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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| montmorency Diglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4828 days ago 2371 posts - 3676 votes  Speaks: English*, German Studies: Danish, Welsh | Message 3673 of 3959 19 August 2014 at 1:53am | IP Logged | |||||
Perhaps. But it is said that the invention of printing tended to lead to more standardisation, and this led to increases in vocabulary. And it just seems very reasonable to me, to suppose that the advent of printed books would lead to more and more people being exposed to more and more words, and there would be a natural multiplier effect. And how do people nowadays increase their vocabulary? Well, one significant way is by reading, and up until recently, most of the things they read were printed. When books were produced by hand, there was an obvious limitation on their number and how many people would have access to them. And we can only really have any confidence in estimating the total vocabulary by consulting surviving written records. We can make guesses as to the influence of the oral tradition, but it can't really be proved. I suppose that those communities that have survived into the 21st century without developing a written tradition may be looked to, in order to give us clues about how our own language developed. I know such communities can often have quite complex grammars, but do they also have large vocabularies? Is there any research to show, either way? Be that as it may, according to this paper: link Shakespeare was writing at a time when the growth in the English language was happening at a pace that had never been seen before, and has not been matched since. Now it didn't surprise me that it was growing faster than ever before, but I'd assumed it would have carried on growing even faster later on, due to advances in communication technology. But maybe not. Well, although we can never know the size of Shakepeasre's passive vocabulary, it is theoretically possible to measure the size of the total written vocabulary of English during his lifetime, by analysing all the known published books in existence up to that time. and maybe this has actually been done. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| montmorency Diglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4828 days ago 2371 posts - 3676 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Danish, Welsh | Message 3674 of 3959 19 August 2014 at 2:08am | IP Logged | |||||
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OK, further on in that paper, pages 55-56, there is a statement that contradicts my doubt
about English having 100,000 words in Shakepeare's day. It mentions David Crystal's supposition that English had 150,000 lemmas in those days, and estimates that Shakespeare knew 40,000 of them, or over a quarter. Edited by montmorency on 19 August 2014 at 2:09am 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| fiolmattias Triglot Groupie Sweden geocities.com/fiolmaRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6689 days ago 62 posts - 129 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English, Arabic (Written) | Message 3675 of 3959 19 August 2014 at 6:04am | IP Logged | |||||
Svenska Akademien (fairly serious bounch) writes (in Swedish) that "Shakespeare använder sig av knappt 29 000 ord medan Strindbergs språkomfång är drygt 119 000 ord" (Shakespeare ca 29 000, Strindberg 119 000 words) There must be other writers with larger written vocabulary than Shakespeare. Heck, Dostojevskij uses more than 29 000 names in some of his books... :) 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6703 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map | Message 3676 of 3959 19 August 2014 at 1:57pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I don't know what the people behind these numbers have counted (word forms, headwords or word families), but if Strindberg used four times as many different lexical items as Shakespeare I wouldn't be able to read his works - or at least I would be in big trouble. There are even words in my Swedish dictionaries which I don't know, and the Gyldendal Swedish-Danish is supposed to contain 50.000 words and compounds. If Strindberg had used 2½ times as many different words as this dictionary even the average Swede wouldn't be able to read his stuff - and it is not even my impression that it is particularly hard to read.
The 129.000 items must be word forms plus proper names plus every thing else you conceivably could count, including Strindbergs shoe number and the names of his neighbours. And I would also like to know how somebody found 29.000 different names in one novel by Dostojevskij. Would any non-savant reader even be able to follow the plot under those circumstances? Is there a list somewhere?.. it would be the size of the telephone book for a midsized provincial town! Edited by Iversen on 25 October 2014 at 7:10pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Zireael Triglot Senior Member Poland Joined 4651 days ago 518 posts - 636 votes Speaks: Polish*, EnglishB2, Spanish Studies: German, Sign Language, Tok Pisin, Arabic (Yemeni), Old English | Message 3677 of 3959 19 August 2014 at 2:44pm | IP Logged | |||||
I think Svenska Akademien fell into a fairly common trap - counting individual word forms instead of lexemes. Swedish does A LOT of inflection and English doesn't (if we discount Saxon Genitive and 3rd person sg 's'). If every word form is counted, then indeed Strindgberg wins, but I don't think this is what should be counted. Another thing I just thought of would be slang/dialect words. Maybe Strindgberg uses a lot of them? Edited by Zireael on 19 August 2014 at 2:45pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Josquin Heptaglot Senior Member Germany Joined 4844 days ago 2266 posts - 3992 votes Speaks: German*, English, French, Latin, Italian, Russian, Swedish Studies: Japanese, Irish, Portuguese, Persian | Message 3678 of 3959 19 August 2014 at 4:04pm | IP Logged | |||||
I fail to see how printing is a way to increase the vocabulary. You mention the standardization of language through printing. Doesn't that per definitionem eliminate non-standard variants of words and reduce vocabulary? I see that effect in my Westphalian home region where dialectal words vanish and are only used by elderly people today. Of course, you could argue printing allows for better education, so more people learn more words, but that doesn't increase the total number of words existing in a language. It doesn't matter if a word was known to one poet or a million peasants, it still existed. In ye olden days, people used to tell stories and invent fairy tales, which have only later been written down. You'd be surprised by the elaborate vocabulary. Have you ever dealt with Icelandic sagas, Irish epic poems, or Homer? You can say many things about Homer but certainly not that his vocabulary was very limited. On the contrary, at that time people had lots of specialized vocabulary for items we don't even know any more. I'm always amazed by how many words I learn from going to the museum and looking at archeological exhibits. My favourite word I learned that way is "Kuttrolf", a special kind of carafe which dispenses the liquid in small drops. That leads me to the next point, which is that vocabulary depends on the culture people live in. Amazonian tribes have a small vocabulary because they live in a simple environment, which is fundamentally different from today's digital society. The medieval culture of the 15th century when printing was invented, however, was a long shot from being primitive. Summarizing my thoughts, I would like to point out that although printing might have favoured the standardization of languages and the spread of poetic or scientific vocabulary, that doesn't automatically mean the vocabulary of a language was increased through printing. Last but not least, we should ask ourselves how many people had an access to education and books at that time. Answer: very few! Oral tradition was still strong in European societies until the 19th century when compulsory schooling was invented and it endured until the middle of the 20th century. However, that does not mean all "uneducated" people had a restricted vocabulary, they just had a different vocabulary from the scientific and literary elite. Today we have more access to education, texts, and other cultural products than ever before. Does that mean our active vocabulary is multiplying itself? Does it mean more languages develop? No, on the contrary! People don't understand 19th century novels any more, because the vocabulary is way over their head. Words and languages die. Linguistic diversity was a feature of traditional societies, which depended much more on the spoken word than we do today. Edited by Josquin on 19 August 2014 at 5:32pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6703 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map | Message 3679 of 3959 20 August 2014 at 2:23am | IP Logged | |||||
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Let me confuse the discussion a bit by pointing out that the rap artists in the study I linked to earlier actually use a lot of homemade or slangy words, and that writing presumably isn't particular central to their culture. I don't know whether they even write down their fabulations before they start rapping.
1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| montmorency Diglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4828 days ago 2371 posts - 3676 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Danish, Welsh | Message 3680 of 3959 20 August 2014 at 4:56pm | IP Logged | |||||
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@Josquin:
Lots of good points there which I won't argue with, well not much :-) except to say that my point about printing leading to standardisation leading to vocabulary growth was supported by the Wikipedia article (yes, I know it's hardly infallible) on William Caxton , who as well as introducing printing to England, translated and published a lot of books of foreign origin, and thus probably directly introduced a lot of new words into the language. (His translation skills weren't the best apparently, but that didn't stop him..).
And while words fall out of active use, they are still technically part of the corpus of the language, and will be still understood by at least some people. I don't have any trouble reading Jane Austen or Charles Dickens, even if I wouldn't dream of speaking or writing like like them. Others may not bother because they don't find them interesting or relevant or because they are having too much fun on their iphones...only a slightly tongue in cheek comment since , most people I see in public spaces are glued to their phone, and I suspect do most of their reading on social media rather than e-books (or real books). Maybe the e-book won't kill the real book, but the iphone might. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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