Our fascination with the vastness of English, Mr. Geoffrey Nunberg said, springs from a kind of linguistic imperialism -- a feeling that "our dictionaries are bigger than their dictionaries." But this doesn't really make us any richer linguistically, he contended.
"It's not like the French are impoverished because they have fewer fish names than we do," he said.
"It's not like the French are impoverished because they have fewer fish names than we do," he said.