Re: Word count of minimum vocabulary



Peter T. Daniels wrote:
Mok-Kong Shen wrote:


So could you kindly explain what do you mean by "word"
in general in a (any) language? And for English, do you
take in a text the character strings that are between
the spaces always to be independent single words, or not?


No There are books about "word." There is no definition of "word" that
suits all languages.

If you know that, then, since you are scientist, you should
accompany your statement in the previous post concerned either
with a definition you used (or a reference to it) or, if you
would like to save time/effort, simply employ something like
" 'word' (under a certain definition) ".

Let me take this opportunity to say something (for the general
reader) in relation to the issue raised in the previous posts.

For a native Chinese, the term "word" (pronounced "tze")
refers (corresponds to) commonly/generally to what one could
find as entries in a Chinese dictionary, i.e. the individual
Chinese "characters", which in books are printed each within
a square space of constant size (for the same font). (I'll
use "tze" to refer to these below.) Now there are less number
of Chinese "tze" than the English words (in the sense of
dictionary entries). To compensate for this deficit, there
is a comparatively more intensive use of the mechanism of
compounding in Chinese than in English in my view. Examples
of different kinds of compounding in English: "body building",
"bodyguard", "body-line". Of these only the first kind is
analogously employed in Chinese. In this way, the English
words e.g. "kitchen", "Chinese (person)" correspond in normal
translation to a sequence of two and three "tze" respectively.
(I said normal translation, because in certain writing styles
the second "tze", e.g. in the translation of "kitchen", could
have been omitted, resulting in a single "tze" corresponding
to a English word.) There do exist some denotations of
concepts/entities consisting of more than one "tze" that
could be argued to be probably not stemming from this
compounding process but instead were created with multiple
"tze" from the very beginning. But these form anyway only a
fairly negligible minority as far as I am aware.

Of course, everthing depends on the level of observation.
I suppose it is correct to say that in English "body building"
is taken to be 2 (orthographic) words but could also be
considered as one single word, if one is looking from the
conceptual level. I read somewhere that words can also be
defined as grammatical units that function according to
grammatical rules. (Note in this connection, however, that
the Chinese grammar is rather rigid and comparatively
simple in a sense.)

M. K. Shen

.

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