Re: Word count of minimum vocabulary



Mok-Kong Shen wrote:

[snip]
On the other hand, I like to remark that in my original
post in this thread my intention was rather to inquire
whether it is possible to "compose" a text to express
any given thought (this may eventually have to be
suitably restricted to certain domains of discourse,
e.g. private and business correspondence) in terms of
a common (preferrably standardized) vocabulary of minimum
size or, equivalently, to "paraphrase" an arbitrary
"given" text (with eventual restrictions as mentioned
above) in such a way that all the words are to be found
in such a common minimum-sized vocabulary. In that topic
comparatively little has been discussed todate in this
thread in my view. However, for Chinese an estimate
of the vocabulary size of 1000 words has been given
in Lee's post. Since Chinese ideographs don't have
"derivatives", a vocabulary of size 2^10=1024 would
thus serve the purpose. I conjecture that, for some
special domains of discourse, it may be conceivable
and practicable to employ even somewhat smaller
vocabularies. On the other hand, Chinese is a rather
special language (in particular, it doesn't have an
alphabet and is deemed by quite many people to be
rather hard to learn), even though it is one of
the major natural languages of the world. English,
on the other hand, is without doubt to be considered
the most important natural language for a large
number of application fields today and in the future.
What is the size of a vocabulary (with and without
counting the "derivatives") for English that
corresponds in functionality to the one for Chinese
of size 2^10? And how should one proceed to determine
its content? I should appreciate it very much, if
there could be some further discussions on such
questions in this thread.

I should mention (even though possibly unnecessarily)
one of the applications of the minimum-sized vocabularies.
In learning a foreign language, it frequently is the
case that one doesn't want to master that language
perfectly (including in-depth studies of literature
classics etc.) but only to be able to communicate
one's own thought (in a certain domain of discourse)
to the foreigners freely and perfectly. An example
is a businessman going abroad to do business. It's
then usually not a problem, when his discourse partner
uses a word that he doesn't know, for he could normally
ask for explanation. On the other hand, if he couldn't
find the right words to express his own thought, then
he would have a problem. Therefore, the vocabulary to
be learned by him should be complete in the sense that
he could with it express correctly all his thoughts
in the domain of discourse of his interest. That the
size of the vocabulary should be minimum is certainly
trivial: the learner could then master it with the
least amount of time and effort, which is certainly
desirable.

There are several follow-ups to my posts in other branches
of the tree of this thread. I don't have much to reply
to them, excepting the following which I write below
instead of separately and individually in the other
branches of the tree so as to minimize the number of posts
that a general reader of this thread would have to open.

Daniels:
Chinese does not use ideographs.

Herring:
If you call them "characters" it's no harder to type,
and you won't get people popping up every other post
to point out that the Chinese writing system isn't
ideographic.

Answer:
From Collins Concise Dictionay:
ideogram or ideograph: a sign or symbol, used in a
writing system such as that of China, that directly
represents a concept or thing, rather than a word
for it.

Herring:
Just guessing here, but I doubt if those 323 million
words are all different.

Answer:
From the envelope of Collins Concise Dictionary:
The Bank of English is a computerized collection of
more than 323 million words of current English created
by Collins Dictionaries and the University of
Birmingham to record how language is used and is changing.

M. K. Shen





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