Russian vocabulary is dying

[ybelov.livejournal.com]

At the beginning of the 20th century dictionaries of Russian and English languages contained approximately same amount of words: 200 thousand. In the 1930s English dictionaries had already 600 thousand, while Russian contracted to 88 thousand…

The Russian vocabulary of the 19th century had 153 words with the root LUB (love); now there are only 41 such words. “Love” has shrunk by three fourths...

This data has been collected by philosopher and linguist Mikhail Epstein.

Complete article (in Russian):
http://www.novayagazeta.ru/data/2009/075/22.html

Comments

[icamel.livejournal.com]

I have stopped reading at the point that fault, blame, and guilt are all means вина in russian and there are four english words corresponding to russian word исследовать and couldn't read any further.

Multitran gives nine to nineteen russian words corresponding to each of that four.

[wolk-off.livejournal.com]

Well, if you are advertizing new brands of ice cream of your own production, it's quite likely that you are stating in your ads that there is no other sort of ice cream (besides some nameless and ugly "Simply Ice Cream") in the market, isn't it? :)