I recently read: “There are seven times more words in English than in French (500,000 versus 70,000), which suggests that French relies on contextual clues to resolve semantic ambiguities to a greater extent than English. Many words in French have multiple possible meanings… which means that the listener is responsible for discerning the intention of the speaker.”*

I suppose I could be heartened by the fact that there are only 60-some-thousand words I don’t know in French. Apparently it could have been much worse.

I’ve always found it strange that a country known for romance has the same word for like and love – that you have to figure out the meaning of aimer based on context clues. But now a correlation between romance and multi-meaning words occurs to me. Fewer words + more interpretation = greater opportunity for happy accidents in which one person misunderstands the other’s semantical intentions, believes that love is being declared, and is inspired to respond in kind. Perhaps France is brimming with l’amour because everyone’s living out their own version of a screwball romantic comedy.

As a related tidbit, this little quiz estimates that I know 30,900 English words. I will try to keep this in mind the next time I’m feeling dumb as a brick while attempting to make simple statements in Spanish or not-so-simple ones in French.

P.S. For English learners (and speakers who want to boost their vocab), here’s an aptly named site.

* I read this quote from Erin Meyer’s “The Culture Map” here.

[Photo: Martin Latter]