Re: Word count of minimum vocabulary

Mok-Kong Shen wrote:

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.

Then the Collins Concise Dictionary is a ass.

(That's a literary allusion.)

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.

Then the Collins Concise Dictionary's blurb-writer is a ass.
--
Peter T. Daniels grammatim@xxxxxxx
.