Re: Plausibility Check


Patric Mueller wrote:

Which dialect exactly? To me this is unpronounceable.

The one from my hometown Zurich. We can swallow the middle
part of the long words. Normally we are still understood. However,
the memory fooled me because my focus was not on the numbers
but on the relation of human made things - information technology
in this case - and words, as explained previously.

+----[http://www.sirbacon.org/covocab.htm]----
| It is said that a common farm labourer uses 500 words, and educated
| business man 3,000, the average novelist 5,000 and great scholars and
| public men 7,000. "Shakespeare" in his poems and plays uses 21,000, the
| largest vocabulary ever possessed by any member of the human race.
+----

Although they don't say who this "It" is.

+----[http://www.sirbacon.org/links/BaconEnglishLanguage.htm]----
| Max Muller, in his "Science of Language," Vol. 1, 1899, p. 278,says:
|
| "A well educated person in England who has been at a public school and
| at the university.... seldom uses more than about 3,000 or 4,000
| words.... Shakespeare, who probably displayed greater variety of
| expression than any writer in any language, produced all his plays
| with about 15,000 words."
|
| This is an underestimate. There are about 22,000 different words in
| the plays, of which 7,000 are new words, introduced-- as Murray's
| Oxford Dictionary tells us-- into the the language for the first time.
| Neither Dickens nor Thackeray made use of more than 7 or 8,000 words.
| Dös anyone suppose that any master of the Stratford Grammar School,
| where Latin was the only language used, knew so many as 2,000 English
| words, or was the illiterate householder of Stratford, known as
| William Shakespeare knew half or a quarter so many?
+----

The numbers vary greatly. May depend on the definition of a word.
Verify - verifialbe - verification are three words. Do you also count
verified for a word of its own?

At http://www.uni-heidelberg.de/institute/sonst/adw/goethe/ they claim
Goethe should have had a vocabulary of 90'000 words. Although with
Goethe there are more writings of different types (eg plays, personal
letters, clerks documents) passed down to us than with Shakespeares
works so there is an advantage for Goethe I don't quite believe this
number. Moreover as I didn't find how the different words were counted
or who counted or when were they counted.

I learned that Goethe had a vocabulary of 30,000 words. That was
in the 1960s, when his work wasn't yet available in digitalized form,
when counting words was more difficult than it is by now. But again,
there is the problem of defining a word, especially in German,
where you can form the longest buggers by linking substantives:
Vierwaldstaetterseedampfschiffahrtsgesellschaftskapitaen -
captain of the steamboat company of lake Lucerne. You can
go on and produce ever longer words: Vierwaldstaettersee-
dampfschiffahrtsgesellschaftskapitaensmuetzengoldsternglanz
- golden shine of the star on the cap of the captain of the
steamboat company of lake Lucerne ...

By the way for Goethe the letters A to G of his vocabulary are online:
http://germazope.uni-trier.de/Projects/GWB

Thanks for the link.

Is there something similar for shakespeare?

Bye
Patric

I found no such site for the vocabulary of Shakespeare,
but I guess it will be only a question of time. Google are
scanning libraries, within ten or twenty years we will have
a lot of books online, with search functions integrated.
If you happen to really be interested in these questions,
on a professional basis, ask Ricardo Manzilla of the
Free University of Mexico. He may give you a hint.

Regards Franz Gnaedinger

.

Loading