Re: Plausibility Check


Franz Gnaedinger wrote:
Peter T. Daniels wrote:

And then you misremember what they tried to teach you.

No, I remember it correctly. It was a TV documentary on
Jesus, featuring, among other scholars, an American
pathologist, leading expert on crucifixion and related matters.
He said the Romans didn't build crosses, they hung the
Jews from olive trees, or perhaps strapped them to olive trees.

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

If I even saw that, it certainly did not make me "freak out."

You freaked out, early on in my etymological thread,
as I recall. Must I look it up and quote your words?

Yes, you must.

You are a fucking liar. I have never, ever, EVER posted anything like
that.

Thread: I have a wonderful story on my WWW, quote:
"And this is the evidence that Jesus was hung like a bear:

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.

in the movie *The Last Temptation of Christ*, at the moment
when Jesus's (William Defoe) loincloth is ...", Aug. 27 1997,
9.26 am, by Peter T. Daniels. You posted that message
under your first e-mail address grammatim (a) worldnet.att.
Using that e-mail address you posted 55024 messages
from August of 1997 to July of this year. Now you got a
new address, but your old messages can still be found.
The one I mean is the second one you ever posted to
the Usenet.

30,000 is any normal person's vocabulary (active and passive).

You find nobody else in Goethe's time with such an active
vocabulary in writing. Shakespeare before him in English,
nobody else.

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.

Who said it did? What I said was that that would have been a more
reasonable mistake than 200,000.

The Middle English Dictionary has 23 volumes and a roughly
estimated number of 100,000 words. 200,000 English words
in the time of Shakespeare are well reasonable.

Whose rough estimate?

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?

No, it was not me, you fucking idiot. Mok-kong Shen did not understand
what "a linguistic corpus of 30,000,000 words" means.

Stop spouting invectives. Either you argue on a scientific level,
providing arguments, or you keep away from me. Arguments
can't be replaced by a prioris pepped up with invectives.

Then stop spouting idiocies.

Considering that information technology alone created 200,000
new words,

Your evidence for that absurdity?

English certainly has way over a million words,
in the range of ten millions, I would guess.

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

Why don't you count the number of words on one page (pick a typical
page, not a random page), and multiply by the number of pages?

You are such a dry mind that you never get a joke.
The 23 volumes of the MED contain a roughly estimated
number of 100,000 words, as I said above, and so a number
of 200,000 English words in Shakespeare's time is well
plausible.

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

.