Re: Plausibility Check

Me:

English in the time of Shakespeare had 200,000 words,
information technology alone created 200,000 new words.

Peter T. Daniels:

This is incredible.

Yes, it is incredible, I came to the same conclusion this¨
afternoon. I never read computer manuals, as they are
teeming with words I don't understand; all I learned about
computers was by helping some friends of mine with
their diploma - I helped them formulate, and watched
as they typed. This afternoon I leafed through the some
fifty pages of the manual of a digital camera. There
aren't really that many uncommon words. 200,000 new
words created by information technology are exorbitant.
My Webster's Unabriged has, roughly calculated, between
150,000 and 200,000 words. Such a brick full of computer
words ain't plausible. 20,000 words is a better guess,
as it goes along with the vocabulary of Shakespeare.
The actual sentence I heard on the radio may then have
been:

Shakespeare had a vocabulary of 20,000 words,
information technology alone created 20,000 words

The numbers 20,000 and 200,000, when pronounced
in my dialect, are sounding rather similar. One tenth of
my Webster's filled with information words could do.
Some centuries ago, a farmer had 700 words, Milton
had a vocabulary of 7,000 words, Shakespeare had a
vocabulary of 21,000 words, 3,000 of them introduced
by himself, mostly from Latin (numbers from a website).
The modest numbers make sense, and, rather strangely,
I found no estimate of the sum of English words on the
web, so that your estimate of some 500,000 English
words in our time is far more probable than the high
number I assumed in a previous message.

Where did I get the number 200,000 from? Probably
from what I learned in school: Goethe had a vocabulary
of 30,000 words, German had or has 200,000 words.
I must have assumed a similar number for English.

A criminal investigation would ask for the motif: why
did I remember that sentence? Because it confirms
my relation of human made things or technology and
words. The same relation holds in the down-sized
version, which is far more probable.

So I apologize to all of you, first Peter T. Daniels,
then Richard Herring, and, last but not least, to the
authors of that radio program, especially Christian
Schmid who does a fine job on Radio DRS 1 and
does not deserve such a cuckoo's egg in his nest.

Franz Gnaedinger

Tomorrow is our National Day,. I won't be online.
Shall be back on Wednesday.

.