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From: elna@netcom.com (Esperanto League N America)
Subject: Re: Average vocabulary size?
Message-ID: <elnaDGAq2p.4nC@netcom.com>
Organization: Esperanto League for North America, Inc.
References: <453haj$4bi@mack.rt66.com> <459ch8$368b@b.stat.purdue.edu> <45fbnj$5m9@news.asiaonline.net> <ACA1B0869668162038@entergrp.demon.co.uk>
Date: Wed, 11 Oct 1995 18:01:36 GMT
Lines: 22
Sender: elna@netcom4.netcom.com

slavins@entergrp.demon.co.uk (Simon Slavin) writes in a recent posting (reference <ACA1B0869668162038@entergrp.demon.co.uk>):
>In article <45fbnj$5m9@news.asiaonline.net>,
>felsjb@asiaonline.net (Jens Behrens) wrote:
>
>
>A intelligent teenager knows on the close order of 10,000 words and
>could probably figure out another 10,000 from the context and from word-
>component clues.  A 60-year old who has been exposed to many different
>topics and sub-cultures can know in the region of 100,000 words, and
>could infer the meaning of another 400,000 from knowledge acquired of
>other languages which share roots.
>
These numbers seem quite high. Especially the last, for I believe that our
Mother Tongue has half-a-million words in total-- and surely you won't want
to assert that anybody can grasp *all* the technical vocabularies....


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