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Books that make use of a small vocabulary

 Language Learning Forum : Books, Literature & Reading Post Reply
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Henkkles
Triglot
Senior Member
Finland
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Studies: Russian

 
 Message 1 of 15
10 August 2013 at 5:29pm | IP Logged 
The idea of this topic is that when the vocabulary used in literary works is limited, the concentration of lemmas and especially the most used lemmas is higher. These books could serve the purpose of "easy reading" in the sense that you don't need an immensely large vocabulary to enjoy them. It would also benefit one trying to advance through the "(upper) intermediate" stage in each language and all.

So in short; simply written works of literature in any language.

Edited by Henkkles on 11 August 2013 at 12:32am

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lichtrausch
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 Message 2 of 15
10 August 2013 at 5:47pm | IP Logged 
Re: Moby Dick

Umm....the whale chapters?

link
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Andrew C
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naturalarabic.com
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 Message 3 of 15
10 August 2013 at 6:17pm | IP Logged 
Henkkles wrote:

This idea arose when I heard I think Deka Glossai mentioning that the total amount of
lexemes in Moby Dick was around four hundred.


No way! Per page perhaps! Moby Dick is very rich in vocabulary - tough for native
speakers, let alone students of English.

You must be thinking of a different book.
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Henkkles
Triglot
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Finland
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 Message 4 of 15
10 August 2013 at 6:36pm | IP Logged 
Andrew C wrote:
Henkkles wrote:

This idea arose when I heard I think Deka Glossai mentioning that the total amount of
lexemes in Moby Dick was around four hundred.


No way! Per page perhaps! Moby Dick is very rich in vocabulary - tough for native
speakers, let alone students of English.

You must be thinking of a different book.

I'm very frustrated people got stuck with the mention of Moby Dick. A limited amount of lemmas doesn't mean the vocabulary is poor. I'm trying to find the video but it didn't have any hard data but it's not something you'd just lie about, might be he misremembered but he used it to drive a point home so. In most books you don't have four hundred words per page, let alone lemmas.
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lichtrausch
Triglot
Senior Member
United States
Joined 5948 days ago

525 posts - 1072 votes 
Speaks: English*, German, Japanese
Studies: Korean, Mandarin

 
 Message 5 of 15
10 August 2013 at 6:53pm | IP Logged 
Sorry, but I've got just one more comment on Moby Dick. Found this gem in the wiki
article I linked too:

"Though 19th century science is of only historical interest, his command of the English
language, or at least of its Yankee version, is unimpeachable, so his definitions cannot
be dismissed lightly."

hahaha
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Cabaire
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Germany
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 Message 6 of 15
10 August 2013 at 11:41pm | IP Logged 
According to this video, you need around 14.000 words under your belt to understand 98% of it. Moby Dick is therefore extremely rich in vocabulary.
Maybe one should have better mentioned something like this.

Edited by Cabaire on 10 August 2013 at 11:58pm

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Henkkles
Triglot
Senior Member
Finland
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Speaks: Finnish*, English, Swedish
Studies: Russian

 
 Message 7 of 15
11 August 2013 at 12:57am | IP Logged 
Removed all remarks of Moby-Dick in hopes that the derailment of the thread would cease.
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montmorency
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 Message 8 of 15
11 August 2013 at 2:36am | IP Logged 
Given an e-book converted to plain text, a programmer proficient in text-processing
could probably develop code to calculate the number of different lexemes, lemmas, or,
er, words in it, so given a sufficently wide range of available e-books one could find
the ones with the smallest vocabulary relatively easily.


400 sounds a bit on the low side though.


I would love to see the appropriate respective word-counts for, say, the early Harry
Potter books, versus "The Hobbit", and, say, the later Harry Potter books versus "Lord
of the Rings".


Or, say, any Charles Dickens novel versus any Dan Brown novel.



I'll bet there are quite a few programmers here more than capable of knocking up such
code in a fairly short time.







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