Re: Word count of minimum vocabulary

In message <e8bukt$olb$02$1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>, Mok-Kong Shen <mok-kong.shen@xxxxxxxxxxx> writes

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:

Bad idea. General-purpose dictionaries, especially "concise" ones, rarely give adequate definitions of technical terms. This one appears to be particularly bad.

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.

And by that definition, out of the many thousands of Chinese characters maybe a dozen qualify. Perhaps you could give some examples, taking care to explain in each case how they fail to represent a word?

Does your inadequate dictionary have entries for "logogram", "radical and phonetic" or "morphosyllabic"?


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.

Which adds nothing. So are they all different, or are they not?

Answer:
It's a corpus, currently up to 524 million words.
http://www.collins.co.uk/books.aspx?group=153
--
Richard Herring
.

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