From iad@MATH.BAS.BG Sat Jul 08 23:58:05 2000 Return-Path: Received: (qmail 27397 invoked from network); 9 Jul 2000 06:58:03 -0000 Received: from unknown (10.1.10.27) by m2.onelist.org with QMQP; 9 Jul 2000 06:58:03 -0000 Received: from unknown (HELO argo.bas.bg) (195.96.224.7) by mta1 with SMTP; 9 Jul 2000 06:58:02 -0000 Received: from banmatpc.math.bas.bg (root@banmatpc.math.bas.bg [195.96.243.2]) by argo.bas.bg (8.11.0.Beta1/8.9.3/Debian 8.9.3-6) with ESMTP id e696vxS10488 for ; Sun, 9 Jul 2000 09:58:00 +0300 Received: from iad.math.bas.bg (iad.math.bas.bg [195.96.243.88]) by banmatpc.math.bas.bg (8.9.3/8.9.3) with SMTP id JAA18958 for ; Sun, 9 Jul 2000 09:57:58 +0300 X-Mozilla-Status2: 00000000 Message-ID: <3966FB14.67954D9D@math.bas.bg> Date: Sat, 08 Jul 2000 12:57:40 +0300 X-Mozilla-Draft-Info: internal/draft; vcard=0; receipt=0; uuencode=0; html=0; linewidth=0 X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.6 [en] (Win98; I) X-Accept-Language: en MIME-Version: 1.0 To: lojban@egroups.com Subject: Re: [lojban] Amusing stuff References: <038701beb2fc$cf766c60$183b99d0@monad.net> <39552838.4705AF6B@bilkent.edu.tr> <395681B6.51018E35@math.bas.bg> <39646E45.F6FDCB0@bilkent.edu.tr> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit From: Ivan A Derzhanski Robin wrote: > Ivan A Derzhanski wrote: > > [...] comparing sizes of published dictionaries is not a sound > > way of comparing the sizes of vocabularies, although it is perhaps > > useful as a guideline. There are many other factors, both > > linguistic (the productivity and predictability of derivation > > and compounding) and extralinguistic (the diligence of the > > lexicographers, the resources available to them). > > > Yes - it all depends on what you count as lexis. As I said, Turkish > has a very small "dictionary" vocabulary, but someone once wrote > a book explaining all the forms of one verb (sevmek) - it had over > 1400 entries The bulk of these don't count, being inflected forms of the same word(s). Only the different voices (reflexive _-in_ / reciprocal _-is~_, causative _-dir_/_-t_ (which can be doubled or tripled), passive _-il_ and the various combinations of these -- a total of 24 possibilities) can and often do develop unpredictable meanings, so a dictionary should register them at least when they do. > (this was originally his PhD thesis, which shows that > even having a PhD in linguistics may not mean very much!). Was it a PhD in linguistics or in Turkish philology? > > I've never approved of the statement `English has more words than any > > other language', because I'm not convinced that the people who say so > > have done an exhaustive search, or even considered some likely rivals > > such as Hindustani. > > Not sure on this one. The people at the OED have done pretty exhaustive > research, but then they haven't looked at Hindustani. Similarly with > Ottoman Turkish - one view is that since educated speakers were (at > least) triglossic, one should also include the entire vocabularies of > Arabic and Persian. Yes, that's the sort of thing I had in mind. Assuming that English does have more words than any other language, why might that be? It's not because it has particularly productive word-building mechanisms; on the contrary, it's very restricted in that regard as Indo-European languages go. Its inherited lexicon can't be very different in size from that of Dutch or German. Remains then the fact that it has ingested large portions of the vocabularies of other lgs, such as French, that it has been in contact with. Which is not common, but not unique either. > My students tend to produce consistent errors, like "thougth" and > "ougth" or suffer from first-language interference, while many > native-speaker friends seem completely at sea. Your students have the advantage of having had their first exposure to the notion of reading and writing through Turkish, which means that one of the first things they've learnt (though not necessarily explicitly) is that speech consists of sounds and writing is a more or less straightforward matter of representing each sound by its corresponding letter. They're in possession of an intuitive idea of phonology, which is a very handy thing to have when they meet languages in which the sound:letter correspondence is not quite so straightforward. By contrast, English native speakers are often completely confused about what speech sounds are and what it means to write them down. > > (5) It has in fact been suggested that irregular inflected forms serve > > a purpose (they're a sort of mental shortcuts, since they are looked up > > as they are, so no time is spent on their morphological analysis), [...] > > Is there any empirical evidence to support this theory? It's > interesting, but historical (and occasionally phonological) > explanations seem more productive. I wish I could say more. I don't even remember who I heard it from, let alone the details. I may still have a handout from that talk, if there was a handout, but even that I'm not sure about. --Ivan