There are 12 messages in this issue.

Topics in this digest:

1a. Re: "English has the most words of any language"    
    From: Jyri Lehtinen
1b. Re: "English has the most words of any language"    
    From: J. 'Mach' Wust
1c. Re: "English has the most words of any language"    
    From: Krista D. Casada
1d. Re: "English has the most words of any language"    
    From: Jörg Rhiemeier
1e. Re: "English has the most words of any language"    
    From: Douglas Koller

2a. voluminous dictionaries (was: "English has the most...")    
    From: Tristan
2b. Re: voluminous dictionaries (was: "English has the most...")    
    From: H. S. Teoh

3a. Re: CHAT: Does etymology awareness affect your speech?    
    From: George Marques de Jesus
3b. Re: CHAT: Does etymology awareness affect your speech?    
    From: Leonardo Castro

4a. Is there an inverse relationship between lexical richness and gramma    
    From: Daniel Bowman
4b. Re: Is there an inverse relationship between lexical richness and gr    
    From: Demian Terentev
4c. Re: Is there an inverse relationship between lexical richness and gr    
    From: Patrick Dunn


Messages
________________________________________________________________________
1a. Re: "English has the most words of any language"
    Posted by: "Jyri Lehtinen" [email protected] 
    Date: Tue Mar 19, 2013 6:57 am ((PDT))

> One way to measure that would be to determine the 80% and 90% vocabulary of
> English and compare it to the size of such vocabularies in other languages.
>  That'd give you a rough sense of the size of the lexicon, it seems to me.
> I got the idea from this article, which puts the 80% vocabulary of English
> at 2400 lemmas (I have no idea where that figure comes from).  If so, that
> puts English more or less on par with most modern languages.
>

Extracting the words responsible for the top 90% or so of discourse would
certainly provide a much more robust measure for the lexicon "size" than
attempting to come up with a usable definition for including a given word
in the so called total lexicon. But I don't think it measures really the
same thing we mean intuitively when talking about the size of the lexicon
of a given language. It rather measures the amount of basic lexical items
one uses to use in a given situation. If you consider compounds and
derivations to be independent lexical items, I'd expect all languages to
end up displaying roughly similar numbers here. In this case you'd really
be measuring the amount of overloading of meaning a language has for its
words, at least if you've managed to analyse equivalent discourse events.

For a large sample of natural discourse you could also try to use a maximum
statistic, namely the total amount of lexical items within the data. This
sound to be much less robust for the size of the dataset and the discourse
topics it includes than the 90% vocabulary approach, however.

The way I would proceed would be to label each word (or what ever
definition for a lexical item we'd be using) with its frequency in a
dataset of fixed length and analyse their full distribution. In other words
I'd plot the histogram of the words at different frequency bins. From the
breadth of the histogram you could see the number of core words used in
basic discourse. There would also be the low frequency tail of the
distribution which would reveal how much specialised vocabulary the
speakers are comfortable in using.

   -Jyri





Messages in this topic (21)
________________________________________________________________________
1b. Re: "English has the most words of any language"
    Posted by: "J. 'Mach' Wust" [email protected] 
    Date: Tue Mar 19, 2013 8:16 am ((PDT))

On Mon, 18 Mar 2013 22:21:07 -0400, Daniel Bowman wrote:

>Hey all,
>
>I was talking to someone today, and he stated that English has the
>most words of any language.  I'm pretty suspicious when I hear such
>claims, and he did not have direct evidence to back up his assertion. 
>However, he is one of the smartest and most knowledgeable people I
>know, and his father happened to be chair of the department of
>linguistics at one point.  It's hard to chalk his claim up to
>ignorance or misinformation, so I started wondering: is this in fact
>true?
>
>I was wondering what list members think.  Is this something that's
>been claimed before, and if so, how is it regarded in the linguistic
>community?  Does anyone have a (reputable or suspicious) source that
>says English has the most words?  If this is a legitimate claim, how
>is it determined?

I've been told that story, too. I don't remember the whereabouts. I
believed it to be a rather reputable story. You've made me more
suspicious.

As for a (suspicious) source for the claim, voilà:

http://oxforddictionaries.com/words/is-it-true-that-english-has-the-most-words-of-any-language

-- 
grüess
mach





Messages in this topic (21)
________________________________________________________________________
1c. Re: "English has the most words of any language"
    Posted by: "Krista D. Casada" [email protected] 
    Date: Tue Mar 19, 2013 8:36 am ((PDT))

The stat I heard in this connection--I don't remember where, but I think it 
might have been in a book about learning languages--was that English has a 
vocabulary roughly twice as large as that of any other modern language.

Warm and fuzzy indeed! ;-)

Krista Casada
________________________________________
From: Constructed Languages List [[email protected]] on behalf of 
Daniel Bowman [[email protected]]
Sent: Monday, March 18, 2013 9:21 PM
To: [email protected]
Subject: "English has the most words of any language"

Hey all,

I was talking to someone today, and he stated that English has the most words 
of any language.  I'm pretty suspicious when I hear such claims, and he did not 
have direct evidence to back up his assertion.  However, he is one of the 
smartest and most knowledgeable people I know, and his father happened to be 
chair of the department of linguistics at one point.  It's hard to chalk his 
claim up to ignorance or misinformation, so I started wondering: is this in 
fact true?

I was wondering what list members think.  Is this something that's been claimed 
before, and if so, how is it regarded in the linguistic community?  Does anyone 
have a (reputable or suspicious) source that says English has the most words?  
If this is a legitimate claim, how is it determined?

Danny





Messages in this topic (21)
________________________________________________________________________
1d. Re: "English has the most words of any language"
    Posted by: "Jörg Rhiemeier" [email protected] 
    Date: Tue Mar 19, 2013 10:15 am ((PDT))

Hallo conlangers!

On Tuesday 19 March 2013 05:42:40 Douglas Koller wrote:

> > Date: Mon, 18 Mar 2013 22:21:07 -0400
> > From: [email protected]
> > Subject: "English has the most words of any language"
> > To: [email protected]
> > 
> > I was talking to someone today, and he stated that English has the most
> > words of any language.  I'm pretty suspicious when I hear such claims,
> > and he did not have direct evidence to back up his assertion.  However,
> > he is one of the smartest and most knowledgeable people I know, and his
> > father happened to be chair of the department of linguistics at one
> > point.  It's hard to chalk his claim up to ignorance or misinformation,
> > so I started wondering: is this in fact true?
> > 
> > I was wondering what list members think.  Is this something that's been
> > claimed before, and if so, how is it regarded in the linguistic
> > community?  Does anyone have a (reputable or suspicious) source that
> > says English has the most words?  If this is a legitimate claim, how is
> > it determined?
> 
> I've heard this one before, certainly. But it makes no bones about it --
> you're supposed to include *every*thing. *All* the hyper-specific jargons,
> *all* the legalese and its Latinisms, *all* the taxonomies, *all* the
> words like "yclept" (though I'm guessing Shakespeare or thereabouts may be
> the cut-off point), *all* the coinages from even the remotest,
> farthest-flung corners of Empire, *all* the slang, *all* the slithy
> toves... Put it *al*together and you have, well, one rather impressively
> large corpus -- or at least, a hefty, multi-volume edition of the OED (and
> the number "1,000,000" is bandied about). Is that useful in any practical
> or linguistic sense? I think not. But it does make English speakers feel
> warm and fuzzy about themselves somehow, and will keep a respectable
> cocktail party conversation going for at least fifteen minutes. Like
> fireworks, you're supposed to ooo and aah at it while you're there, but
> not really discuss it in gross detail the following morning.

I think that is it.  English is now the world language of science,
and thus, terminology for all fields of human endeavour exists in
English.  This is why some people (including me at an earlier time;
I no longer hold this position any more, though) claim that English
has the most words of any language.

But actually, it makes little sense to ask which language has the
most words.  That is because every speaker of a language has a
*different* lexicon.  There is nobody who is equally at home in
all fields of science, art, technology etc., so there is nobody
who has *every* word attested in at least one English text in his
active lexicon.

--
... brought to you by the Weeping Elf
http://www.joerg-rhiemeier.de/Conlang/index.html
"Bêsel asa Éam, a Éam atha cvanthal a cvanth atha Éamal." - SiM 1:1





Messages in this topic (21)
________________________________________________________________________
1e. Re: "English has the most words of any language"
    Posted by: "Douglas Koller" [email protected] 
    Date: Wed Mar 20, 2013 5:44 am ((PDT))

> Date: Tue, 19 Mar 2013 08:33:29 -0400
> From: [email protected]
> Subject: Re: "English has the most words of any language"
> To: [email protected] > On Tue, Mar 19, 2013 at 12:42 AM, Douglas 
> Koller
> <[email protected]>wrote:

> > Barring that, let me arbitrate: English has 1,087,562 words, full stop. ;)

> I hereby declare the world "grumphle" to be a verb describing how one feels
> immediately after dragging oneself out of the bed in the morning to the
> tune of the world's most annoying alarm clock to go to work the morning
> after spending all night watching a Lost marathon (as in, I grumphled my
> way out of bed at the unearthly hour of 6 AM). Haha! Now there's 1,087,563
> words!

Curses! Foiled again! ;P

Kou                                       




Messages in this topic (21)
________________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________________
2a. voluminous dictionaries (was: "English has the most...")
    Posted by: "Tristan" [email protected] 
    Date: Tue Mar 19, 2013 11:09 am ((PDT))

> I believe I've read somewhere that this claim came from the fact 
> that the OED is bigger (in number of entries / cm^3) than other comparable 
> dictionaries for other languages.

> This would be easily verificable [1]_ , and also completely useless 
> for anything beyond the 15 minutes cocktail party conversation 
> that has been mentioned in the thread.

> .. [1] is there anybody in the list with easy access to a few such 
>        dictionaries, a ruler and 10 minutes to waste? :D

A few thoughts...

The 1992 OED has 171480 normal and 59675 obsolete entries, with 665591
definitions, and 2435558 quotes! Guess what most of the area is dedicated
to... (and a number of definitions of the form: "see quote")

I don't have such intimate access to other similar dictionaries, but my
glances at the DRAE (Español) show it to be much less quote heavy. I've
also heard that it is provides a very conservative view of the lexicon.
I imagine the French equivalent is even more conservative.

Anyone have a list of these sorts of dictionaries for various languages? 

Anyone have an in-world organization that creates such a thing?

tristan

-- 
All original matter is hereby placed immediately under the public domain.





Messages in this topic (21)
________________________________________________________________________
2b. Re: voluminous dictionaries (was: "English has the most...")
    Posted by: "H. S. Teoh" [email protected] 
    Date: Tue Mar 19, 2013 11:36 am ((PDT))

On Tue, Mar 19, 2013 at 01:57:15PM -0400, Tristan wrote:
> > I believe I've read somewhere that this claim came from the fact
> > that the OED is bigger (in number of entries / cm^3) than other
> > comparable dictionaries for other languages.
> 
> > This would be easily verificable [1]_ , and also completely useless
> > for anything beyond the 15 minutes cocktail party conversation that
> > has been mentioned in the thread.
> 
> > .. [1] is there anybody in the list with easy access to a few such 
> >        dictionaries, a ruler and 10 minutes to waste? :D
> 
> A few thoughts...
> 
> The 1992 OED has 171480 normal and 59675 obsolete entries, with 665591
> definitions, and 2435558 quotes! Guess what most of the area is
> dedicated to... (and a number of definitions of the form: "see quote")
> 
> I don't have such intimate access to other similar dictionaries, but
> my glances at the DRAE (Español) show it to be much less quote heavy.
> I've also heard that it is provides a very conservative view of the
> lexicon.  I imagine the French equivalent is even more conservative.
> 
> Anyone have a list of these sorts of dictionaries for various
> languages? 
> 
> Anyone have an in-world organization that creates such a thing?
[...]

This is an interesting thought. We know that each English-speaker's
active vocabulary (or maybe even inactive, I suspect) is only a subset
of the entries in the OED. One may say that the OED is the set union of
all(?) English-speakers' respective vocabularies. But what if the OED
(as a sort of "official" lexicon of English words) didn't exist? How
would one then count the size of a language? How would one count the
size of a conlang?

Taking this further: presumably there are regional variations in
lexicon, even in English. Suppose these groups were suddenly isolated
from each other, and none of them had a copy of the OED. You'd end up
with regional dialects of English, each with their slightly different
English lexicons (which is the set union of those regional speakers'
personal vocabularies). Each such group would give a different number
when asked to count the number of English words.

Moreover, it seems plausible that the subtle (and perhaps some
not-so-subtle) variations in vocabulary would contribute to language
divergence -- different sound changes due to different words or phrases
being more commonly used and therefore phonologically simplified, for
example. Give it a few hundred years, we'd all end up with different
languages, wouldn't we?

I looked up the history of the English language recently, and was quite
fascinated to discover that the transition between Old English and
Middle English coincided (more or less) with the Normandy invasion,
which brought a heavy French influence into the language, and the
transition between Middle English and Modern English coincided (more or
less) with the codification of English spelling.

Now I'm wondering, in the context of conlangs, how would you accurately
describe the lexicon of a conlang with or without an "official" lexicon,
or an official spelling convention? How would having a written language
vs. a purely oral language affect the conlang? Each speaker of the
conlang, presumably, would have their own personal vocabulary, a large
part of which overlaps with other speakers', but also a small part of
which is unique. Without an official lexicon, it seems plausible that
people in influential positions would cause their personal vocabularies
to be spread to those around them, forming groups that differ by region,
family, social circle, etc.. And without an official spelling
convention, each such group may acquire their own variation of the
language, most of which is mutually intelligible but also a small part
of which is peculiar to that group. Would you consider the language
spoken by these groups to be all the same conlang, or different dialects
of the conlang? How would you measure the lexicon size of "the conlang"
overall?

It seems to me that purely-oral languages would tend to have a wider
range of local/personal/etc., variations than a language with a fixed
written form and an official lexicon. How do yall's conlangs account for
this?

</ObConlang ;-)>


T

-- 
Turning your clock 15 minutes ahead won't cure lateness---you're just making 
time go faster!





Messages in this topic (21)
________________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________________
3a. Re: CHAT: Does etymology awareness affect your speech?
    Posted by: "George Marques de Jesus" [email protected] 
    Date: Tue Mar 19, 2013 1:56 pm ((PDT))

I'm not sure about "speech", but about writing I usually stop many times to
check the dictionary and make sure that the word mean what I think it means.

Knowing the origin of word is good to know the meaning of it and how and
when to use it, however we have to understand that language changes (and
what changes it are the people who speak it).


2013/3/18 Roger Mills <[email protected]>

> Someone should go back to grade school ........
>
> --- On Mon, 3/18/13, Sam Stutter <[email protected]> wrote:
>
> From: Sam Stutter <[email protected]>
> Subject: Re: CHAT: Does etymology awareness affect your speech?
> To: [email protected]
> Date: Monday, March 18, 2013, 8:09 PM
>
> What's your opinion on the expression "could you borrow me a pencil"?
>
> On 18 Mar 2013, at 22:52, Matthew George <[email protected]> wrote:
>
> > I've begun to take care to keep certain kinds of multiple meanings
> > separate, and to eliminate them in some cases.  I now dislike the use of
> > 'look' to refer to appearance or semblance as opposed to active sight,
> for
> > example.  Sure, it results in fewer synonyms, but English is particularly
> > rich in them - possibly one of the few special features I value in it now
> > that I know more about the possibilities available.
> >
> > Matt G.
>



-- 
::. George Marques .::





Messages in this topic (8)
________________________________________________________________________
3b. Re: CHAT: Does etymology awareness affect your speech?
    Posted by: "Leonardo Castro" [email protected] 
    Date: Tue Mar 19, 2013 2:00 pm ((PDT))

I vaguely remember a discussion about "monuments to ignorance" in this
list some months ago. Was it about words that ended up with "wrong"
conotations?

Até mais!

Leonardo


2013/3/19 George Marques de Jesus <[email protected]>:
> I'm not sure about "speech", but about writing I usually stop many times to
> check the dictionary and make sure that the word mean what I think it means.
>
> Knowing the origin of word is good to know the meaning of it and how and
> when to use it, however we have to understand that language changes (and
> what changes it are the people who speak it).
>
>
> 2013/3/18 Roger Mills <[email protected]>
>
>> Someone should go back to grade school ........
>>
>> --- On Mon, 3/18/13, Sam Stutter <[email protected]> wrote:
>>
>> From: Sam Stutter <[email protected]>
>> Subject: Re: CHAT: Does etymology awareness affect your speech?
>> To: [email protected]
>> Date: Monday, March 18, 2013, 8:09 PM
>>
>> What's your opinion on the expression "could you borrow me a pencil"?
>>
>> On 18 Mar 2013, at 22:52, Matthew George <[email protected]> wrote:
>>
>> > I've begun to take care to keep certain kinds of multiple meanings
>> > separate, and to eliminate them in some cases.  I now dislike the use of
>> > 'look' to refer to appearance or semblance as opposed to active sight,
>> for
>> > example.  Sure, it results in fewer synonyms, but English is particularly
>> > rich in them - possibly one of the few special features I value in it now
>> > that I know more about the possibilities available.
>> >
>> > Matt G.
>>
>
>
>
> --
> ::. George Marques .::





Messages in this topic (8)
________________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________________
4a. Is there an inverse relationship between lexical richness and gramma
    Posted by: "Daniel Bowman" [email protected] 
    Date: Tue Mar 19, 2013 7:31 pm ((PDT))

Hi All,

Alex Fink and I had a very interesting conversation today where we considered 
how lexical richness may (or may not) have an inverse relationship with 
grammatical complexity.  I am interested to hear what others on the list think 
of this concept, and I'm particularly excited to know if anyone's considered 
this while designing their conlangs.

This is how it works:

If a language has a large lexicon, it may be able to use words to describe 
situations that other languages grammaticalize.  For example, English does not 
grammaticalize formality (unlike Korean and Japanese).  Therefore, English 
speakers have to use words to describe a situation that a Korean speaker would 
mark using a certain formality inflection.  English is richer in vocabulary for 
formality, whereas Korean is richer in grammar.  If Korean has less words for 
formal situations than English, this would lend support to the inverse 
relationship hypothesis.

Another example showing the inverse:  my conlang Angosey has evidentiality 
markers.  One of these markers indicates that the speaker considers the source 
of information doubtful.  In this case, I have obviated the need for the word 
"doubt" since I have a grammatical construction for it.  I can likely do away 
with "dubious, unsubstantiated, unlikely" etc, or at least greatly reduce my 
usage of these terms.

I think the absolute inverse relationship is unlikely to hold - I am sure 
there's a situation where I would need a word for "doubt" in Angosey and be 
unable to replace it with my evidentiality marker.  However, such markers may 
push certain words - such as "doubt" below the "common use" threshold we 
recently discussed in the English word count thread.  In other words, the word 
"doubt" will exist, but it will be used quite seldom since the evidentiality 
marker replaced most of its occurrences.

Irrespective of whether or not the lexical richness vs grammatical complexity 
holds for natlangs, it poses an interesting puzzle for conlangers.  Is it 
possible to design a very lexically rich, grammatically minimal conlang?  Is it 
easier to do this than to make (and use) one that is both grammatically and 
lexically sparse?  

Conversely, is it possible, or do we have examples of, languages with a very 
minimal lexicon with a correspondingly rich grammar?  Perhaps Ithkuil is an 
example of this?

Danny





Messages in this topic (3)
________________________________________________________________________
4b. Re: Is there an inverse relationship between lexical richness and gr
    Posted by: "Demian Terentev" [email protected] 
    Date: Tue Mar 19, 2013 7:47 pm ((PDT))

Hypothesis fails on Sanskrit and Ancient Greek that feature both lexical
richness and grammatical complexity.

As for conlangs, Toki Pona is an example of grammatically and lexically
sparse language.

I believe, it is harder to create a lexically rich language than a
grammatically complex one, so, most conlangs tend to be grammatically
complex. Although, it would be interesting to develop an isolating conlang
with lots of absolute sinonyms for example, I can hardly see anyone
investing that much effort in a conlang.


2013/3/20 Daniel Bowman <[email protected]>

> Hi All,
>
> Alex Fink and I had a very interesting conversation today where we
> considered how lexical richness may (or may not) have an inverse
> relationship with grammatical complexity.  I am interested to hear what
> others on the list think of this concept, and I'm particularly excited to
> know if anyone's considered this while designing their conlangs.
>
> This is how it works:
>
> If a language has a large lexicon, it may be able to use words to describe
> situations that other languages grammaticalize.  For example, English does
> not grammaticalize formality (unlike Korean and Japanese).  Therefore,
> English speakers have to use words to describe a situation that a Korean
> speaker would mark using a certain formality inflection.  English is richer
> in vocabulary for formality, whereas Korean is richer in grammar.  If
> Korean has less words for formal situations than English, this would lend
> support to the inverse relationship hypothesis.
>
> Another example showing the inverse:  my conlang Angosey has evidentiality
> markers.  One of these markers indicates that the speaker considers the
> source of information doubtful.  In this case, I have obviated the need for
> the word "doubt" since I have a grammatical construction for it.  I can
> likely do away with "dubious, unsubstantiated, unlikely" etc, or at least
> greatly reduce my usage of these terms.
>
> I think the absolute inverse relationship is unlikely to hold - I am sure
> there's a situation where I would need a word for "doubt" in Angosey and be
> unable to replace it with my evidentiality marker.  However, such markers
> may push certain words - such as "doubt" below the "common use" threshold
> we recently discussed in the English word count thread.  In other words,
> the word "doubt" will exist, but it will be used quite seldom since the
> evidentiality marker replaced most of its occurrences.
>
> Irrespective of whether or not the lexical richness vs grammatical
> complexity holds for natlangs, it poses an interesting puzzle for
> conlangers.  Is it possible to design a very lexically rich, grammatically
> minimal conlang?  Is it easier to do this than to make (and use) one that
> is both grammatically and lexically sparse?
>
> Conversely, is it possible, or do we have examples of, languages with a
> very minimal lexicon with a correspondingly rich grammar?  Perhaps Ithkuil
> is an example of this?
>
> Danny
>





Messages in this topic (3)
________________________________________________________________________
4c. Re: Is there an inverse relationship between lexical richness and gr
    Posted by: "Patrick Dunn" [email protected] 
    Date: Tue Mar 19, 2013 9:10 pm ((PDT))

I'm not convinced that ancient Greek really features lexical richness.  The
cite I mentioned earlier argues that the 90% vocabulary of ancient Greek
(the number of words needed to understand 90% of a given text) is smaller
than Latin.  Now, picking up my Middle Liddell, I see a lot of words that
are essentially compounds of other words.  It seems the lexical richness of
Greek comes largely from a freer compounding morphology than, say, Latin.

It seems that lexical richness might be obscured by morphological
complexity because languages tending toward the synthetic are more likely
to have compounding derivational morphology than those tending toward the
analytic end of the spectrum.


On Tue, Mar 19, 2013 at 9:47 PM, Demian Terentev <[email protected]> wrote:

> Hypothesis fails on Sanskrit and Ancient Greek that feature both lexical
> richness and grammatical complexity.
>
> As for conlangs, Toki Pona is an example of grammatically and lexically
> sparse language.
>
> I believe, it is harder to create a lexically rich language than a
> grammatically complex one, so, most conlangs tend to be grammatically
> complex. Although, it would be interesting to develop an isolating conlang
> with lots of absolute sinonyms for example, I can hardly see anyone
> investing that much effort in a conlang.
>
>
> 2013/3/20 Daniel Bowman <[email protected]>
>
> > Hi All,
> >
> > Alex Fink and I had a very interesting conversation today where we
> > considered how lexical richness may (or may not) have an inverse
> > relationship with grammatical complexity.  I am interested to hear what
> > others on the list think of this concept, and I'm particularly excited to
> > know if anyone's considered this while designing their conlangs.
> >
> > This is how it works:
> >
> > If a language has a large lexicon, it may be able to use words to
> describe
> > situations that other languages grammaticalize.  For example, English
> does
> > not grammaticalize formality (unlike Korean and Japanese).  Therefore,
> > English speakers have to use words to describe a situation that a Korean
> > speaker would mark using a certain formality inflection.  English is
> richer
> > in vocabulary for formality, whereas Korean is richer in grammar.  If
> > Korean has less words for formal situations than English, this would lend
> > support to the inverse relationship hypothesis.
> >
> > Another example showing the inverse:  my conlang Angosey has
> evidentiality
> > markers.  One of these markers indicates that the speaker considers the
> > source of information doubtful.  In this case, I have obviated the need
> for
> > the word "doubt" since I have a grammatical construction for it.  I can
> > likely do away with "dubious, unsubstantiated, unlikely" etc, or at least
> > greatly reduce my usage of these terms.
> >
> > I think the absolute inverse relationship is unlikely to hold - I am sure
> > there's a situation where I would need a word for "doubt" in Angosey and
> be
> > unable to replace it with my evidentiality marker.  However, such markers
> > may push certain words - such as "doubt" below the "common use" threshold
> > we recently discussed in the English word count thread.  In other words,
> > the word "doubt" will exist, but it will be used quite seldom since the
> > evidentiality marker replaced most of its occurrences.
> >
> > Irrespective of whether or not the lexical richness vs grammatical
> > complexity holds for natlangs, it poses an interesting puzzle for
> > conlangers.  Is it possible to design a very lexically rich,
> grammatically
> > minimal conlang?  Is it easier to do this than to make (and use) one that
> > is both grammatically and lexically sparse?
> >
> > Conversely, is it possible, or do we have examples of, languages with a
> > very minimal lexicon with a correspondingly rich grammar?  Perhaps
> Ithkuil
> > is an example of this?
> >
> > Danny
> >
>



-- 
Second Person, a chapbook of poetry by Patrick Dunn, is now available for
order from Finishing Line
Press<http://www.finishinglinepress.com/NewReleasesandForthcomingTitles.htm>
and
Amazon<http://www.amazon.com/Second-Person-Patrick-Dunn/dp/1599249065/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1324342341&sr=8-2>.





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