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From: John Cowan <cowan@ccil.org>
Subject: Re: Invention of language
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Date: Thu, 14 Nov 1996 18:20:54 GMT
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Steve Whittet wrote:

> Funk and Wagnalls lists about 70 words per page and has 1565 pages
> which gives 109,550 words. It claims on page X that Old English had
> about "forty thousand words" and a strong Celtic influence.

I will eat my hat, or rather my 10,000 hats (see below), if it
says anything of the sort.  There must be all of twenty words
(excluding names) in English that are of Celtic origin, which is
not a "strong influence" by anybody's definition.

As for the 40,000 words, the entire corpus of Old English would
fit more than comfortably on one CD-ROM.  Do you suppose that
the word for "baby's pacifier" appears anywhere in it?  (It doesn't.)
Would you conclude from that that the English before 1066 didn't
have any device for getting their babies to shut up?

> Under the topic of Vocabulary on page 1091 the Oxford Companion
> to the English language claims that "The Oxford English Dictionary"
> (1989) defines over 500,000 items described as words in a promotional
> press release. The average college desk or family dictionary defines
> over 100,000 such items. Specialist dictionaries contain vast lists
> of words and word like items."
> 
> "When printed material of this kind is taken into account along with
> lists of geographical, zoological, botanical and other usages, the
> crude but credible total for words and word like forms in present
> day English is somewhere over a billion items."

This is preposterous.  How do you think the OED chose their mere
one half of one percent of all the words to list?  Can you give a single
example of one of those 99-million-plus words?  I say they don't
exist, and this quotation is intentionally or unintentionally deceptive.

-- 
John Cowan						cowan@ccil.org
			e'osai ko sarji la lojban
