Comment by greazy
3 days ago
The lack of books and therefore lack of reading leads to reduce vocabulary. I read somewhere the average of known words by an Arabic speaker was substantially lower than English speakers.
When I switch to speaking Arabic (poorly) I struggle to find words because my vocab level is so bad. Imagine for an every day person, not being able to effectively express themselves. It would lead to a ton of frustration, miscommunication and misunderstanding.
I really need to improve my Arabic!
That really interesting.
To be fair, modern "English" is a nebulous smorgasbord of words from a lot of different languages. I'm sure we could afford to drop a lot of the words from clusters of synonyms.
I recall a team working on machine translation starting by translating English into a simpler form before translating that into the target languages. This was a couple of decades ago. Perhaps not a new idea even then.
You can take those 'useless', redundant synonyms from my cold, dead brain cells!