Laudator Temporis Acti

Wolfgang de Melo, "Classics in Translation? A Personal Angle (Part I)," Antigone (March, 2023):

[I]n order to understand 90% or more of the words of any text in any language, one needs to know approximately 4,000 words; the most frequent 100 words will give you 50% of any text, because half of any text consists of words like the or forms of be, but thereafter it is a case of diminishing returns, and every further set of 100 words will give you fewer and fewer percent.

Id.:

For me, this situation arose when I as a budding Latinist took Italian classes, and later in life when I moved to Belgium, where I was expected to teach in Dutch. With a newborn at home, I didn’t have time to attend a language course until half a year after my arrival; but because German and Dutch are so close, I could easily establish equivalents, figuring out that Dutch d typically corresponds to German t (dag and Tag, both meaning “day”), or that German subordinate clauses end with infinitive + modal verb, while in Dutch the order is typically reversed.^[3] After half a year of listening to native speakers in the faculty and a further three-week course at the language centre, I was able to teach in Dutch; such fast progress was only achievable because of my method of establishing equivalents.<sup>[4]

3</sup> Compare English “I am glad that he could come to the meeting”; German “ich bin froh, dass er zum Treffen kommen konnte”; and Dutch “ik ben blij dat hij naar de vergadering kon komen”.

⁴ Such a contrastive approach also makes us aware of ‘false friends’: German anrufen means “to call someone on the phone”, while Dutch aanroepen means “to call upon the Lord”, a religious meaning which also still exists in German, where it is, however, marginal. If you want to call someone on the phone in Dutch, the verb is bellen (which in German means “to bark”!)

See also Part II of de Melo's article.