Basic Vocabulary (De Mauro) (Philological Room) Language Learning Forum

Basic Vocabulary (De Mauro)
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Emme
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Message 9 of 19

30 August 2011 at 11:39am | IP Logged

Andrew C wrote:

[…]

Something that interested me on your list was the 47,000 common words that everyone knows. I think that if this shows anything, it shows what a truly mammoth task learning vocabulary is and that we should therefore focus on what we need, rather than trying to learn everything. I seems especially fruitless to learn words that are hardly ever used.

[…]

Just a clarification: the 47,000 common words are known by most Italians no matter their profession, their qualification, their social class or their regional origin. By no means that implies that everybody knows them all.

s_allard wrote:

I think there are some methodological issues that have to be clarified when one looks at vocabulary frequency lists. When one reads that the individual with 8 years of schooling would master at least 7000 words, there is a bit of fallacy here. This does not mean the all individuals have to master 7000 words. First of all, you have to distinguish between available or passive vocabulary, in the sense of words that one understands and could use and active vocabulary, the words that one actually uses. For example, to read any major newspaper over the course of a month requires a large vocabulary. But most people only use a small portion of the words they read.

[…]

You are absolutely right in saying that a bit of clarification is in order here.

As I mentioned, but probably didn’t emphasise enough, De Mauro studies are focussed mainly on discovering the core of the language to guide those who want to ‘be understood’ in choosing the appropriate words to use. His studies have nothing to do with second language acquisition, but with readability of texts in Italian for Italian (native) speakers.

In Guida all’uso delle parole, for instance, he dedicates a chapter to the structure of sentences and paragraphs: he reaches the non-earth-shattering conclusion that to improve readability one needs to keep his/her sentences short (no more than 20 words) and to prefer paratactic syntax or a coordinate, rather than a subordinate, construction.

The message seems to be aimed to professional writers and speakers (journalists, reporters, administrators, politicians etc.) inviting them to tailor their texts to the widest possible audience (unless they are working in a technical field, where one can expect the audience to be attuned to technical terms).

De Mauro studies were started when literacy in Italy was improving fast thanks to obligatory education for children, yet a large share of the older population was still practically illiterate. Consider for a second that one of the greatest successes in the early years of RAI (the national broadcaster) was a programme called Non è mai troppo tardi (‘It’s never too late’) that from 1960 to 1968 taught illiterate adults to read and count and actually offered these people an educational curriculum equivalent to elementary school. It’s been estimated that about one and a half million adults passed the elementary school final exam thanks to this TV programme.

Diffuse analphabetism meant that historically in Italy intellectuals used to write only for other intellectuals, therefore they were not in the least interested in readability. When literacy reached the masses, linguists like De Mauro started working to ensure that texts for the general public were really accessible to the general public: i.e. that people with just 8 years of schooling would understand them without too much trouble. This of course meant reminding the so-called intellectuals (that usually had university degrees) that the general public only had an average of 8 years of schooling (and not 17+ years like a typical graduate) and therefore the language had to be clearer and not deliberately obscure and elaborate.

The almost 7000-words basic vocabulary that De Mauro has identified is therefore a guide to writers to prefer these words whenever possible, and when that’s not possible, to see to it that more difficult terms are appropriately explained if they are not easily understandable from the context. At the same time, De Mauro invites teachers and compilers of school curricula to make sure that students master these 7000 words by the time they finish middle school. From what I’ve read it seems that the kind of knowledge required is just passive: i.e. what is important here is that people can understand an article in a newspaper or a magazine, not necessarily that they can write one.

Edited by Emme on 30 August 2011 at 11:46am
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s_allard
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Message 10 of 19

30 August 2011 at 2:22pm | IP Logged

The subject of this thread reminds me of the Plain English movement that started in the 1940's. Here is a quote from the Wikipedia article Plain English:

"Plain English (sometimes referred to more broadly as plain language) is a generic term for communication styles that emphasise clarity, brevity and the avoidance of technical language - particularly in relation to official government communication, including laws.

The intention is to write in a manner that is easily understood by the target audience: appropriate to their reading skills and knowledge, clear and direct, free of cliché and unnecessary jargon."

As the quote points out, this call for writing in a language that is broadly accessible was and is aimed particularly at government officials and lawyers. If my memory serves me well, a special target was insurance contracts that were notorious for being hard to understand by the consumers and always in favor of the insurance companies.

This is somewhat different from the situation of intellectual writing that Emme refers to, but there are some parallels. Certainly one shared concern is the use of widely used vocabulary or common terms rather than obscure terms that are meant to illustrate one's erudition (for intellectuals) or that are meant to obfuscate (lawyers and insurance companies),

Edited by s_allard on 30 August 2011 at 2:24pm
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Hendrek
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Message 11 of 19

02 September 2011 at 4:36am | IP Logged

Does anyone happen to know if these lists are available as Anki decks yet? I tried to mass import it, but it seems Anki has limited functionality in that regard. One can't import one-sided cards and then add the English meaning later... at least I tried and couldn't.
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Haukilahti
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Message 12 of 19

05 September 2011 at 11:33am | IP Logged

First of all, thank you Emme for your wonderful first post and links. Tullio De Mauro is a name you can trust.

Emme wrote:

One typical example of regionalism is the word ‘anguria / cocomero’. In northern Italy the watermelon is known as ‘anguria’. In central and southern Italy the same fruit is called ‘cocomero’ (a name, by the way, that in my northern dialect is actually used for ‘cucumber’). In any dictionary (not only the GRADIT) you can find both ‘anguria’ and ‘cocomero’. Not only are they both acceptable in standard Italian, actually they are both correct. You only need to remember that the first one is more likely to occur when the speaker / writer is someone from the North and the second one when s/he is from the South.

I presume that a word like ‘watermelon’ can be considered a highly-available word. After all we all know what fruit it is and we may think about it quite often, especially on hot summer days. Yet it’s not likely to recur very often in literature, in magazines, scripts or other texts, so it’s unlikely to appear among high-frequency words. But when a researcher has to classify this word, s/he can’t actually ascribe it to the highly-available words known to all Italians with at least 8 year of schooling because most of them will actually know and use just the one term for ‘watermelon’ common in their area.

That’s why neither ‘anguria’ nor ‘cocomero’ can be part of the list of highly-available words for native speakers. With either one of them, half the population would simply don’t recognize the term as a word they are likely to use (even just mentally).

I suppose that there must be hundreds or even thousands of similar words in a language like Italian where local varieties are still very important. And that’s why the list for highly-available words for all native speakers of Italians has just about 2000 items.

The rest of the highly-available words each speaker possesses probably don’t belong to any variety of acceptable ‘standard Italian’ (but to the dialect or idiolect of the single person or small group of people) and so they don’t belong in a dictionary. At least that’s my hypothesis.

I'd be more interested in this aspect. I tend to consider anguria/cocomero more the exception than the rule and I think you might overestimate the influence of dialects/regional variations in contemporary Italy. But I admit I have no hard data.
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Emme
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Message 13 of 19

05 September 2011 at 3:10pm | IP Logged

Unfortunately I don’t have hard data on this topic either.
But here are some more geosynonyms, i.e. words like ‘cocomero / anguria’ with more than one regional variant that you can hear in ‘standard Italian’:

babbo / papà (dad)
giocattolo / balocco (toy)
fantoccio / pupazzo (puppet)
foruncolo / brufolo (pimple)
cencio / straccio (rag)
cannella / rubinetto (tap)
fede / vera (wedding ring)
scorza / corteccia (bark)
mestolo / ramaiolo (ladle)
gruccia / attaccapanni / stampella (hanger)
acquaio / lavandino (sink)
marinare / bigiare (to play truant)
padrino / santolo / compare (godfather)
ceffone / sberla (slap)
serranda / tapparella / avvolgibile / persiana (rolling shutter)
frate / monaco (monk)
suora / monaca (nun)
calorifero / termosifone (radiator)
boiler / scaldabagno (water-heater)
dimenticare / scordare (forget)

If your Italian is good enough you could try to read this Facebook thread to see many more examples (I haven’t read it all myself).

As a Facebook thread the tone of the discussion is friendly and informal, so there’s nothing scientific to it but you may find it interesting anyway. If you prefer a linguistic approach to the problem you could read this article by Gloria Corbucci of the Università per stranieri di Perugia.

Gloria Corbucci, Fenomeni di variazione sociolinguistica nell’insegnamento dell’italiano a stranieri.

Regional variants are discussed on pp. 1-3 and in the bibliography you can find other studies to delve deeper into the subject.

Other articles you may want to read are:

Vincenzo Orioles, Variazione diatopica.

Simona Fianu, Geosinomia e modello lessicale panitaliano.

I particularly liked this explanation for the presence of geosynonyms in Italian (the quick English translation is mine):

Quote:

[…] i geosinonimi riguardano principalmente il lessico tradizionale, sono concetti comuni, mai astratti, in genere voci relative alla vita quotidiana (nomi di utensili, mobili e capi di abbigliamento, alimenti, animali domestici, piante, parti del giorno, ma anche aggettivi qualificativi, verbi e avverbi di uso comune). La motivazione di questa loro specializzazione onomasiologica è una consequenza del fatto che la lingua scritta, di tradizione letteraria, prediligeva i registri stilistici più alti trascurando le necessità comunicative.
[…]
La presenza massicia dei geosinonimi nel lessico Italiano è dovuta principalmente a due fattori: 1) la mancanza di una terminologia unificata su scala nazionale per gli oggetti comuni, per le arti e per i mestieri; 2) il potere evocativo del dialetto che può supplire, in certi casi, alle carenze stilistico-espressive della lingua comune.

[…] geosynonyms pertain mostly to traditional vocabulary: they denote common concepts, never abstract ones, and generally they are terms relating to daily life (names of tools, furniture, clothes, food, pets, plants, parts of the day, but they are also commonly used adjectives, verbs and adverbs). The reason for this onomasiologic specialization is that the written language, with its roots in literary tradition, used to prefer the highest stylistic registers neglecting more basic communicative needs.
[…]
The massive presence of geosynonyms in the Italian vocabulary is mostly due to two factors: 1) the lack of a unified terminology in the entire country for common object, crafts and trades; 2) the evocative power of dialect which may make up, in some cases, for stylistic and expressive shortages in the common language.

Simona Fianu, Geosinomia e modello lessicale panitaliano.

[my translation]

Now, you may wonder what this all means in practice for native Italian speakers. For instance, how do we use one of the words in the list above? How can we choose?

Let’s say I’m in the kitchen. I’m serving the soup so I need a tool. I think of a ladle and my brain comes up with the word ‘càza’ (Veneto). If I have to ask a family member to hand me that particular tool, I have no problem. I use ‘càza’.

It’s another evening, and I have some friends over for dinner. I’m still serving soup and I still need a ladle. If I have to ask one of my friends to hand me the ladle I have to stop for a second and ask myself one of these questions:
- are we close friends and am I comfortable talking very informally with him/her?
- when have I met this person? Have we known each other since childhood?
- where does s/he come from? Is s/he likely to understand the dialectal term?
- is s/he one of my university* friends?

If the answer is ‘yes’ I would use ‘càza’. Otherwise I would use the word ‘mestolo’ (standard Italian in my area).

If I need to buy a ladle, I would never ask a shop-assistant for a ‘càza’ but I would search for the Italian term for it. Even though I know two standard words for ladle (‘mestolo’ and ‘ramaiolo’) I would always pick ‘mestolo’ because that’s the standard where I live. I know ‘ramaiolo’ only as a passive word.

By the way, ‘mestolo’ in standard Italian is such a foreign words (compared to my native ‘càza’) that it takes me (slightly) longer to remember it than to come up with the English word ‘ladle’. We’re talking about seconds or fractions of a second, and I have no way to scientifically measure whether this is just an impression; but it gets the idea across, I think.

*It may sound absurd, but if we attended university together (studying languages and linguistics), I can suppose that we both developed a certain respect and appreciation for local dialects so that neither of us would feel ashamed using dialectal words in the appropriate context. I’m not sure that people with degrees in other areas would feel the same. There’s still some stigma in using dialect unless it’s a deliberate choice.

Edited by Emme on 05 September 2011 at 3:11pm
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Haukilahti
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Message 14 of 19

05 September 2011 at 5:00pm | IP Logged

Thank you for the extensive answer and impressive links. Your list of words is impressive too - in that very few words in that list appear to my ears clearly dialectal/regional, most sound to me synonims or having slightly different meanings.

On the other hand, there are not so many examples in the links above (I confess I didn't read Corbucci). Besides, as Fianu says, some of those have "won" on the Tuscan word even in Tuscany (balocco, fantoccio, ciuco some connotation, the neutral words in Tuscany, grandmothers and contadini excluded, are giocattolo, pupazzo, asino).

I didn't know the word caza, or ramaiolo for the matter. I wonder how many dialectal/regional words are still in use for everyday words in the different Italian regions. I admit that I have very little experience outside Tuscany.
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Luk
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Message 15 of 19

18 September 2011 at 1:48am | IP Logged

I've just made an Anki deck of Lessico fondamentale,

From Italian to English

From Italian to Spanish

I used www.systranet.com to translate the words.

Edited by Luk on 18 September 2011 at 1:51am
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Jeffers
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Message 16 of 19

18 September 2011 at 12:32pm | IP Logged

Emme wrote:

Finally, highly available words represent only 1-2% of the language corpus. This category is probably the most interesting, at least from my point of view. Here we find words that are only rarely written or actually spoken, but that are very present to anyone’s mind as they refer to common objects and basic ideas: ‘portafoglio’ wallet; ‘nuotare’ swim; ‘infermiere’ nurse; ‘asciugacapelli’ hair dryer; ‘inconsolabile’ inconsolable. De Mauro maintains that by their nature these important words ‘risk being excluded from frequency lists’.

Like many others, I found the idea of "highly available" intriguing. Word frequency lists are usually made from written texts, and so many common words from conversation are ignored. But even when conversational sources are used, these will still be sources which can be accessed by the collator, so they would be from transcripts of interviews and the like. Words like 'hair dryer' or 'fork' are unlikely to come up in any method of frequency counting, unless someone recorded and transcribed all the conversations in a house for a week.

I was further intrigued to notice that of the examples you used, one is from leisure (swim) and another is from employment (nurse). The CEFR scales specifically mention these two areas in the description of B1: "Can understand the main points of clear standard input on familiar matters regularly encountered in work, school, leisure, etc." From B2 upwards, the language is more focused, e.g. "including technical discussions in his/her field of specialisation" (from B2). I suspect if you were preparing specifically for a C1 examination, you would miss a lot of the vocabulary required for lower levels. For example, you could possibly pass the C1 without knowing how to ask for and give directions, use common greetings, etc.

Similarly, topics required for GCSE include school, work, holidays, my house, free time, job adverts, holidays, etc. Again, if you cover these topics well, you will be learning many low(ish) frequency words which would nevertheless be "highly available" to a native speaker. And two more of the examples listed, wallet and hair dryer, are likely to be learnt if you master these topics.

I have sometimes wondered about the selection of topics for GCSE and CEFR exams. The idea of "highly available" words perhaps shows the method to the madness.

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