Ilunga is solved by taraadin – that’s English actually

I didn’t know this but it seems there are currently 988,974 words in the English language, with thousands more emerging every month.

And according to Paul Payack, who runs the Global Language Monitor, at the going rate, English will adopt its one millionth word in late November. The Times of London says that this figure means for every French word, there are now ten in English.

Not everyone is happy or accepting this burst of the English language. Traditional lexicographers are enraged. They should be as the 20-volume OED has only 301,100 entries.

So how did Mr Payack come up with his ball park figure? Easy, he found the remaining 687,874 words by scouring the internet. Yes, the vast tentacles of the internet are now in the business of churning out new words almost everyday.

The Times added:

“Thanks to the internet, we are witnessing the second great age of the neologism, a fantastic outpouring of words and phrases to describe new ideas or reshape old ideas in novel forms of language. Today, a word does not need the slow spread of verbal usage or literature to gain acceptance. If a word works, the internet can breathe instant life into it.

Last year this newspaper reported the existence, in the Bantu language Tshiluba, of the long-needed word ilunga, meaning “a person who is ready to forgive any abuse for the first time, to tolerate it a second time, but never a third time”. Subsequent investigations suggested that the word may not exist in Tshiluba, but it exists now in English, as thousands of entries on the web attest, and the language is better for it.

Rather than fight the word loans and word borrowings, the strange hybrids and new coinages, we should welcome them. New words expand our world. They can even change it. If ilunga is the thrice-repeated offence that cannot be forgiven, then its opposite is an Arabic word, taraadin, meaning “I win, you win”, the face-saving way to end an argument. As bombs fall on southern Lebanon and missiles on northern Israel, the world could profit from learning a new language, in which ilunga is solved by taraadin.”

Read the full article here.