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UK Teens: Active vocabularly of 800 words | ||
Tags: Teenagers | Vocabulary learning | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| wildweathel Newbie United States Joined 5563 days ago 32 posts - 71 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: Esperanto, Japanese | Message 9 of 94 11 January 2010 at 8:06pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
Neither Esperanto nor Japanese conjugate verbs. Does that make them inferior languages?
Elision. In this case there's no semantic need to mark the progressive aspect twice.
Please "perfect your English." "Have got" is currently acceptable for objects, and expressions like "do you have a computer" might even become archaic if the meaning of "to have (a good time)" splits from "to have got (a sweet car)." (Note: currently "have got" is a defective verb limited only to the present indicative, so "to have got" is not yet in general use.) Edited by wildweathel on 11 January 2010 at 8:08pm 9 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Paskwc Pentaglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5677 days ago 450 posts - 624 votes Speaks: Hindi, Urdu*, Arabic (Levantine), French, English Studies: Persian, Spanish | Message 10 of 94 11 January 2010 at 8:24pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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I don't see the need for a panic. Languages change with time; words fall out of use and
structure is made more efficient. These teenagers are every bit as functional as the ones who came before them, the only difference is that they function with smaller vocabularies. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Paskwc Pentaglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5677 days ago 450 posts - 624 votes Speaks: Hindi, Urdu*, Arabic (Levantine), French, English Studies: Persian, Spanish | Message 11 of 94 11 January 2010 at 8:35pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
Maybe, but was school necessarily of greater value when you attended it? I don't see how having a large vocabulary correlates with career or life success. You may seem more eloquent, educated, and sophisticated, but whats the point? The argument that you'll need a large vocabulary for your career prospects only goes so far. If there is a general trend that vocabularies are shrinking, then employers can't really be picky. Edited by Paskwc on 11 January 2010 at 8:46pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| MäcØSŸ Diglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 5809 days ago 259 posts - 392 votes Speaks: Italian*, EnglishC2 Studies: German | Message 12 of 94 11 January 2010 at 8:39pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
Changes in grammar are a natural product of time and the evolution of languages. Middle English speakers would be astonished by people like you saying “Where are you going?” instead of “Where art thou going?”. On the other hand using little vocabulary is just a sign of blatant ignorance. Edited by MäcØSŸ on 11 January 2010 at 8:40pm 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Cainntear Pentaglot Senior Member Scotland linguafrankly.blogsp Joined 6011 days ago 4399 posts - 7687 votes Speaks: Lowland Scots, English*, French, Spanish, Scottish Gaelic Studies: Catalan, Italian, German, Irish, Welsh | Message 13 of 94 11 January 2010 at 9:06pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
If you look at the general trend in English, it has been shedding its conjugations for person over the course of the last millenium. We are in an instable state -- a state of transition. Maintaining current incosistencies (I am, it is, they are; I was, it was, they were; I go; he goes; they go) has no practical value.
I'd say that article's still slightly behind the times. The corpus evidence shows that in natural, spontaneous native speech, "I have got" is in the overwhelming majority -- "I have" is only used in formal planned speech and in writing. Now, back to the Mail article. First rule of marketing: sensationalism sells. Sponsor some research that the press can make a big noise about and you get your name across the papers. Then there's also going to be a general election soon and Leahy is no friend of the current government. The opposition's taxation policy is much more friendly to guys earning (for example) £1.3 million than the current government's. Strangely enough, that was Leahy's wage a year or two ago... not including the 10 million bonuses in cash and shares. Anyway, the article is pretty meaningless without access to the raw research. What does Gross mean by a word? Is a "token" -- ie one form of a word (so "was" and "were" would be different words)? Is it a "paradigm", eg including all tenses and persons for a verb as a single word? Is it somewhere in between? There's many ways of diddling the figures. For one thing, English's love of prepositions, particles and phrasal structures means that we start off with a lot less "words" than a language that relies on synthesis (the building of words from affixes (prefixes, suffixes and infixes)). Now on to more general problems with the article: As has already been said, "on a daily basis could use as few as 800 terms" really doesn't cut it -- there's plenty of stuff in your active vocabulary you don't use every day. I think this is the first time I've used the word "deck" today, and I don't think I've had any need of it in months. Research from Tony McEnery... "found that the top 20 words used by teenagers, including 'yeah', 'no' and 'but', account for about a third of all words used." Also including I, me, it, you, and, or, the and a. There is no context -- how is the reader to evaluate this without knowing the frequency of the top 20 words in adult speech? IIRC, it's something near... a third! The slang terms he identifies are not all that common as far as I know (or Google, for that matter), suggesting that he was looking at the speech within a particular geographic or social community... which the newspaper neglects to mention. Now here's the best bit: "John Bald, a language teaching consultant and former Ofsted schools inspector, told a Sunday newspaper: 'There is undoubtedly a culture among teenagers of deliberately stripping away excess verbiage in language. 'When kids are in social situations, the instinct is to simplify. It's part of a wider anti-school culture that exists among some children which parents and schools need to address.'" Oh, the Plain English Campaign would tear this guy apart. English has been artificially overcomplicated to an enormous extent by the kind of people who chose to use terms like "verbiage". More to the point, the man's so confused by the complexity of the English language that he fails to see that the very term he uses -- "excess verbiage" -- states pretty clearly that there is too much. Isn't it a shame that young folk today are not wasting their time learning unnecessary words? Let's get them back into the classroom and teach them words that only exist for their own sake and don't fulfill any communicative need!! Pishaw! English's overabundance of disconnected words has led to a breakdown in the understanding of etymology -- surely one of the least attractive trends to any educated person is the modern tendency to "portmanteau" words or "Frankenwords" that take parts of two words and weld them together irrespective of the meaning of any individual elements. I don't like this trend -- I think it's one of the few forms of language change that is genuinely detrimental -- but it's the fault of the language, not of the speaker. 8 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| hcholm Heptaglot Groupie Norway Joined 6061 days ago 43 posts - 65 votes Speaks: Norwegian*, English, Swedish, Danish, German, French, Polish Studies: Czech | Message 14 of 94 11 January 2010 at 10:43pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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I fully agree with OldAccountBroke. How do you count words in English – or in any other
language? This kind of "research" is flawed. I consider myself a typical non-native, educated English user. That means can I understand quite a few English words of Latin or Greek origin and many "difficult" words of Germanic origin, but my active use of English everyday idioms can be really bad at times. English idioms are many and difficult for foreigners. They are often made of "simple", short words that, when used together, express a special meaning or nuance that can be hard to understand for non-natives. An expression like "cut it" (OK, not that difficult) can not count as just the two words "cut" and "it". You should get an extra point for the combination, but on the other hand, "it" should perhaps not be counted at all, since it is more a grammatical function word than a lexeme on it's own. The task of counting words is impossible. Is "girlfriend" one or two words? Do I know three words if I know this word? Is "script" one word, or do I get a point for every meaning I know? And what about nuances that aren't expressed by using different words, or by using words at all? You can use intonation, facial epressions or other body language, sounds, word play, anything. Teenager speak can be very subtle and colorful (I know this because I was once a teenager myself), but you can't measure that by counting words. In a conversation in Norwegian, I can say just "s" with a special emphatic articulation to express a certain type of contempt. A foreigner may learn hundreds or thousands of Norwegian words and score the same number of points without ever being able to express the particular nuance of that single "s" which would never be counted. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| datsunking1 Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5585 days ago 1014 posts - 1533 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: German, Russian, Dutch, French | Message 15 of 94 12 January 2010 at 3:35am | IP Logged | ||||||||
I don't remember saying anything about Esperanto or Japanese being inferior... lol I've studied them both and love them :D Thank you for your clarifications though on the other things. I'm not very educated in English (besides school) I usually just go by ear. To the other members, Is the abscence of "are" and other things a positive or negative thing? Are we moving to a simplistic state in English where everything is getting easier? -Jordan Edited by datsunking1 on 12 January 2010 at 3:38am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| hcholm Heptaglot Groupie Norway Joined 6061 days ago 43 posts - 65 votes Speaks: Norwegian*, English, Swedish, Danish, German, French, Polish Studies: Czech | Message 16 of 94 12 January 2010 at 8:35am | IP Logged | ||||||||
It isn't a negative or positive thing, it's just a thing. Any judgements, positive or negative, are personal and social, and has nothing to do with any intrinsic value in the thing itself. You can choose to make it positive or negative if you want to, but the judgement will be random from a purely linguistic point of view.
English has got rid of many redundant features that are still present in many other Indo-European languages, such as the case system and complex verb patterns. This tricks many people into believing that English is "simple", which it isn't. The old features are just replaced by new ones. You can't measure simplicity in a language, but there's no reason to think that English is or will be any simpler or more complex than other languages. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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