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<div>Dear Jim (if I may)</div>
<div><br></div>
<div>I understand your concern to be getting an idea of the size of
the 'indigenous' lexicon in languages of preliterate societies.</div>
<div><br></div>
<div>I can tell you something about estimates based on the better
dictionaries for 'preliterate' languages of the Austronesian family
and the Trans New Guinea (the largest Papuan) family.</div>
<div><br></div>
<div>But first some methodological considerations. We can't make
useful comparisons without agreeing on the basic units to be counted.
Defining terms such as 'lexical unit' and 'lexeme' is, as you
indicate, crucial to estimating the size of the lexicon.</div>
<div><br></div>
<div>Like D.A. Cruse in his book<i> Lexical Semantics</i>, I regard
the basic lexical unit as the pairing of a form with a single sense.
Just counting 'lexical entries' or 'headwords' is highly
unsatisfactory -- different dictionaries may organise entries on
radically different principles so that counts of entries or headwords
will not be commensurate. A polysemous root like<i> run</i>,<i>
take</i> or<i> head</i> consists of many sense units and each
such unit has to be learnt separately. A family of sense units
forms a lexeme. One can in turn recognise a family of lexemes (related
by derivation, compounding, etc.) which some dictionaries will include
in a single entry and others will not. </div>
<div><br></div>
<div>Given that the 10 most polysemous verb roots in English total 552
senses between them in the Macquarie Dictionary (many more in the OED,
but that includes obsolete senses), and the top 200 verb roots total
over 3000 senses, you can see that a count of sense units will yield a
much larger larger lexicon than a count of lexemes. Comparison is
further complicated by the fact that different languages seem to have
different amounts of polysemy. (It is true that there is some
fuzziness in boundaries between sense units but there are tests for
polysemy that work most of the time.)</div>
<div><br></div>
<div>There are other considerations. Just counting single-word lexical
units will result in an estimate that is far too low. In most,
probably all languages much of the lexicon consists of compounds and
phrasal units. Estimating the size of the multi-word lexicon as
opposed to the single word lexicon can't be done by a simple general
formula because languages vary considerably in how much use they
make of compounding and phrasal units.</div>
<div><br></div>
<div>Defining the boundary between inflection and derivation and
whether to count inflected forms is another issue. I think most of us
agree that we should not count regular inflected forms but we should
count irregular ones. Another variable is the treatment of
dialect variants. Some dictionaries represent a single regional
dialect, others include material from a number of dialects. And
so on. </div>
<div><br></div>
<div>Anyway, my own experience of attempting to compile comprehensive
dictionaries is limited to one Austronesian language (Wayan Fijian)
and one Trans New Guinea language (Kalam). I've been toiling at both
for over 30 years, off and on. </div>
<div><br></div>
<div>Wayan is a dialect of the Western Fijian language spoken by a
farming and fishing community of about 1500 people. The
Wayan-English dictionary (1000 pages) contains around 35,000 sense
units, of which probably not more than 3 percent would be loanwords
from non-Fijian languages. I haven't done a sampling of lexemes but at
a guess there are around 20 to 25,000. For sure, I have missed many
thousands of multiword units and probably some thousands of derived
words, as well as many foreign words and phrases that are more or less
integrated into Wayans' speech repertoires. </div>
<div><br></div>
<div>Kalam is spoken by a farming people on the fringes of the New
Guinea Highlands. At first European contact (in the 1950s and 60s)
there were about 13,000 Kalam, though these divided into several
regional dialects. The Kalam-English dictionary is smaller than
the Wayan one, containing about 15,000 sense units. Why is it smaller?
Mainly I think because Kalam doesn't have such a rich verbal
derivational system as Wayan and because, unlike Wayan, it cannot
derive verb roots from nouns and vice versa.</div>
<div><br></div>
<div>In her 1998 PhD thesis on problems in Tongan lexicography
Melenaite Taumoefolau made counts of the number of entries in the
largest dictionaries of Polynesian languages (Maori, Hawaiian, Tongan,
Samoan). As I recall it, these ranged from 19,000 to 23,000. These
figures don't tell us the number of basic lexical units (in my sense)
but they indicate that these four dictionaries probably each contains
on the order of 30 to 50,000 lexical units.</div>
<div><br></div>
<div>All of which suggests that your historical linguist friends who
said 50,000 were talking more sense (no pun intended) than those
talking 3000.</div>
<div><br></div>
<div>Of some interest are the inventories for specialised semantic
domains. Kalam has over 1200 terms for plant taxa, Wayan has 600-700.
The Kalam have a richer flora (Waya is a small island) and make wider
use of it than contemporary Wayans, who are more westernised.
Comparative ethnobotanical data indicate that preliterate language
communities generally have over 1000 terms for plants, provided they
live in a place with a rich flora. The Wayans exploit a rich
marine environment and distinguish over 400 fish taxa, 140 mollusc
taxa and about 40 crustacean taxa. Other studies show that Pacific
Island fishing communities consistently distinguish well over 300 fish
taxa, except for small very remote islands where there are fewer
fish. The Kalam on the other hand are great on land animals and
distinguish some 230 bird taxa, over 40 mammals (mainly marsupials),
35 frogs and over 100 creepy crawly taxa. I would expect other New
Guinea Highland peoples to pattern pretty much like Kalam.</div>
<div><br></div>
<div>I'll post this note on the Austronesian Languages and Papuan
Languages lists to see if any of my colleagues there have
opinions.</div>
<div><br></div>
<div>Andy Pawley</div>
<div>Linguistics Dept, RSPAS</div>
<div>Australian National University </div>
<div><br></div>
<div><br></div>
<div><br></div>
<div> </div>
<div><br></div>
<blockquote type="cite" cite>Malcolm (or whomever is taking this)<br>
<br>
For some time I have been trying to establish ball park figures for
the size of the lexicon of unwritten languages, i.e. languages that
will not be full of learned European loans etc. and I have been
getting estimates from historical linguists that range beyond a single
order of magnitude (3,000 to 50,000). If there is a reliable source
out there that covers such could you let me know. Otherwise, could
this be asked around. I do appreciate how difficult this is to
estimate especially given the problem of defining lexemes but some
form of general order of magnitude would be useful.<br>
<br>
Jim<br>
<br>
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