Re: Plausibility Check


Richard Herring wrote:

The other half is learning how to present it in such a way that others
can assess its credibility for themselves. You are very bad at that.

I always tell about my sources of information when someone
asks me about.

Trust nobody.

How can you live without trusting anyone? Poor fellow.

Which includes estimating its accuracy and credibility, their
motivation, by how many levels of hearsay it's been distorted, etc... If
they don't provide the metadata for doing that, they get low scores.

Okay, tell me about your metadata. Your understanding
of the world has been mediated, first by your mother and
father, then by siblings and comrades, by teachers, by
books, by journals, by radio, TV, the Web, etc. Almost
everything you know has been been provided or at least
influenced by one or another medium (by someone or
something "in between," which is the meaning of the word
medium). Tell me all that came in between your natural trust
as a baby and the above statement "Trust nobody.".

But you fail to present the evidence from which you made your
evaluation.

I gave you the quote

English in the time of Shakepseare had 200,000 words,
information technology alone created 200,000 words

and by request I gave you the source, the radio program
Mailbox, DRS 1, 11:40 to 11:45, one or two or perhaps
three years ago. I gave you the link to the website, you
can contact the editors of the Mailbox, I even wrote
a draft of a letter to them. Can you ask for more?

Back in 1975/75 I defined language and stated a correlation
between human made things and words (look up an earlier
message of mine here in this thread). The above sentence
confirms that correlation, which is why I picked it up, which
is why I remember it accurately, and which is why I can
still remember the source.

Then I checked the plausibility by consulting the 23 volumes
of the Middle English dictionary and calculated a rough
number of 100,000 English words in the era from 1066 to
1475. The end of that era coincides with the rise of the
Renaissance in Italy, the Renaissance opened the door to
many new scientific disciplines, which led to new applications,
which led to plenty new words. For example the words for
colors increased in Shakespeare's time, owing to new dyeing
techniques. 200,000 English words in the time of Shakespeare,
then, are well plausible to me. I have no reason to doubt that
number, neither have I a reason to doubt the qualifications of
the authors of that radio program. I assume they relied on
a publication. There must be some people around who study
the number of words, and how that number increases. May
well be that someone wrote and published a paper on the
increasing number of English words through time. Do you
know every book and doctoral thesis and journal and article
and paper on linguistic topics? If you can't evaluate the number
of English words in the time of Shakespeare yourself, and if you
doubt my memory, ask the editors of the Mailbox.

Franz Gnaedinger

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