Re: Plausibility Check


Franz Gnaedinger wrote:
Peter T. Daniels wrote:

No, idiot. You claimed that TV taught you there were 200,000 words in
Early Modern English.

Your invectives fall back on yourself. I said quite clearly that
I got this information from a linguistic radio program: English
in the time of Shakespeare had 200,000 words, information
technology alone created 200,000 new English words.

If there is such a thing as a "linguistic radio program," identify it;
and tell us who made those nonsensical claims.

You also frequently attribute your nonsense to "TV." Am I supposed to
recall exactly which piece of nonsense goes with which nonexistent
"source"?

Yes, you must.

January 29, 2006, 6:03 pm: "One more time: where are you
getting this crap?" The "one more time" refers to a previous

What does that have to do with the claim that 10+ years ago I used the
nonexistent phrase "hung like a bear"? Or was that actually a quotation
of someone's previous posting?

message in my etymological thread where you commented
on another information I got from the same TV documentary
on the life of Christ: "Where the frigging hell do you _get_
this bull***?"

There isn't even an expression "hung like a bear." The expression is
"hung like a horse," and Dafoe (no relation to the author of Robinson
Crusoe) has the reputation of being hung like a horse.

Everybody can go to www.google.com, click on Groups,
give in sci.lang, and look out for messages Peter T. Daniels
posted before July 2006. When you found one, click on: view
profile. You'll find that he, using his first e-mail address, posted
55,024 messages to 374 groups between August 1997 and July
2006 (numbers from this morning). In the diagram Post Activity
you can see that he began posting in August 1997. Look up the
two messages of that month (click on the number 2). Then look
at the quote of the second message: "And this is the evidence
that Jesus was hung like a bear: in the movie (...)". If you dare
read the whole message, open it and confirm that you are at
least 18 years old.

I suspect that if I try to do that (not that your instructions are
clear) before posting this message, this message will be lost.

BTW I have certainly not posted to 374 groups. I post to exactly four
groups.

If a message is occasionally crossposted, that is not my
responsibility. And I find nowhere in google groups to discover which
newsgroups a message is being crossposted to.

So you've already forgotten the meaning of "active vocabulary" and
"passive vocabulary," which I explained when M.-K. Shen asked what a
normal person's vocabulary is.

Goethe had an exceptional vocabulary of 30,000 words.
An active vocabulary, of course, goes without saying.
The average vocabulary of people living in the western
civilizations, as I recall, is between 8,000 and 10,000
words. Among the lower classes you find people with
an active vocabulary of only 4,000 words.

Where do you "recall" that from? Who lied to you previously?

It sounds like you're perverting some of the bigoted claims of one
Basil Bernstein, a British sociologist who systematically attempted to
show that "the lower classes" were mentally inferior.

Whose rough estimate?

My rough estimate, I leaved through several of the 23
volumes of the Middle English dictionary and did a quick
calculation.

I leave it to the audience to evaluate the legitimacy of this claim.

If 100,000 words were added to English vocabulary in the space of 100
years or so, where did they come from, and why is there no record of
them?

The era of Middle English lasted from 1066 to 1475.
Its end coincided with the Renaissance that opened
the door for many a new science that led way to new
technical applications that gave way to plenty new
words. The more things we have the more words we
need. By comparing the vocabulary of Chaucer and
Shakespeare you can about estimate the increase
of the English vocabulary between the Middle Ages
and Shakespeare's time.

How many different words did Chaucer use?

How many different words did Shakespeare use?

What does 1066 have to do with Chaucer?

What does Chaucer have to do with the Middle Ages? You JUST SAID that
he comes near the end of the period called the Renaissance.

Or maybe you just don't know Chaucer's dates.

Or maybe you don't know that Middle English was not spoken in the
Middle Ages.

Then stop spouting idiocies.

Your invectives fall back on yourself. The way you behave
undermines your authority and reputation. You are now
paying the bill for calling irrelevant every concern of mine.
What does the Bible say about idols that stand on hollow
feet?

No idea. There are remarks about idols with feet of clay.

Your evidence for that absurdity?

Yet another invective that falls back on you. How many
times did I quote from that linguistic radio program?
English in the time of Shakespeare had 200,000 words,
information technology alone created 200,000 new
English words. I can rely on those program, I can't
rely on you.

You never QUOTED from any "linguistic radio program." You spout
misremembered untruths.

Your guesses are worth far less than the paper they're not printed on.

Yet another invective.

Do lay out the argument that makes it "plausible."

200,000 English words created by information technology
(according to that linguistic radio program I mentioned so
many times now). As many termini technici in medicine,
I assume, in economy, in military, in ship building, etc
etc etc. 10,000,000 words are 50 times 200,000 words.
50 fields of human activity matching about information
technology. My personal guess.

Prove that there was a "linguistic radio program," and prove that
anyone connected with it was competent to deal in linguistics, and
prove that you remember it correctly.

.

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