19° with a high of 38° expected – clear – calm – visibility of 10.0 miles – Monday just may be the day (Kansas City 45°, Emporia 56°, Tulsa 63°). Here’s hoping for a warm Monday.
So Joe says, English is the richest language in the world because of all the amalgamations of other languages into it. He says that it contains over 500,000 words and maybe twice that if you include scientific terms. What about proper names I ask. He is dismissive of the idea of counting them. I have heard that German and French have less than half that number, he comments . I wonder how many there are in Arabic, he asked. Will if your theory about amalgamations holds any water than Arabic should have as many words as does English. And this leads to a discussion of what we are talking about when we speak of a language – the literary language or the language as it is spoken in all of its varieties. In that case Arabic is more diverse than English – the largest spoken version, Egyptian only accounts for 15% of the language’s speakers. Well it would be interesting to know, he replies.
So I did some research and the first thing I discover is that it is not an easy question to answer – probably impossible because there is no agreement of what we mean by a word or whether just the literary usage is to be counted. The 500,000 number for English comes for the
word count (number of definitions) in the Oxford English Dictionary (612,000 in the latest edition). I found mention that there has not been a comprehensive Arabic dictionary since the 12th century – can this be true. But this comparing of dictionaries obviously won’t work (and besides Joe says the OED is unique) – the French Dictionnaire de l'Académie françaiseh has not been updated since 1935 (9th ed is in progress) and it only contained 35,000 words.
Another way to tackle the problem is to count what are called Type-Token Ratios (TTRs). This is a text corpus measure of the number of different word types divided by the number of word tokens). Sounds kind of techy and it is. Using TTR analysis Spanish is more rich than English and Arabic is far richer than Spanish. But are we counting what Joe is calling a ‘word’ or the blank spaces between characters? It is really a measure of the degree of inflection of a language not its vocabulary diversity. Maybe we could get the word counts from Microsoft for their Word spell checkers for each of the 37 languages for which they provide them. I can’t find that Microsoft has released these numbers. But it is a possible measure. Joe doesn’t like that idea. Just ask an expert he says, they ought to know. Well I report, no linguist will touch this with a ten foot pole. It’s not a number that makes any sense across the world’s languages and even if we would identify and gather a panel of experts on the world’s major languages there is no systematic method for them to derive a number – it will just be a wild quesstimate (being an expert does not necesarrly make one correct - it just means that we expect them to know). And besides who will fund this congress of experts. No I don’t think it is a well formulated question and hence there is no meaningful answer.
Why are you so hostile to English being the world’s richest language, Joe asks. I have always taught my students this (he was an English teacher). I’m not, I exclaim, but I believe if you are going to make such an assertion you should have more than just an hypothesis about why it should be true – otherwise it smacks of Englocentrism. It well could be true the English is the richest language in the world, but without well formulated measure, it is just an assertion. Well I have some books at home and I’m sure they will have the answer, he asserted. I have my doubts but I kept them to myself and sipped some more of my pint.
I had explained the difference between type-tokens, lexemes and lemmas and how 90% of English usage was accounted for by only 7,000 lemmas and that perhaps 90% of the word usage in the King James Bible and probably television programming was limited to less that 5,000 words. But he kept harping back to his 500,000 number and maybe twice that and English being the richest language in the world and he too sipped on his beer. And as I explained if the linguist hemmed had hawed about an answer to his assertion, then we were unlikely to reslove it here in Charlie Hooper’s Bar and Grill. We both again payed more attention to our libations.
What keeps one from going too far
Keeps one satisfied with how far
One has already gone
You smug-faced crowds with kindling eye / Who cheer when soldier lads march by, / Sneak home and pray you'll never know / The hell where youth and laughter go. – Siegfried Sassaon
So Joe says, English is the richest language in the world because of all the amalgamations of other languages into it. He says that it contains over 500,000 words and maybe twice that if you include scientific terms. What about proper names I ask. He is dismissive of the idea of counting them. I have heard that German and French have less than half that number, he comments . I wonder how many there are in Arabic, he asked. Will if your theory about amalgamations holds any water than Arabic should have as many words as does English. And this leads to a discussion of what we are talking about when we speak of a language – the literary language or the language as it is spoken in all of its varieties. In that case Arabic is more diverse than English – the largest spoken version, Egyptian only accounts for 15% of the language’s speakers. Well it would be interesting to know, he replies.
So I did some research and the first thing I discover is that it is not an easy question to answer – probably impossible because there is no agreement of what we mean by a word or whether just the literary usage is to be counted. The 500,000 number for English comes for the
word count (number of definitions) in the Oxford English Dictionary (612,000 in the latest edition). I found mention that there has not been a comprehensive Arabic dictionary since the 12th century – can this be true. But this comparing of dictionaries obviously won’t work (and besides Joe says the OED is unique) – the French Dictionnaire de l'Académie françaiseh has not been updated since 1935 (9th ed is in progress) and it only contained 35,000 words.Another way to tackle the problem is to count what are called Type-Token Ratios (TTRs). This is a text corpus measure of the number of different word types divided by the number of word tokens). Sounds kind of techy and it is. Using TTR analysis Spanish is more rich than English and Arabic is far richer than Spanish. But are we counting what Joe is calling a ‘word’ or the blank spaces between characters? It is really a measure of the degree of inflection of a language not its vocabulary diversity. Maybe we could get the word counts from Microsoft for their Word spell checkers for each of the 37 languages for which they provide them. I can’t find that Microsoft has released these numbers. But it is a possible measure. Joe doesn’t like that idea. Just ask an expert he says, they ought to know. Well I report, no linguist will touch this with a ten foot pole. It’s not a number that makes any sense across the world’s languages and even if we would identify and gather a panel of experts on the world’s major languages there is no systematic method for them to derive a number – it will just be a wild quesstimate (being an expert does not necesarrly make one correct - it just means that we expect them to know). And besides who will fund this congress of experts. No I don’t think it is a well formulated question and hence there is no meaningful answer.
Why are you so hostile to English being the world’s richest language, Joe asks. I have always taught my students this (he was an English teacher). I’m not, I exclaim, but I believe if you are going to make such an assertion you should have more than just an hypothesis about why it should be true – otherwise it smacks of Englocentrism. It well could be true the English is the richest language in the world, but without well formulated measure, it is just an assertion. Well I have some books at home and I’m sure they will have the answer, he asserted. I have my doubts but I kept them to myself and sipped some more of my pint.
I had explained the difference between type-tokens, lexemes and lemmas and how 90% of English usage was accounted for by only 7,000 lemmas and that perhaps 90% of the word usage in the King James Bible and probably television programming was limited to less that 5,000 words. But he kept harping back to his 500,000 number and maybe twice that and English being the richest language in the world and he too sipped on his beer. And as I explained if the linguist hemmed had hawed about an answer to his assertion, then we were unlikely to reslove it here in Charlie Hooper’s Bar and Grill. We both again payed more attention to our libations.
What keeps one from going too far
Keeps one satisfied with how far
One has already gone
You smug-faced crowds with kindling eye / Who cheer when soldier lads march by, / Sneak home and pray you'll never know / The hell where youth and laughter go. – Siegfried Sassaon
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The more pieces of the puzzle that there are
The more likely the pieces are to fit together
Even if it is more unlikely that any two will
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Starbucks introduces instant coffee – are they diluting their brand
The US instant coffee market is $700m/ year. Worldwide it is $17b
Only 7% of Americans drink instant coffee (82% drink a cup of coffee at least occasionall
y; 52% daily)
Instant coffee accounts for 40% of the coffee sales globally (81% in the UK where Starbuck’s in introducing their instant coffee)
The average annual expenditure on coffee in the US is $164.71
30 m Americans drink specialty coffee beverages daily
65% of the coffee drank in the US is consumed during breakfast hours
In 1978, President Carter chided Mr. Kahn for warning in speeches that the country risked “deep, deep depression” if inflation continued to soar. So Mr. Kahn replaced the term with “banana.” Everybody knew what he was talking about. - EDUARDO PORTER
The US instant coffee market is $700m/ year. Worldwide it is $17b
Only 7% of Americans drink instant coffee (82% drink a cup of coffee at least occasionall
y; 52% daily)Instant coffee accounts for 40% of the coffee sales globally (81% in the UK where Starbuck’s in introducing their instant coffee)
The average annual expenditure on coffee in the US is $164.71
30 m Americans drink specialty coffee beverages daily
65% of the coffee drank in the US is consumed during breakfast hours
In 1978, President Carter chided Mr. Kahn for warning in speeches that the country risked “deep, deep depression” if inflation continued to soar. So Mr. Kahn replaced the term with “banana.” Everybody knew what he was talking about. - EDUARDO PORTER
