How many words are there in the English language? #AmWriting #GuestBlogger #Translation

 

Image by Steve Buissinne from Pixabay

By A P von K’ory (Guest Blogger)

This question has no single sensible answer. I’ve realized this truth during my endeavours in translating my books from the original English to German. It's impossible to count the number of words in a language, because it's so hard to decide what actually counts as a word. Is dog one word, or two (a noun meaning 'a kind of animal', and a verb meaning 'to follow persistently')? If we count it as two, then do we count inflections separately too (e.g. dogs = plural noun, dogs = present tense of the verb). Is dog-tired a word, or just two other words joined together? Is hot dog really two words, since it might also be written as hot-dog or even hotdog? In these nuances, I keep running into solid walls in my translations. No wonder “New German” has lots of English words in it.

Of course there are lots of German words in the English language too – after all, English is originally a Germanic language like most northern Europe languages. Still, it's difficult to decide what counts as 'English'. What about medical and scientific terms? Latin words used in law, French words used in cooking, German words used in academic writing, Japanese words used in martial arts? Indian words like ayah, dhobi, sahib, memsahib, huzoor? African words like safari? Do you count Scots dialect as well? How about teenage slang? Abbreviations?

The Second Edition of the 20-volume Oxford English Dictionary, published in 1989, contains full entries for 171,476 words in current use, and 47,156 obsolete words. To this may be added around 9,500 derivative words included as subentries. Over half of these words are nouns, about a quarter adjectives, and about a seventh verbs; the rest is made up of exclamations, conjunctions, prepositions, suffixes, etc. And these figures don't take account of entries with senses for different word classes (such as noun and adjective).

This suggests that there are, at the very least, a quarter of a million distinct English words, excluding inflections, and words from technical and regional vocabulary not covered by the OED, or words not yet added to the published dictionary, of which perhaps 20 per cent are no longer in current use. If distinct senses were counted, the total would probably approach three quarters of a million.

No wonder I sweat and revise a few dozen times in my German translations. The fact that you often have to crunch three or four German words (with the verb squeezed into the mix) to form a single word in translation doesn’t help. So thank heavens for editors!

 

London Sparks by A P von K’Ory

All she wanted was to lose her innocence...

Fledgling lawyer Fairuza wakes up in bed with a stranger fast asleep under the duvet next to her. He’s the man she chatted up at a London pub the previous night and decided to go home with. She’d made up her mind that a one night stand with the man would be just the treat she needed to celebrate her 25th birthday.

But a couple of hours later in her office, the police are waiting to arrest her as a murder suspect. The man she’d just left fast asleep in his bed has been found dead, killed with several shots to the chest. Having imbibed too heavily at the pub, Fairuza has no memory of what happened. But she knows she has a psychopathic nature ever since her childhood when she tried to kill her stepmother in bed with a knife in the middle of the night...

Fairuza starts her own investigations which include enlisting the help of workmate and friend, Peter Spencer—who seems all too willing and devoted in uncovering all the secrets of the powerful men in government and global sports who were connected to the victim, Government Chemist Dr Jasper Chelwood. Immediately, Fairuza’s own life and the lives of her family members are endangered. Can she trust Peter? She’s attacked several times. Soon she’s unable to distinguish who is foe amid domestic violence, marital breakdowns, human trafficking and treacherous friends.

Excerpt

I got arrested on my birthday, Monday, August the fourteenth. Which also happened to be the day I’d decided to lose my virginity. The decision, indeed the determination, to choreograph the loss occurred in the small hours between Sunday and Monday, around two, I guessed. But not earlier. So it could also have been three in the morning. Not only did I get arrested, it happened at the offices of my new place of work, Cecil & Buckley, in Duncannon Street, the Strand. I was an intern, still on my probationary period.

But I’ve skipped ahead of myself, so let me begin from the time prior to my arrest.

My morning had started in a curious way.

Something woke me up. Some inner alarm, I suppose. I rolled my head on the pillow, lifted it and suppressed a whimper. My head wasn’t mine, it belonged to an entire symphony orchestra of drums, cymbals, xylophones, gongs, bells – the lot – gyrating inside my skull.

Shite. I forced my torso upright, andthe duvet slipped down. I held my head between my hands, a useless effort to quieten the orchestra. Slowly, through tangles of hair veiling my face, I took in my surroundings. First take: somebody in bed with me. Second take: sod it, not my bedroom, not my bed either. The somebody seemed fast asleep under his own duvet.

The digital clock on my side of the bedside table stared back at me – 08:47. Monday morning.That fact set vibrations in my mind, trying to jangle their way through the gauzy layers of my slipping sleep. Oh Jayz, I should have been at work forty-seven minutes ago. I defied the orchestra and kicked out of bed in a hurry. More surprises: I was as naked as the second I was born, minus the umbilical cord. A quick look at the stranger still peacefully asleep on the large bed told me he was still roaming dreamland. His face was turned away from me.

Smashwords: https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/1014656

Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/LONDON-SPARKS-P-VON-KORY/dp/B085K5JZSM/

About the Author

A P von K'Ory is the winner of six Awards from four continents including the Achievers Award for African Writer Of The Year in the Netherlands, the nominations for the London Caine Prize and being shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers Prize. She has a son and lives in Europe.

Amazon Author Page: https://www.amazon.co.uk/A-P-Von-KOry/e/B00MDHD7ZS

Visit her at: http://Akinyi-princess.de