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From: deb5@midway.uchicago.edu (Daniel von Brighoff)
Subject: Re: The "larger" vocabulary of English
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Date: Tue, 21 Jan 1997 18:24:16 GMT
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Xref: glinda.oz.cs.cmu.edu sci.lang:68679 sci.lang.translation:11742

In article <32E46C25.1F95@cyberspace.com>,
Patrick Sweeney  <patricks@cyberspace.com> wrote:
>Adrian Tan wrote:
>> 
>> Quoth the Guinness Book of Records 1991: "Vocabulary: The English
>> language contains about 490,000 words plus another 300,000 technical
>> terms, the most in any language...
><snip>
>
>One thing to watch out for is the misperceptions that numbers alone can
>tease us into allowing.  Though the Guinness Book quote addresses
>numbers, it does not look at usage/meaning.  It may well be the case
>that our language has a larger number of words than others, while still
>having fewer essentially _unique_ words.  Having a hundred words that
>are a variation on ten meanings is not in all senses a larger vocabulary
>than a set of twenty words with compleletely different meanings.

	There are much more important objections to "counting words" than
this, most of which were raised here not long ago in a thread devoted
almost exclusively to that subject.  The main problem is that there is no
universally-applicable cross-linguistic definition of "word".  A single
"word" in polysynthetic languages, like Eskimo, can only be expressed by
means of an entire phrase in English and other analytic languages.  Even
comparing the number of "lexical roots" between languages is fraught with
difficulties.


-- 
	 Daniel "Da" von Brighoff    /\          Dilettanten
	(deb5@midway.uchicago.edu)  /__\         erhebt Euch
				   /____\      gegen die Kunst!
