“The common reply to the question 'What is it? ' is, when the reply is difficult or the experience unique, 'Well, it is like —. '” That metaphorical process is at the heart of Toki Pona, the world's smallest language.
According to serious linguistic research and personal notices of many people, conversational speech consists of 100 words that cover 50% of what we talk about. And 400 most common words that cover 75%, and 1000 words that cover 80+%.
Alphabet of the "Toki Pona" language
In the "toki Pona" language capital letters are used only for the name of a person and place, not the first word of each sentence. In the above mentioned letters first nine (p, t, k, s, m, n, l, j, w) are consonants and the last five (a, e, i, o and u) are vowels.
Toki Pona (rendered as toki pona and often translated as 'the language of good'; IPA: [ˈtoki ˈpona] ( listen); English: /ˈtoʊki ˈpoʊnə/) is a philosophical artistic constructed language (philosophical artlang) known for its small vocabulary, simplicity, and ease of acquisition.
Toki Pona has only 120 words and uses only 14 letters. The grammar is simple and few words have more than two syllables.
According to Ethnologue, there are currently 7,117 languages spoken around the world.
Looking at the figures given in the previous paragraph, we can see that 100 words will not be enough to express yourself in any language, no matter how briefly. Let's take a look at this analytically by applying the 80/20 rule (also called Pareto's law), to the use of languages.
1. Norwegian. This may come as a surprise, but we have ranked Norwegian as the easiest language to learn for English speakers. Norwegian is a member of the Germanic family of languages — just like English!
Arabic has over 12 million distinct words. To put this into context, the Oxford English Dictionary includes just over 170,000 words.
“No” in 52 Different Languages: A “No”-fuss Guide.
Collectively, Cantonese and Mandarin are the most commonly spoken languages other than English in Australia (over 600,000 speakers), followed by Italian, Arabic and Greek.
The world's youngest language, coming in at only 100 years old (officially), is the South African language of Afrikaans. Surprised? Afrikaans, the natively spoken language of 7 million South Africans, was born from the white Dutch, French, and German colonizers in South Africa in the 17th and 18th centuries.
Sumerian can be considered the first language in the world, according to Mondly. The oldest proof of written Sumerian was found on the Kish tablet in today's Iraq, dating back to approximately 3500 BC.
100 words is about 0.5-1 paragraphs for essays or 1-2 for easier reading (to allow skimming). A paragraph length typically has 100-200 words and 5-6 sentences.
1,000 words is 6.67 minutes of speaking time. How minutes is 1,500 words? 1,500 words is 10 minutes of speaking time.
100,000 words is 200 pages single-spaced or 400 pages double-spaced. Typical documents that are 100,000 words or more include full-length novels. It will take approximately 333 minutes to read 100,000 words.
The Roman numerals are used to symbolize the Arabic letters which don't exist, or rather, the ones that have no phonetic equivalent in English. For e.g., the Arabic letter “ح” (Haa) can't be accurately represented with Latin characters and it is, therefore, represented by the number “7”.
The actual longest word in Arabic is أفاستسقيناكموها ('afastasqaynakumuha, "did we ask you to give it to us to drink"), which is a 15 letter word.
It has been estimated that the vocabulary of English includes roughly 1 million words (although most linguists would take that estimate with a chunk of salt, and some have said they wouldn't be surprised if it is off the mark by a quarter-million); that tally includes the myriad names of chemicals and other scientific ...
Across multiple sources, Mandarin Chinese is the number one language listed as the most challenging to learn. The Defense Language Institute Foreign Language Center puts Mandarin in Category IV, which is the list of the most difficult languages to learn for English speakers.
Italian language, or Italiano—as it is commonly known, is a Romance language and one of the languages most people would readily agree on as one of the softest and sweetest languages in existence. The language of revolutionists like Dante da Vinci, and Pavarotti, Italian is spoken by 66 million people globally.
This vocabulary corresponds with JLPT levels N3 / N2. About 10,000 words will give you a high level of competence. You will still need to look up a lot of words if you read a novel, but you will be able to get the gist of almost anything you read or hear.
People who know 250 to 500 words are beginners. Those who know 1,000 to 3,000 words can carry on everyday conversations. Knowing 4,000 to 10,000 words makes people advanced language users while knowing more than 10,000 words puts them at the fluent or native-speaker levels.
Speech and publication coach Daphne Gray-Grant found that, on average, people speak at a rate of 125 to 150 wpm so a 2 minutes long speech uses between 250 to 300 words.