I do in fact give some thought to the needs of participants who are not native
speakers of English, and with some of them I sometimes have clarifying offline
exchanges in one of the other languages that I know well.
Vocabulary, as measured by one of the standard intelligence scales, has little
scatter. People know almost all of the words up to some level of
difficulty/frequency of use and almost none above that level in their native
languages.
In second languages, however, things are very different. There is an important
sense in which the notionally difficult words are the same in every language.
A Russian may, for example, have a small English vocabulary, but he or she wil
know the word 'hegemony' because it figured heavily in Soviet political talk.
Again, an educated native speaker of a Latin dialect---French, Italian,
Portuguese, Romanian, Romansh, or Spanish--is all but certain to know the
putatively difficult English words that have Latin or Greek etymologies. He or
she may not, for example, know the word 'fish' but will know the word
'piscatorial'. [I he/she has been taught Grimm's laws fish will not be
problematic the second time.]
There are some traps, words having the same etymologies that have different
meanings in different modern languages: 'egregio' does not have the negative
connotations in Italian that 'egregious' has in English. Inevitably, one
learns about these traps, and how to avoid them, early in one's experience of a
new language.
Concern about the impact of my written vocabulary on participants here whose
English is a second language, whatever the motivation for that concern, is thus
misplaced.
The mistakes that educated Europeans make in English are of a different sort.
More than once I have had to say to an Italian friend that, yes, 'evitable' is
in the English dictionaries, Shakespeare and Sir Thomas Browne did use it,
etc., etc.; but inferences from the currency of 'inevitable' to the usability
of 'evitable' are problematic unless one is talking to elaborately educated
native English speakers, who will decode it in a few milliseconds even if they
are not familiar with it. (Both 'evitabile' and 'inevitabile' are current in
Italian.)
John Gilmore Ashland, MA 01721-1817 USA
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