The richest language. The richest language in the world

At one of the symposia, four linguists met: an Englishman, a German, an Italian and a Russian. The conversation turned to languages. They began to argue, whose language is more beautiful, better, richer, and to which language does the future belong?

The Englishman said: “England is a country of great conquerors, sailors and travelers who spread the glory of its language to all corners of the world. English language- the language of Shakespeare, Dickens, Byron - undoubtedly best language in the world".

“Nothing like that,” said the German, “Our language is the language of science and physics, medicine and technology. The language of Kant and Hegel, the language in which the best work of world poetry is written – Goethe’s Faust.”

“You are both wrong,” the Italian entered into the argument, “Think, the whole world, all of humanity loves music, songs, romances, operas! What language are the best love romances and brilliant operas in? In the language of sunny Italy!

The Russian was silent for a long time, listened modestly and finally said: “Of course, I could also say, like each of you, that the Russian language - the language of Pushkin, Tolstoy, Turgenev, Chekhov - is superior to all the languages of the world. But I won't follow your path. Tell me, could you compose in your languages short story with a plot, with a consistent development of the plot, so that all the words in the story begin with the same letter?”

This greatly puzzled the interlocutors and all three said: “No, this is impossible in our languages.” Then the Russian replies: “But in our language this is quite possible, and I will now prove it to you. Name any letter." The German replied: “It doesn’t matter. The letter "P", for example."

“Great, here’s a story for you with this letter,” answered the Russian.

Pyotr Petrovich Petukhov, lieutenant of the fifty-fifth Podolsk Infantry Regiment, received a letter by mail full of pleasant wishes. “Come,” wrote the lovely Polina Pavlovna Perepelkina, “let’s talk, dream, dance, take a walk, visit a half-forgotten, half-overgrown pond, go fishing. Come, Pyotr Petrovich, to stay as soon as possible.”

Petukhov liked the proposal. I figured: I’ll come. I grabbed a half-worn field cloak and thought: this will come in handy.

The train arrived after noon. Pyotr Petrovich was received by Polina Pavlovna’s most respected father, Pavel Panteleimonovich. “Please, Pyotr Petrovich, sit down more comfortably,” said dad. A bald nephew came up and introduced himself: “Porfiry Platonovich Polikarpov. Please, please."

The lovely Polina appeared. A transparent Persian scarf covered her full shoulders. We talked, joked, and invited us to lunch. They served dumplings, pilaf, pickles, liver, pate, pies, cake, half a liter of orange juice. We had a hearty lunch. Pyotr Petrovich felt pleasantly satiated.

After eating, after a hearty snack, Polina Pavlovna invited Pyotr Petrovich to take a walk in the park. In front of the park stretched a half-forgotten, half-overgrown pond. We went sailing. After swimming in the pond we went for a walk in the park.

“Let’s sit down,” suggested Polina Pavlovna. Sit down. Polina Pavlovna moved closer. We sat and were silent. The first kiss sounded. Pyotr Petrovich got tired, offered to lie down, laid out his half-washed field cloak, and thought: this would come in handy. We lay down, rolled around, fell in love. “Pyotr Petrovich is a prankster, a scoundrel,” Polina Pavlovna said habitually.

“Let’s get married, let’s get married!” whispered the bald nephew. “Let’s get married, let’s get married,” the father approached in a deep voice. Pyotr Petrovich turned pale, staggered, then ran away. As I ran, I thought: “Polina Petrovna is a wonderful match, I’m really excited.”

The prospect of receiving a beautiful estate flashed before Pyotr Petrovich. I hastened to send an offer. Polina Pavlovna accepted the proposal and later got married. Friends came to congratulate us and brought gifts. Handing over the package, they said: “Wonderful couple.”

The interlocutors, linguists, having heard the story, were forced to admit that the Russian language is the best and richest language in the world.

Not only philologists like to argue about which language is the richest and most beautiful. Of course, for every person it is native language will be the best, the most beautiful and, of course, the most unique.

There are no rules by which we could determine which language is the most harmonious and perfect. However, almost each has its own characteristics that distinguish it from all others and give many reasons for pride to the people who speak it. In this article I will try to show just a little how diverse the linguistic map of the planet is. In the future, I will return to this topic more than once, because every language has some amazing feature, thanks to which it can be considered a record holder in one area or another.

And you can start the story with the simplest thing - with the number of words in the language.

As for the richness of the vocabulary, the Greek language occupies a leading position here: it has 5 million words. The English language, for example, contains only about half a million words. At the same time, we are unlikely to call English “poor.” This can only be said by someone who is not familiar with classical literature created in English and has no idea how “capacious” this language is. Many would likely agree that The best way The definition of the “richness” of a language is its expressive capabilities. And there are not many languages here that can compare with Russian and German. Is not it?

Now let's turn to “poor” languages. Did you know that the Taki language, common in some parts of French Guinea, contains only 340 words? But even with such a modest vocabulary, people manage to communicate well with each other.

For obvious reasons, the Guinness Book of Records does not include the category “most beautiful language", but instead of it there are many others language records, which are ways to surprise anyone. For example, the Abaza alphabet is considered the longest of the currently existing alphabets (by the way, 65 alphabets are used in the world). It has only 82 letters. The Cambodian alphabet is only slightly inferior to it: it consists of 74 letters. It is followed by the Khmer alphabet, which contains 72 letters. The shortest alphabet is found in the Rotokas language from the island of Bougainville (Papua New Guinea). It only has 11 letters. And in the Hawaiian alphabet there is only one more - 12.

The earliest example of alphabetic writing was found in Ugarit (now Ras Sharma, Syria). It dates back to approximately 1450 BC. and is a clay tablet with 32 wedge-shaped letters printed on it.

The oldest letter is considered to be “o”. It remained unchanged in the form in which it was adopted in the Phoenician alphabet (around 1300 BC).

In English and Hungarian, the letter “E” is considered the most common.

The letter "Q" is used least often in modern European languages (French is an exception).

In the Eskimo language there are more than 20 synonyms for the word “snow”, and many more words denoting shades white. It also has 63 present tense forms, and simple nouns have 252 inflections.

Papua New Guineans speak approximately 700 languages (about 10 percent of all languages in the world). In addition, among these languages there are many local dialects that are used by neighboring villages to communicate with each other.

The Chippewa Indian language contains greatest number verb forms (there are about 6000 of them). In another Aboriginal language North America- Haida - 70 prefixes are used, which is also a record.

In the Tabasaran language, widespread in Dagestan, there are 48 cases of nouns (in Hungarian, for example, there are only 24, and in Russian - 6).

There is only one in Turkish irregular verb- olmak (“to be”), and in English there are 283 such verbs.

In Russian, German and Romanian language There are three genders, in French, Danish and Swedish there are two, in Finnish and Hungarian there is one, but in the Australian Aboriginal language Diirbalu there are four: masculine, feminine, neuter and edible.

The largest number of consonant sounds (80-85) is contained in the Ubykh language (the Abkhaz-Adyghe group of the Caucasian family), the smallest - 6 - in the Rotokas language (yes, yes, the very one whose alphabet is considered the shortest).

The Sedang language (Central Vietnam) has the most vowel sounds - 55, and the least - in Abkhazian (there are only 2).

The most common sound is the vowel “a” - there is no language that does not have it. There are languages where “a” has different degrees of longitude (Slovak, Hungarian, etc.).

The Czech sound is recognized as the rarest, representing the pronounced “r” and “zh” together - [рж]. Even the closest relative of the Czech language, Slovak, cannot boast of this sound. It is also interesting to note that in the Czech language “rzh” is one of the main sounds: without it it is impossible to pronounce such traditional popular names like “Jiri”, “Přemysl”, etc.

In the southern Bushman languages there is another rare sound - a kind of click of the tongue. Even a special sign was invented to depict it in writing.

The Japanese language does not have the “l” sound familiar to Europeans. And at the same time, Japanese is rightfully called one of the most melodic languages on the planet.

The largest number of values has English word set (58 meanings as a noun; 126 as a verb; 10 as a participle adjective). And how can we then deny practicality to native English speakers?

If we turn to Asian languages, they seem to be completely “woven” from records. For example, in Chinese, where there are no verb conjugations or tenses, there is a huge lexicon. And, of course, as befits a language whose history goes back thousands of years, Chinese can be proud of its amazing writing. The 40-volume Chinese language dictionary Zhongwen Dajidian contains only 49,905 characters. The phoneme [i] in tone IV has 84 meanings, and among them are “clothes”, “hiccups” and “lousy”. IN written language There are 92 hieroglyphs to indicate the syllable [i] in the IV tone. The most complex is the hieroglyph [se] - “chatty”, consisting of 64 lines. However, nowadays it is not actually used. Of the common in this moment the most difficult character is “nan”. It contains 36 dashes and means “stuffy nose.” And if you suddenly decide to go to a Chinese pharmacy complaining of a runny nose, you have every chance to draw this very hieroglyph on a piece of paper. And then they will definitely understand you!

By the way, Mandarin Chinese is the most widely used language in the world, with more than 885 million people speaking it. Spanish ranks second (332 million), English is third (322 million), and Bengali is fourth (189 million). By the way, Russian is in 7th place on this list (170 million) and is the most common language in Europe.

There are more than 1,000 on the African continent different languages. The Berber language of North Africa does not have a written form. And Afrikaans, known as the Boer language, was considered a dialect of Dutch until the early 20th century. And this language also has no family ties with its African neighbors and belongs to the West Germanic group of languages. A unique case, isn't it?

Some linguists also believe that Latin language did not cease to be colloquial at all, it just underwent minor changes. Latin's closest relative is Castilian. According to some sources, Occitan and Sardinian may compete with it. All these languages are so similar to Latin (even Italian is much more different from its distant ancestor than they are) that one can believe that the language of the ancient Romans lives to this day. Latin, by the way, is recognized as “the most living of the dead languages.” Its study is mandatory in many countries of the world, not only for philologists, but also for historians. Doctors are also forced to understand Latin terminology. And not only them. Simply interested persons also penetrate into the secrets of Latin grammar.

There are about 5-6 thousand languages in the world, and about two die every month... Languages disappear and appear. And each of them is interesting. It would be useful to talk about the curious features of some of them, if only to better understand how valuable the language that you speak and that you love is.

Kurkina AnaTheodora

October 24, 2013

Many people are interested in linguistics. They read interesting books by L. Uspensky and look for the answer to the question, what is the richest language on our planet? You should try to answer their question.

For a long time, philologists have been struggling with the question: which language of the world is the most lexically rich? In what language could a person most accurately and elegantly express what is in his soul? It is difficult to answer this question right away, because everyone will consider their native language to be the richest. There are a lot of proverbs related to rain in English, but in German they can be expressed very accurately abstract concepts, the French language helps to accurately express even the most ornate epithets. The Japanese language is traditionally divided into two parallel dialects - feminine and masculine, Norwegian - into Bokmål and modern Norwegian, and what can we say about the Russian language - it has thousands of dialects.

Unfortunately, the Guinness Book of Records chose Greek and not Russian as the leader in the number of words. Using a special program, it was possible to calculate that there are more than 5 million words in the Greek language (for comparison, there are about 1.3 million words in English).

However, as one popular saying goes, “Russians don’t give up.” NKR linguists created a special program that was able to most objectively calculate the number of words in our language. It turned out that the Russian language is eight times richer than the Greek language. More than 40 million words (40 megawords) were counted in the national corpus of the Russian language. But this is not the limit: in connection with the development of our language, scientists are already planning the creation of a dictionary of 200 megawords, which would include absolutely all words, both modern and ancient, and dialectal, and fictitious, and even obscene.

Sometimes, when discussing the Russian language as one of the richest, one remembers an anecdote about how representatives of four European nationalities, including Russian, met. And he proposed to his friends a bet that only in the Russian language can one compose a story from words starting with the same letter. And he succeeded: Pyotr Petrovich Petukhov, lieutenant of the Podolsk Fifty-fifth Infantry Regiment, received a letter by mail full of wishes, and pleasant ones at that. Petukhov liked Praskovya Petrovna Perepelkina’s invitation...” and so on.

However, many see Chinese as the richest language in the world. There was even a competition “The Richest Language”, which was held in 2003 in the USA, and where the winner was the Chinese language. However, professional linguists believe that this is not so. The Chinese language is rather rich in grammatical basis, rather than lexical.

Many scientists consider the richest languages to be the little-known dialects of the Indians, as well as various African tribes. The Chippewa Indian language has more than 6,000 verb forms, and the Haida Indian language has more than 70 prefixes. The Eskimo language is also distinguished by its grammatical richness - it has more than 60 present tense forms! That is why the Eskimo language is difficult to teach to a European person who is accustomed to a maximum of 16 forms of different tenses.

Another rich language is Tabasaran, which has more than forty-eight noun cases. If we judge the richness of a language by the number of letters in the alphabet, then the Khmer language is in the lead, with 73 letters in its alphabet. The Ubykh language has the most consonant sounds - 85; among the ready-made ones there are 8 variations of the sound “g”.

But to us Russians, of course, our native language will seem richer than others. The Russian language does not have a colossal number of letters, consonants and vowels, or intricate grammatical forms. But there is an incredible lexical wealth that allows you to most accurately express every thought, put it into beautiful shape. This is precisely what helped many famous Russian classics create their works - an inexhaustible vocabulary fund of the Russian language. And in order for this wealth to increase every year, one should treat the language with care, preserve old and little-used words, draw new ones from other languages and create neologisms.

Without linguistic expertise, it is difficult to answer the question of which language is the richest. In fact, for every native speaker, his native language is the most beautiful and rich, and this is completely natural.

The Englishman said: “England is a country of great conquerors, sailors and travelers who spread the glory of its language to all corners of the world. The English language - the language of Shakespeare, Dickens, Byron - is undoubtedly the best language in the world."

The Russian was silent for a long time, listened modestly and finally said: “Of course, I could also say, like each of you, that the Russian language - the language of Pushkin, Tolstoy, Turgenev, Chekhov - is superior to all the languages of the world. But I won't follow your path. Tell me, could you compose a short story in your languages with a plot, with a consistent development of the plot, so that all the words in the story begin with the same letter?”

“Great, here’s a story for you with this letter,” answered the Russian.

Pyotr Petrovich Petukhov, lieutenant of the fifty-fifth Podolsk Infantry Regiment, received a letter by mail full of pleasant wishes. “Come,” wrote the lovely Polina Pavlovna Perepelkina, “we’ll talk, dream, dance, take a walk, visit a half-forgotten, half-overgrown pond, go fishing. Come, Pyotr Petrovich, to stay as soon as possible.”

Petukhov liked the proposal. I figured: I’ll come. I grabbed a half-worn field cloak and thought: this will come in handy.

“Let’s sit down,” suggested Polina Pavlovna. Sit down. Polina Pavlovna moved closer. We sat and were silent. The first kiss sounded. Pyotr Petrovich got tired, offered to lie down, laid out his half-worn field raincoat, and thought: it would come in handy. We lay down, rolled around, fell in love. “Pyotr Petrovich is a prankster, a scoundrel,” Polina Pavlovna said habitually.

The interlocutors, linguists, having heard the story, were forced to admit that the Russian language is the best and richest language in the world.

The richness of the Russian language is expressed primarily in its vocabulary or, as philologists say, in the wealth of vocabulary. How many words are there in our language? Fifty thousand? One hundred thousand? Or maybe several hundred thousand? There are more than one hundred thousand words in the large academic dictionary. But these are not all words of the Russian language. His vocabulary is surprisingly polysemantic. It includes synonyms, antonyms, homonyms, words in figurative meaning, epithets and many, many other linguistic semantic means. How many words are borrowed from other languages?! Thus, from the languages of the peoples of the Caucasus, the words “saklya”, “shashka”, “narzan” entered the Russian language, from Japanese language- “kimono”, “judo” and many others. Borrowings enrich the Russian language, making it more figurative, expressive and diverse. Russian is one of the most common languages in globe. Our Russian words have entered many languages of the world: “advice”, “sputnik”, “subbotnik”, “lunokhod”... and in many countries ignorance of the Russian language is considered a sign of illiteracy and lack of culture. “Studying the Russian language is a great benefit for all Caucasians, as it makes it possible to become familiar with the rich Russian literature and feel at home in the vast expanses of their fatherland, which occupies a sixth of the entire earth.” These words belong to a Georgian teacher of the 19th century. Jacob Gogebashvili. The great Kazakh educator Abai Kunanbaev wrote: “Remember that the main thing is to learn Russian science... In order to avoid vices and achieve goodness, you need to know the Russian language and Russian culture.” Many other foreign writers, poets, and thinkers have also spoken about the importance of the Russian language in the life of every person. F. Engels wrote that the Russian language “deserves study in itself, as one of the strongest and richest living languages.” For centuries, people have been creating this flexible, expressive, melodious and beautiful language. The Russian language is the history of our people. In every word one can hear the peculiarity of Russian nature - the murmuring of a brook, the rustling of leaves, the blowing of wind, the singing of a nightingale, and the peculiarity national character- every word is colored with its own unique emotional coloring and conveys different moods: joy or irritation, friendliness or hostility, delight or disappointment. Such a huge variety of shades can only be expressed in Russian. “In it is the whole singing Russian soul, the echo of the world and human groans, and the mirror of divine visions” (I. A. Ilyin, 3rd Russian philosopher of the 20th century). Without knowledge of your native language, without the ability to speak competently and use rich vocabulary, you cannot be cultured person, you can't be a patriot. After all true love to Russia is impossible without love for the native language, without pride in the immeasurable richness of its shades and sounds. “A man indifferent to his language is a savage. His indifference is explained by complete indifference to the past, present and future of his people” (K. Paustovsky). Perhaps the most interesting thing about our language is that everyone specific style the presentation corresponds to a certain selection of linguistic forms. If you use a bookish style, then using colloquial expressions will look ridiculous, and vice versa. And such an abundance of lexical, morphological, phonetic, grammatical and syntactic forms is not found in any other language in the world. The Russian language is beautiful, rich, polysemantic and capable of modification. This statement is accepted without objection. But can we consider that its potential is inexhaustible? Unfortunately, the state of the modern Russian language is causing more and more concern every day. The decline in the level of speech culture is obvious. The decline of morality, moral principles in society, the loss of national traits - all this affects our native language. Jargon, slang, and jargon are increasingly used in modern vocabulary. foreign words. Where is our national pride? Is our native language worse than others? “Our language is expressive not only for high eloquence. For loud, picturesque poetry, but also for tender simplicity, for the sounds of the heart and sensitivity.” (N. M. Karamzin) Preserving the language, caring for its dissemination and enrichment is a guarantee of preservation national culture. Love the Russian language and protect it from distortion, remember that this powerful language was given to a great people.