Icelandic.


----------



## 涼宮

Well, yes, there are older languages, Greek would be one of the oldest because Latin split up but Greek evolved, I think. What I really like about Icelandic is that usual words like ''computer'' have been adapted in an Icelandic way and not just a spelling change as many languages do with some terms, like tölva, even though it's a fusion of 2 words it is still unrecognizable for most languages, I think, that is what I meant by  ''fewest loanwords'' . Now, that a word like halda can be used for so many things makes things complicated  yet fascinating.

''I'd be tempted to say the newer the language the more rich its lexical  root stock would be (therefore many more words), while an older language  would have more of these phrasal structures and idioms like Icelandic.''

Could you please explain that to me? As I fathom you mean that the newer the language the easiest it becomes and more words it obtains? Root words can help a lot, but if you have many roots, doesn't it make things more complicated? Would it not be easier with few roots?


----------



## Alxmrphi

> Could you please explain that to me? As I fathom you mean that the newer  the language the easiest it becomes and more words it obtains? Root  words can help a lot, but if you have many roots, doesn't it make things  more complicated? Would it not be easier with few roots?



I wrote those posts about 4am last night when I was pretty tired, and I decided I'd answer that question the next day (today), but when I read my quote back again, I'm not sure I agree with myself. Ignore that comment  I started to think about it and don't really know why I said it, because I can contraddict that argument myself. Either way, yeah I still stand by everything else, in essence I was trying to say lack of individual lexemes is not a sign of limited linguistic productivity.


----------



## Tazzler

I agree with Alex on pretty much everything. I've always thought Icelandic was a "root-poor" language but made up for that by extensive compounding. In any given text you probably won't find as much lexical diversity as you would in English, but the expressive capabilities aren't compromised. 

By the way, by "oldest" you mean "oldest-attested." We can obviously assume that a language was spoken before it was first written down.


----------



## 涼宮

Thank you  But, Icelandic has more than 600,000, of that number just a few are used? That is to say, Icelandic people do not usually use too much diversity of vocabulary as English or others language do in a daily conversation?


----------



## Alxmrphi

涼宮 said:


> Thank you  But, Icelandic has more than 600,000, of that number just a few are used? That is to say, Icelandic people do not usually use too much diversity of vocabulary as English or others language do in a daily conversation?



Well English only has a record amount of words because of mainly due to specialised fields in science/medicine/<insert of specialities>.
It's fair to say that a lot (over half at least?) of words that are considered to be in the English languages are ones that non-experts would never write or say.
If you're talking about daily conversation in English, I don't imagine there's much difference between Icelandic and English at all.

The amount of words ordinarily used in normal daily English conversation would be a shockingly low percentage of its total claimed 'capacity'.

Anyway basically what I said is I think you're using 'vocabulary' in a non-linguistic sense by meaning the amount of different lexemes, whereas it should be used in a sense of an extra entry would be needed for every verb/particle combination. There's no way of getting around the fact that English has a much richer system of lexemes through extensive borrowing and leading the field of science and technology / research, but in terms of ability to express diverse meanings, it's only a case that that effect is done in different ways.


----------



## Gavril

Alxmrphi said:


> Either way the 600,000 only goes up to the mid-80s and there was a huge 'boom' in the way the culture opened up and started translating its own versions of words.



I didn't know there had been an acceleration in the creation of Icelandic neologisms since the 1980s. Is there a source (or sources) where I can read more about this? (I'm not doubting what you say -- I'm just curious to know more.)


----------



## Alxmrphi

> About ten years ago a study was conducted to determine the number of  words in the written language archives of the University Dictionary.  This source included all words that had appeared in printed texts from  1540 and up the mid eighties.  This study can be used as an indication  of the number of words in the language, with the caveat that quite a  number of words have been added since, including various compound words  and new words, variously introduced by vocabulary committees or directly  from popular usage, as the need arose.



That's a quote from the why.is article I quoted before, that gives a hint at it.

But I remember in a book I read (I think it was this one) that there was a note about Iceland's race to modernisation and how the increased contact with technology and education needed the words to catch-up and have a native word-stock of concepts that were being used around that time. Unless she's died in the last 4 years, there is still someone (or maybe there were a few?) alive who was born in a cave in Iceland, showing an indication of how recently they were an extremely undeveloped nation (no offence Icelanders!). That cave where she was born is now a national landmark in Icelandic and this post claims it was the poster's grandmother, and it is on the credible inspiredbyiceland.com site. So that massive race to modernisation posed a big challenge for the national language institute. I'll have to find that book and see if I can quote from it, otherwise I'll need to find another source on the net.

There's an article here giving an overview that shows the widely-stated government proposal that Icelandic should be able to be used at the forefront of academic research, and part of that involves keeping up with the gigantic evolution of new terms that I think most people on Earth can appreciate has happened in the last 20 years, however I know you're looking for something deeper so I'll keep looking. Obviously it's not as if there was not a lack of technical terminology in use pre-1980s, Icelandic has always been in some sense connected to Europe in learning, but with regards to the advance of computer technology it's involved the re-application (adaption) of terms to encompass new meanings alongside new creations, but I can't find anything else on the net at the moment.

Hopefully an Icelander has a better idea of where to find such information. But at the same time it's fairly obvious that if you can go to 1980 and deliberately block all new words being added, it would not be possible to get very far at all in academic study in 2011, but alongside the compounding issue I mentioned before, sometimes it's so clear what a compound means, what that warrant a new dictionary entry or an official welcome to the language? Possibly not. Language planning is not my forte, I'm only going off what I remember reading.
It's not really a case of "an acceleration in the creation of new words" as much as it is an increase in the acceleration of terms at the forefront of research all over the world that has had a subsequent need to be able to be explained in accordance with the Icelandic government's proposal that modern concepts can be dealt with in the language of the nation.

*Protectionist Language Policies in the Face of the Forces of English. The Case of Iceland*

That looks like it'd contain a lot of relevant information, but it doesn't look like my university has an account to be able to access it.
Ok I read it, didn't really include any specific information on an effort to compete with English's dominance in the academic field, though it did (bleakly) surmise the situation and how hard the government is fighting against it.

I found the book as well, and found the relevant pages (363-365), but it didn't include what I must have misremembered about the race to catch up with academic terminology in terms of its modernisation. It has details on the extreme linguistic policy and some of the details, but nothing about recent additions. I guess I don't have a source. If I'm wrong about that I apologise, I was certain that was where I read that, maybe my mind's own view made me think I had read it before. Okay time I stopped talking


----------

