Editing Occitan language (section)

===Lexicon===
A comparison of terms and word counts between languages is not easy, as it is impossible to count the number of words in a language. (See [[Lexicon]], [[Lexeme]], [[Lexicography]] for more information.)

Some have claimed around 450,000 words exist in the Occitan language,<ref>Avner Gerard Levy & Jacques Ajenstat: [http://www.kodaxil.org/kManifesto.pdf ''The Kodaxil Semantic Manifesto'']{{dead link|date=February 2018 |bot=InternetArchiveBot |fix-attempted=yes}} (2006), Section 10 – ''Modified Base64 / Kodaxil word length, representation'', p. 9: "the English language, as claimed by Merriam-Webster, as well as the Occitan language – are estimated to comprise over 450,000 words in their basic form."</ref> a number comparable to English (the ''[[Webster's Third New International Dictionary]]'', Unabridged with 1993 addenda reaches 470,000 words, as does the Oxford English Dictionary, Second edition). The Merriam-Webster website estimates that the number is somewhere between 250,000 and 1&nbsp;million words.{{citation needed|date=March 2023}}

The magazine [[GEO (magazine)|''Géo'']] (2004, p.&nbsp;79) claims that American English literature can be more easily translated into Occitan than French, excluding modern technological terms that both languages have integrated.{{citation needed|date=March 2023}}

A comparison of the lexical content can find more subtle differences between the languages. For example, Occitan has 128 synonyms related to cultivated land, 62 for wetlands, and 75 for sunshine (''Géo''). The language went through an eclipse during the [[Industrial Revolution]], as the vocabulary of the countryside became less important. At the same time, it was disparaged as a [[patois]]. Nevertheless, Occitan has also incorporated new words into its lexicon to describe the modern world. The Occitan word for web (as in World Wide Web) is {{wikt-lang|oc|oèb}}, for example.