tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13177437.post3382146310010501330..comments2024-03-23T01:31:13.502+01:00Comments on Jabal al-Lughat: Small vocabularies, or lazy linguists?Lameen Souag الأمين سواقhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00773164776222840428noreply@blogger.comBlogger9125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13177437.post-89659584526278964342011-09-08T19:08:51.547+02:002011-09-08T19:08:51.547+02:00Blogspot eats that URL in my browser so here’s it ...Blogspot eats that URL in my browser so here’s it as a link: <a href="http://www.eva.mpg.de/lingua/staff/haspelmath/pdf/WordSegmentation.pdf" rel="nofollow">The indeterminacy of word segmentation<br />and the nature of morphology and syntax</a>leoboikohttps://www.blogger.com/profile/13196088462616982635noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13177437.post-47733620190607335432011-09-08T19:07:59.711+02:002011-09-08T19:07:59.711+02:00Haspelmath has pointed that the word/morpheme dist...Haspelmath has pointed that the word/morpheme distinction doesn’t work the same for all languages http://www.eva.mpg.de/lingua/staff/haspelmath/pdf/WordSegmentation.pdf<br /><br />I can picture a lexicographer claiming a language has few words when he’s looking at objects closer to morphemes.leoboikohttps://www.blogger.com/profile/13196088462616982635noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13177437.post-52838367710924912010-11-27T21:14:27.736+01:002010-11-27T21:14:27.736+01:00Did that previous linguist make grandiose claims a...Did that previous linguist make grandiose claims about the sound system of that language...?David Marjanovićnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13177437.post-263617984839843302010-11-27T18:51:54.342+01:002010-11-27T18:51:54.342+01:00I have been studying an "exotic" languag...I have been studying an "exotic" language for many years. When I started I spoke to a linguist who had done a little work on it, who told me that there were very few minimal pairs in the language. As time went on, I found dozens of minimal pairs, including threesomes and sometimes foursomes. The previous linguist just had not had the opportunity to learn too many words.marie-lucienoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13177437.post-58617892966294081392010-11-27T18:48:36.502+01:002010-11-27T18:48:36.502+01:00Caspar Jordan: "secret register"
I hav...Caspar Jordan: "secret register"<br /><br />I have read the same thing about other "secret languages". One aspect is that secret languages (which are usually secret vocabularies rather than whole languages) are used for specific purposes, and therefore they don't contain vocabulary which is irrelevant to those purposes. Another aspect is that they often use regular words with different meanings. These are not the only features of secret languages, but these features can be observed in slang, for instance.marie-lucienoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13177437.post-56246285663763224332010-10-06T12:01:18.202+02:002010-10-06T12:01:18.202+02:00GamesWithWords: that all sounds very well, and lit...GamesWithWords: that all sounds very well, and literacy in particular probably allows for a much bigger notional vocabulary simply by making the transmission of rare words no longer depend on actually knowing someone who uses them. But how many "things" there are to talk about is very much in the eye of the beholder - there are few limits on how finely you can divide up the body or the natural world if you feel like it, and none on how many imaginary entities you can decide to talk about.<br /><br />Claire: thanks! That talk sounds really interesting - wish I had been there.<br /><br />Caspar: I've heard a little bit about that, yes - don't know much about it, but I can well believe that what's effectively an artificial language would have a much smaller vocabulary. Getting it to express everything sounds like the hard part!Lameen Souag الأمين سواقhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/00773164776222840428noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13177437.post-73829446398662700952010-10-04T23:18:45.438+02:002010-10-04T23:18:45.438+02:00Are you aware of Kenneth Hale and Davis Nashs rese...Are you aware of Kenneth Hale and Davis Nashs research on Damin, the "secret" register of Lardil, an Australian aboriginal language, spoken by initiated men? I have no idea how trustworthy the research is but it suggests that this register uses only some several hundred lexical items to express more or less anything expressed by the non-secret register. This is said to be achieved through extreme polysemy. <br />Definitely interesting!Caspar Jordannoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13177437.post-63761780633861906552010-10-02T14:30:27.271+02:002010-10-02T14:30:27.271+02:00Andy Pawley gave a talk about this once.
Time spen...Andy Pawley gave a talk about this once.<br />Time spent on the language was part of the equations, but there were many other things too.<br /><br />. What count as a 'headword' in the dictionary?<br />. How much (productive) derivational morphology is there? [and how are those forms listed in the dictionary?]<br />. How much polysemy is there?<br />. How much use is made of compounding (as opposed to other word formation processes, or phrasal descriptor compounds)?<br />. How much use is made of specialised technical vocabulary? (for example, in English, musical terms tend to be their own lexemes, but in Bardi they are special senses of more general words.)<br />. Is there lots of loan (near-)synonymy?Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13177437.post-81281126453504129492010-09-30T14:40:47.427+02:002010-09-30T14:40:47.427+02:00You'd have to define "word," right?
...You'd have to define "word," right?<br /><br />But you would expect a language spoken in a wide geographic distribution by cultures with an awful lot of cultural and technological complexities (e.g., lots of stuff to talk about) would have more words than languages spoken in a geographically-restricted range with relatively few things to talk about.<br /><br />I'm not calling anyone unsophisticated or primitive, but we've probably got an order of magnitude more <i>job titles</i> than many of these languages have <i>people</i>. We've probably got more fictitious nationalities in science fiction than these language have people. We probably have more <i>plant names</i> (this comes from the geographic distribution) than they have <i>plants</i>. There's nothing really mysterious here.<br /><br />But the correlation between the size of a lexicon and the amount of time spent studying that language is well-taken.GamesWithWordshttps://www.blogger.com/profile/15107067137612954306noreply@blogger.com