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Language by the numbers
ByFrank Cherry

How many words do you need to express yourself?

The answer to this, and the questions which follow is: "depende…". So, we won't address the myriad possible answers which have already been worked over ad nauseam in Ph.D. theses; but, listen to this:

Scholars have estimated that Shakespeare had one of the largest vocabularies of any English writer: from 21,000 to 30,000 different words of which maybe as many as 20% were neologisms--words he made up, or borrowed from abroad, or just picked up out of the air. By contrast, the average English speaker today has a vocabulary of some 15,000 words; and an educated English speaker's vocabulary can reach 20,000 words.

In the generation following Shakespeare's death (1616) just a few miles across the English Channel in France, Jean Racine wrote neoclassical plays, and he used fewer than 2,000 different words in his entire opus!

Many hypotheses could be woven here, but the fact is that Shakespeare used every ingredient in the pantry and Racine was very, very picky.

Since our focus here is strictly the numbers and not value judgments, we can conclude that degrees of excellence can be achieved both by using many words and by using few words.

Turning to the Portuguese language, we see that Camilo Castelo Branco, the brilliant Portuguese novelist, used some 12,000 words in Onde Está a Felicidade (1860).

Whereas Machado de Assis (praised by Susan Sontag the greatest author ever produced in Latin America), in Memorias Postumas de Braz Cubas (1881), (recently made into a feature-length film) used only 6,700 words in that novel. [To give some perspective as to how deep the well is, in 2001 a new Portuguese dictionary was published, the life-long work of Antonio Houaisse, and it contains 228,500 words, more than the Aurélio and the Michaelis dictionaries].

How many words do you need to know to speak basic Portuguese?

Brazilian philologists estimate that the basic Portuguese spoken vocabulary contains only 3,000 words, and that speakers generally use between 800 and 1,400 words. The educated class uses between 3,000 and 5,000 words.

So this means that the foreigner arriving in Brazil needs to learn only about 800 words, probably fewer, in order to speak basic Portuguese. (By basic we understand something beyond taxi driver and restaurant language skills).

Does this make Portuguese a relatively easy language for a foreigner to learn? If you look strictly at the numbers, the answer would appear to be "yes."

But aside from the numbers, and a compliant grammatical structure, the main factor may be the Brazilians' disposition to accept foreigners and things foreign with natural ease. Sociologists point to their heritage of pragmatism which required explorers and traders to get along with people in order to sell to them and so the arts of compromise and mediation are part of the Brazilian character.

Why do Brazilians embrace foreign words so easily, especially in an age of nationalism, when language police have been put on the streets in France and Quebec, to cite just two examples?

In fact, Brazilian legislators have introduced bills calling for a restriction on the use of foreign words and punishment for violators. Fat chance.

Brazilians just charge blissfully forward shunning the cooked-up, awkward Portuguese translations of foreign words, and cribbing with pragmatic nonchalance hundreds of foreign words, mainly English, but also French, Japanese, and others.

Sometimes they retain the foreign spelling and pronounce the foreign word as if it were a Portuguese word; and sometimes they make a transliteration of the word.

Restaurants which set out food cafeteria-style are called "Self-Service" which gets pronounced something like sel-servi, many times by people who don't even know that it is an English word.

Proper names like Xerox and Texaco get a Portuguese pronunciation which is usually unintelligible to the English speaker the first time he hears it.

A great example of transliteration is pikape for a pick-up truck.

And then there is the happy conjunction of orthography and meaning when restaurants advertise sandwiches with cheese on them by making use of the Portuguese letter "X" which is pronounced "schees", so you can order a X-burger, or X-salada, and even a X-bacon (bacon and cheese on your hamburger).

The influence of multinational companies has also contributed to this phenomenon. Consider the secretary who tells her boss: eu vou colocar isso no foloupi meaning that she will put a document in the follow-up file.

And when it comes to naming the children, whoever has lived in Brazil knows that anything goes. We heard of a girl called Madinusa because her mother saw the label in a T-shirt which said "made in USA" and she thought it sounded good. (We found this gem on Ray Vogensen's excellent site: www.portcult.com).

In the end, the Brazilians, who love their language dearly and express themselves so creatively, just don't care, or notice, that foreign words are proliferating in their daily vocabulary. If Shakespeare reached higher levels of expression by opening the floodgates, why shouldn't Brazilians do the same?