[ExI] Unrelated Question

BillK pharos at gmail.com
Tue Mar 20 15:22:51 UTC 2012


2012/3/20 Dan wrote:
> All "natural" languages, including pre-Modern  English, are imprecise. They
> just have different ways of being imprecise. And people tend to get along
> fine with them, despite these imprecisions.
>
>

There are now over a million words in English so you have plenty of
ways to be imprecise.
Unfortunately only about 400,000 have made it into dictionaries and
the average educated English speaker only uses about 50,000 words.
(Modern teens use far less of course, some estimate around 1,000
words)  ;)

<http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304459804577285610212146258.html>
The New Science of the Birth and Death of Words
Have physicists discovered the evolutionary laws of language in
Google's library?


BillK




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