Re: Plausibility Check


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:
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).

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.

(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 even in different and mutually incompatible
ways. People don't lie, they are trying to be helpful, but their
records are often unreliable. How come? I can tell, because
ten years ago I witnessed a near accident and a subsequent
theft, offered the victims to testify before the police on their
behalf, and was invited to do so a couple of weeks later.
Knowing that witnesses are often unreliable, I told myself
that I will tell the event as truly as I can remember, I won't
make up any detail. An easy task, I thought, for I could see
the near-accident before my inner eyes and replay it as if
it were on video. I spent almost an hour in the police office,
and the longer I tried to answer the questions by the kind
officer, the more I realized how little I actually remember.
No video at all, not even a picture of the key scene, just
a dark blob met by a bright blob !! The dark blob: a young
couple correctly crossing the street. The bright blob: a
careening car, slowing down, and suddenly accelerating
again, nearly seizing the couple. So that was all I actually
remembered on the visual level. Not even the place. I know
that place very well, and there was no necessity to store it
again. The two blobs had somewhat like a link to them:
insert us into that place. The young couple was a regular
young couple, no necessity to remember them in a specific
way. And so on. What I saw (and still see) as a "video" is
actually made up by my brain: a reconstruction. The other
way round: our brain does a marvellous job on the basis of
the least little bit of information. Events are stored in a way
that they occupy very little space, and are then combined
when we need an information from the memory, and occur
to us as a lively stream of inner pictures ...

Conclusion: we don't really remember, we are constructing
our memories. The same happened with that sentence I
"recalled" from that radio program: it was an equation,
two blobs covering each other, so to speak:

blob 1 English words Shakespeare
blob 2 English words information technology

The equation I remember exactly, like the dark blob met by
the bright blob in that near accident. But the words around
the equation are made up, drawn from other memories,
like the scene of the near-accident. the look of the couple,
etc. Now my brain, asking for more details, provided the
over fourty years old information about English having or
having had 200,000 words, information technology would
then have created 200,000 words, and voilà, I had my false
equation: English in the time of Shakepseare had 200,000
words, information technology alone created 200,000 words.
My mistake was that I didn't check my reconstruction: my
Webster's Unabridged has between 150,000 and 200,000
words (rough estimate) - it would be very unlikely that
information technology created that many words. Now,
thanks to your insistence, I found out where I went wrong,
and, moreover, I got a model case of how the memory
works. May it be that the same mechanism holds in the
creation of mythology? The Bible is full of incredible stories
and exorbitant numbers, yet, I believe, there is always
a crucial point that is kept faithfully - as in the above case
the two blobs and the equation per se -, while the other
information are twisted - as in the case of zwaenztuusig
and zweihunrtuusig. Finally I was able to find out what they
must have said on the radio: Shakespeare had a vocabulary
of 20,000 words, information technology alone created 20,000
English words.

Knowing more about the way the memory works, both on
the individual and collective level, and how it can go astray,
may give us hope to find some of the true events behind
mythology, and stories in the Bible.

Regards Franz Gnaedinger

.

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