Register  Login  Active Topics  Maps  

Iversen’s Multiconfused Log (see p.1!)

  Tags: Multilingual
 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log Post Reply
3959 messages over 495 pages: << Previous 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 ... 460 ... 494 495 Next >>
montmorency
Diglot
Senior Member
United Kingdom
Joined 4578 days ago

2371 posts - 3676 votes 
Speaks: English*, German
Studies: Danish, Welsh

 
 Message 3673 of 3959
19 August 2014 at 1:53am | IP Logged 
Josquin wrote:
montmorency wrote:
It's hard to believe there even were 100,000 words in the English
language at that time,
given that printing had only been around for 100-150 years.

What does the one have to do with the other? You underestimate the power of oral tradition.


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 4578 days ago

2371 posts - 3676 votes 
Speaks: English*, German
Studies: Danish, Welsh

 
 Message 3674 of 3959
19 August 2014 at 2:08am | IP Logged 
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 6439 days ago

62 posts - 129 votes 
Speaks: Swedish*, English, Arabic (Written)

 
 Message 3675 of 3959
19 August 2014 at 6:04am | IP Logged 
Iversen wrote:
...Shakespeare may not have been as linguistically challenged as it
seems, because "across his entire corpus, he uses 28,829 words, suggesting he knew over
100,000 words and arguably had the largest vocabulary ever."


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 6453 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 
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 4401 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 
Quote:
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)


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 4594 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 
montmorency wrote:
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?

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 6453 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 
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 4578 days ago

2371 posts - 3676 votes 
Speaks: English*, German
Studies: Danish, Welsh

 
 Message 3680 of 3959
20 August 2014 at 4:56pm | IP Logged 
@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..).

Quote:

Caxton is credited with standardising the English language (that is, homogenising
regional dialects) through printing. This facilitated the expansion of English
vocabulary, the regularisation of inflection and syntax, and a widening gap between the
spoken and the written word. However, Richard Pynson, who started printing in London in
1491 or 1492, and who favoured Chancery Standard, was a more accomplished stylist and
consequently pushed the English language further toward standardisation.[9]
It is asserted that the spelling of "ghost" with the silent letter h was adopted by
Caxton due to the influence of Flemish spelling habits.[10]


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



This discussion contains 3959 messages over 495 pages: << Prev 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99 100 101 102 103 104 105 106 107 108 109 110 111 112 113 114 115 116 117 118 119 120 121 122 123 124 125 126 127 128 129 130 131 132 133 134 135 136 137 138 139 140 141 142 143 144 145 146 147 148 149 150 151 152 153 154 155 156 157 158 159 160 161 162 163 164 165 166 167 168 169 170 171 172 173 174 175 176 177 178 179 180 181 182 183 184 185 186 187 188 189 190 191 192 193 194 195 196 197 198 199 200 201 202 203 204 205 206 207 208 209 210 211 212 213 214 215 216 217 218 219 220 221 222 223 224 225 226 227 228 229 230 231 232 233 234 235 236 237 238 239 240 241 242 243 244 245 246 247 248 249 250 251 252 253 254 255 256 257 258 259 260 261 262 263 264 265 266 267 268 269 270 271 272 273 274 275 276 277 278 279 280 281 282 283 284 285 286 287 288 289 290 291 292 293 294 295 296 297 298 299 300 301 302 303 304 305 306 307 308 309 310 311 312 313 314 315 316 317 318 319 320 321 322 323 324 325 326 327 328 329 330 331 332 333 334 335 336 337 338 339 340 341 342 343 344 345 346 347 348 349 350 351 352 353 354 355 356 357 358 359 360 361 362 363 364 365 366 367 368 369 370 371 372 373 374 375 376 377 378 379 380 381 382 383 384 385 386 387 388 389 390 391 392 393 394 395 396 397 398 399 400 401 402 403 404 405 406 407 408 409 410 411 412 413 414 415 416 417 418 419 420 421 422 423 424 425 426 427 428 429 430 431 432 433 434 435 436 437 438 439 440 441 442 443 444 445 446 447 448 449 450 451 452 453 454 455 456 457 458 459 460 461 462 463 464 465 466 467 468 469 470 471 472 473 474 475 476 477 478 479 480 481 482 483 484 485 486 487 488 489 490 491 492 493 494 495  Next >>


Post ReplyPost New Topic Printable version Printable version

You cannot post new topics in this forum - You cannot reply to topics in this forum - You cannot delete your posts in this forum
You cannot edit your posts in this forum - You cannot create polls in this forum - You cannot vote in polls in this forum


This page was generated in 0.7031 seconds.


DHTML Menu By Milonic JavaScript
Copyright 2024 FX Micheloud - All rights reserved
No part of this website may be copied by any means without my written authorization.