Does the subtleties and nuances, the richness and adaptability, of a language impact a culture’s (a population group’s) ability to innovate?
If the language:
- is rich with borrowed words;
- is open to playful metamorphosis by the majority of the population and not just the hyper- educated elite;
- is actively used by many people in diverse (but not isolated) geographical regions so has to promote both variation and cross pollination);
- has been in use for a significant time period and remain sufficiently unchanged so as to enable multigenerational access to history and stories;
- has enough mechanisms to enable feed the brains of visual, aural and kinaesthetic thinkers…
Consider:
"There are about 540,000 words in the English language, about 5 times as many during shakespeare's time." From Shift Happens.
Does anyone have other stats for other languages?
