There are 9 messages in this issue.
Topics in this digest:
1.1. Re: quick vocab/sociology survey
From: Christophe Grandsire-Koevoets
1.2. Re: quick vocab/sociology survey
From: MorphemeAddict
1.3. Re: quick vocab/sociology survey
From: A. da Mek
1.4. Re: quick vocab/sociology survey
From: Christophe Grandsire-Koevoets
1.5. Re: quick vocab/sociology survey
From: Adam Walker
1.6. Re: quick vocab/sociology survey
From: A. da Mek
1.7. Re: quick vocab/sociology survey
From: Padraic Brown
1.8. Re: quick vocab/sociology survey
From: Christophe Grandsire-Koevoets
1.9. Re: quick vocab/sociology survey
From: taliesin the storyteller
Messages
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1.1. Re: quick vocab/sociology survey
Posted by: "Christophe Grandsire-Koevoets" [email protected]
Date: Mon Feb 20, 2012 6:41 am ((PST))
On 20 February 2012 14:45, A. da Mek <[email protected]> wrote:
> English has too many words. While I wouldn't take it as
>> far as Toki Pona or Ogden's Basic English, I do believe that a fixed,
>> closed vocabulary of 2,000 to 3,000 words would be plenty for a rich
>> and expressive language.
>>
>
> For comparison: Esperanto has about 2900 morphemes.
> (cca 1730 substantives, 194 adjectives, 63 pronouns, 16 numerals, 739
> verbs,
> 29 adverbs, 34 prepositions, 17 conjunctions,
> 8 prefixes, 34 suffixes and 11 endings.)
>
Mmm... no. The latest version of the Plena Ilustrita Vortaro de Esperanto,
for instance, lists 16780 words and 46890 lexical units. Of these, about
9000 are basic roots. What you mention are only the most common morphemes,
not their totality.
And while English has many words, how many do people *actually* use in
daily life? I believe I've read that the average English speaker gets by
with 2000-3000 words for 80% of the time, and the rest of their vocabulary
is used for less than 20% of the time. People who use more than 5000 words
80% of the time are very uncommon.
--
Christophe Grandsire-Koevoets.
http://christophoronomicon.blogspot.com/
http://www.christophoronomicon.nl/
Messages in this topic (41)
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1.2. Re: quick vocab/sociology survey
Posted by: "MorphemeAddict" [email protected]
Date: Mon Feb 20, 2012 7:08 am ((PST))
On Mon, Feb 20, 2012 at 8:45 AM, A. da Mek <[email protected]> wrote:
> English has too many words. While I wouldn't take it as
>> far as Toki Pona or Ogden's Basic English, I do believe that a fixed,
>> closed vocabulary of 2,000 to 3,000 words would be plenty for a rich
>> and expressive language.
>>
>
> For comparison: Esperanto has about 2900 morphemes.
> (cca 1730 substantives, 194 adjectives, 63 pronouns, 16 numerals, 739
> verbs,
> 29 adverbs, 34 prepositions, 17 conjunctions,
> 8 prefixes, 34 suffixes and 11 endings.)
>
I don't think so. I have an Esperanto dictionary for my relex, and it has
4395 entries, and each entry corresponds to a single morpheme. About 30
entries are only part of my relex, not part of Esperanto, but that still
leaves roughly 4350 morphemes. While I don't have any information about the
innate part of speech of the roots, I do have numbers for some of them. I
treat the morphemes as roots, prefixes, suffixes, endings, and "independent
words", which are distinguished from roots by the fact that roots are
almost always used with an ending, while the independent words are commonly
used without endings.
12 numerals
10 pronouns
11 endings
6 participial suffixes
45 "correlative" words
82 other independent words, which include prepositions, conjunctions, the -a
ŭ words
9 official prefixes and 23 unofficial prefixes
31 official suffixes and about 40 unofficial suffixes
3975 roots
The rest are names (75), abbreviations (3), compounds (3), and some other
words.
John Wells's Esperanto Dictionary in the Teach Yourself Books series has
120 pages of Esperanto-English, and each of those pages has an average of
about 80 entries or morphemes. That's roughly 9600 entries. In the foreword
the author says it has roughly 9000 entries. Many of those entries are
obsolete. Many words in common use, and even more technical words, are not
included in the dictionary, which is, after all, first printed in 1969. New
words are being coined every day, mirroring what happens in 'natural'
languages.
Your estimates overall seem quite low, but certain parts seem too high. How
do you get 63 pronouns, 16 numerals (Do you count "nul-", "milion-",
"bilion-", as numerals? I count them as roots.)
Dividing the roots into substantives, adjectives, adverbs, and verbs seems
pointless, since any Esperanto root can change its part of speech just by
changing the ending. This is why I mentioned that I don't know the 'innate'
part of the speech of the roots.
stevo
Messages in this topic (41)
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1.3. Re: quick vocab/sociology survey
Posted by: "A. da Mek" [email protected]
Date: Mon Feb 20, 2012 8:15 am ((PST))
>> For comparison: Esperanto has about 2900 morphemes.
>> (cca 1730 substantives, 194 adjectives, 63 pronouns, 16 numerals,
>> 739 verbs, 29 adverbs, 34 prepositions, 17 conjunctions,
>> 8 prefixes, 34 suffixes and 11 endings.)
>
> Mmm... no. The latest version of the Plena Ilustrita Vortaro de Esperanto,
> for instance, lists 16780 words and 46890 lexical units. Of these, about
> 9000 are basic roots. What you mention are only the most common morphemes,
> not their totality.
Lingvo internacia, published by Zamenhof in 1887, listed only 900 roots.
The above mentioned 2900 morphemes are taken from the
Universala Vortaro, published in 1894.
http://www.akademio-de-esperanto.org
gives 3071 basic elements and 2187 additional elements,
thus 5258 total.
> Your estimates overall seem quite low, but certain parts seem too high.
> How
do you get 63 pronouns, 16 numerals (Do you count "nul-", "milion-",
"bilion-", as numerals? I count them as roots.)
> Dividing the roots into substantives, adjectives, adverbs, and verbs seems
pointless, since any Esperanto root can change its part of speech just by
changing the ending.
I divided them according to the glosses in the five languages provided by
Zamenhof.
And although it is possible by means of derivation to change one part of
speech to another, every root has ussually some basic meaning. For example,
"horse" is primarily a substantive, although you can derive a verb with the
meaning "to ride on a horse".
If positive, comparative and superlative form can be derived, then the root
is basicaly an adjective (although some languages may treat it as a state
verb).
If cardinal, ordinal and denominator form can be derived, then the root is a
numeral.
Messages in this topic (41)
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1.4. Re: quick vocab/sociology survey
Posted by: "Christophe Grandsire-Koevoets" [email protected]
Date: Mon Feb 20, 2012 2:31 pm ((PST))
On 20 February 2012 17:14, A. da Mek <[email protected]> wrote:
>
> Lingvo internacia, published by Zamenhof in 1887, listed only 900 roots.
> The above mentioned 2900 morphemes are taken from the
> Universala Vortaro, published in 1894.
> http://www.akademio-de-**esperanto.org<http://www.akademio-de-esperanto.org>
> gives 3071 basic elements and 2187 additional elements,
> thus 5258 total.
>
>
You do realise Esperanto has evolved in the last century? Those lists are
outdated, and nobody uses them any longer, except for historical interest.
The PIV is the closest thing there is to a "standard" Esperanto dictionary,
and its latest version dates from 2005. Many new words have found their way
in Esperanto in 111 years, including many new roots, as was Zamenhof's wish
all along (that Esperanto shouldn't stay static). And those roots were
added because their was a need for them.
Today's Esperanto has many more than 5258 morphemes.
--
Christophe Grandsire-Koevoets.
http://christophoronomicon.blogspot.com/
http://www.christophoronomicon.nl/
Messages in this topic (41)
________________________________________________________________________
1.5. Re: quick vocab/sociology survey
Posted by: "Adam Walker" [email protected]
Date: Mon Feb 20, 2012 3:26 pm ((PST))
Okay, so I retook it (I first saw this test more than a year ago IIANM) and
got 40,300. I didn't know oneiromancy or clericy or williwaw among a few
others. the earliest one on the list I didn't know was epigone. But I now
know those words if I can find enough opportunities to use them in the next
couple of days to stamp them firmly in memory that will be nice.
Adam
On Sat, Feb 18, 2012 at 7:35 PM, Daniel Bowman <[email protected]>wrote:
> Hey all:
>
> My friend forwarded me this, and I participated. It was interesting and I
> thought the list would enjoy participating. My friend's message is copied
> below:
>
> Hey guys,
>
> A friend sent me this. It takes 5 minutes, and it looks like these people
> are actually paying attention to who is in their sample population, which,
> as a soc major, I find incredibly refreshing. Please forward this on to
> anyone you think might like to take it (or who could give them more data
> from their under-sampled populations!) Check out the results (second link)
> to see what I'm talking about.
>
> http://www.testyourvocab.com
>
>
> http://testyourvocab.com/blog/2011-07-25-New-results-for-native-speakers.php#mainchartNative
>
Messages in this topic (41)
________________________________________________________________________
1.6. Re: quick vocab/sociology survey
Posted by: "A. da Mek" [email protected]
Date: Tue Feb 21, 2012 1:02 am ((PST))
> Those lists are
> outdated, and nobody uses them any longer, except for historical interest.
For our purpose of conlanging, they may serve as wordlists of basic
vocabulary.
It has some significance whether a word was already
in the 1887 1kroot list, 1894 3kroot list,
one of nine Oficialaj Aldonoj from 1919 - 2007
which increased the vocabulary to 5kroots,
or only in PIV.
There is several million species, so we could coin a new root for each of
them, but such special terms have different status than commonly used words.
> those roots were added because there was a need for them.
A living language does need new words, but there is no need for new roots.
It does not much mater whether a new root is added or whether the new word
is produced by means of derivation or compounding or whether instead of a
single word, some phrase consisting of several words is used. It usually
depends on how frequently the word is used.
Although the meanings of many derived words and compounds cannot be
straightforwardly guessed from their components,
IMO a language which would have for example
yellow'sparrow (flav'paser'o) "canary", blue'sparrow (blu'paser'o)
"titmouse"
would be much easily rememberable than another language with unrelated
roots.
Even the 1894 list contains many needless roots; for example days of week
could be something like:
sun'tag'o, lun'tag'o, batal'tag'o, mez'tag'o, tondr'tag'o, am'tago, sep'tago
Messages in this topic (41)
________________________________________________________________________
1.7. Re: quick vocab/sociology survey
Posted by: "Padraic Brown" [email protected]
Date: Tue Feb 21, 2012 4:36 am ((PST))
--- On Mon, 2/20/12, Adam Walker <[email protected]> wrote:
> Okay, so I retook it (I first saw
> this test more than a year ago IIANM) and
> got 40,300. I didn't know oneiromancy or clericy or
> williwaw among a few
> others. the earliest one on the list I didn't know was
> epigone. But I now
> know those words if I can find enough opportunities to use
> them in the next
> couple of days to stamp them firmly in memory that will be
> nice.
Find a way to combine williwaw with katabatic and bob's thy nuncle. Throw
in piteraq for good measure! Ikkii!
Does it hurt or help that I read "oinomancy" in stead of oneiromancy?
Padraic
> Adam
>
> On Sat, Feb 18, 2012 at 7:35 PM, Daniel Bowman
> <[email protected]>wrote:
>
> > Hey all:
> >
> > My friend forwarded me this, and I participated.
> It was interesting and I
> > thought the list would enjoy participating. My
> friend's message is copied
> > below:
> >
> > Hey guys,
> >
> > A friend sent me this. It takes 5 minutes, and it
> looks like these people
> > are actually paying attention to who is in their sample
> population, which,
> > as a soc major, I find incredibly refreshing. Please
> forward this on to
> > anyone you think might like to take it (or who could
> give them more data
> > from their under-sampled populations!) Check out
> the results (second link)
> > to see what I'm talking about.
> >
> > http://www.testyourvocab.com
> >
> >
> > http://testyourvocab.com/blog/2011-07-25-New-results-for-native-speakers.php#mainchartNative
> >
>
Messages in this topic (41)
________________________________________________________________________
1.8. Re: quick vocab/sociology survey
Posted by: "Christophe Grandsire-Koevoets" [email protected]
Date: Tue Feb 21, 2012 5:04 am ((PST))
On 21 February 2012 13:35, Padraic Brown <[email protected]> wrote:
>
> Does it hurt or help that I read "oinomancy" in stead of oneiromancy?
>
>
Well, enough oinomancy does lead to oneiromancy generally, so the two are
actually connected! ;)
--
Christophe Grandsire-Koevoets.
http://christophoronomicon.blogspot.com/
http://www.christophoronomicon.nl/
Messages in this topic (41)
________________________________________________________________________
1.9. Re: quick vocab/sociology survey
Posted by: "taliesin the storyteller" [email protected]
Date: Tue Feb 21, 2012 5:17 am ((PST))
On 2012-02-21 13:35, Padraic Brown wrote:
> Find a way to combine williwaw with katabatic and bob's thy nuncle.
But, katabatic williwaws should surely be possible? Might almost think a
piteraq *is* a katabatic williwaw by my quick google of the terms, just
located to Greenland.
> Throw in piteraq for good measure! Ikkii!
With or without the extra-i? There might be plenty ikkis in the years to
come :(
t.
Messages in this topic (41)
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