Re: Plausibility Check


Franz Gnaedinger wrote:
Peter T. Daniels wrote:

Swiss radio broadcasts in Swiss dialect? That's surprising. What are
the words that are much less different that "zwanzig tausend" and "zwei
hundert tausend"?

Sloppily pronounced zwAEnz(g) tuusig - zwEI hnr tuusig

Now you're wending back to the incredible ... no normal adult human has
a vocabulary of 700 words, or of 7,000 words.

Milton may have used only 7000 different words in his writings (though
I rather doubt that), but his writings are rather limited in subject
matter.

I found those numbers on a website, quotes from one Craig:

Hopefully not Craigie, who was involved with the OED early in the 20th
c.

Whoever "Craig" may be, he merely repeats ignorant bigotry.

a farmer some centuries ago had a vocabulary of 700 words,
Milton a vocabulary of 7,000 words, Shaespeare one of
21,000 words, 3,000 of them introduced by himself, mostly
form Latin. Google for

"english in shakespeare's time" vocabulary size

open the site on Shakespeare vs. Bacon, and navigate it
(will take you about half an hour to find all the quotes).

Then I'm certainly not going to do that.

That, as is pointed out in histories of the OED, is a misleading
figure: it turns out that if the collectors found an unusual word in
Shakespeare, they didn't bother searching out earlier occurrences in
lesser-known authors. He did use a lot of words, but he can't certainly
be credited with _inventing_ many of them. ("Incarnidine," sure -- but
books on S's language give examples of words that happen to be first
recorded in the dictionaries from S, but that surely existed in the
language earlier.

As I said, I found that information on the site Shakespeare
vs. Bacon, with plenty of useful quotations, although I don't
agree on Bacon having been Shakespeare. Have a look
at that site.

I have neither interest in nor time for doing that.

(Remember how few words we know of Biblical Hebrew -- we simply don't
know the names of lots of plants and animals, and many other realia,
because they don't happen to occur in the stories and laws that got
written down.)

So there were more words. I gues the same was true
for every vocabulary.

Not my estimate, just the claims of the unabridged-publishers.

500,000 words in present-day English, well, that seems
reasonable.

Entirely reasonable. English pulled ahead of German in the sciences
about halfway through the last century, so it's probably got more new
technical terms. Though of course it's harder to list"words" for German
than for English, since compounding is so free -- at least there's no
problem about what _is_ a word, because it's easy to know where to put
the inflections.

I must correct myself. What I remeber from my remote
schooldays was rather this: Goethe had a vocabulary
of 30,000 words, while English has or had 200,000 words.

Now I can reconstruct how my memory went astray. Let me
explain it more broadly. The police know well that witnesses
can tell the same

The unreliability of eyewitness testimony is a staple of every
introductory course in psychology and, presumably, criminal justice.

.

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