thy thigh etc.

Larry Trask larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk
Tue Jun 12 14:21:49 UTC 2001


--On Thursday, June 7, 2001 10:37 am +0000 Douglas G Kilday
<acnasvers at hotmail.com> wrote:

[Folks, I'm still buried in exam marking, and I'm having to economical with
my e-mail, so this response will be unavoidably brief.]

> I believe that if we had a reliable way of
> tracking the "death" of English words, we would find that the number of
> words lost from common use every year roughly equals the number gained.

OK.  On this point we flatly disagree.  Sadly, I have no hard data at my
fingertips to back up my position, and no time to look for any, so I'll
just repeat myself.  Today we have cell phones, planes, computers, cars,
trains, spacecraft, TVs, VCRs, faxes, CDs, the Internet, e-mail, credit
cards, genetic engineering, nuclear reactors, and all manner of modern
technology
-- all of them with a large and growing body of associated terminology.  We
had none of them 200 years ago, and we didn't have some of them 30 years
ago.  Is it really plausible to assume that the vast number of words
brought into English by this technology has been effectively balanced out
by the loss of words pertaining to obsolete technology?  I don't think so.
We may have lost some words pertaining to windmills, but I'll bet we have
gained a very much larger number of words pertaining to nuclear power
stations.  How many parts does a windmill have, anyway?

[snip several points -- no time; sorry]

> This _a priori_ economic argument only works if the processes required to
> manufacture dictionaries are stable in cost. During the past century and
> more, this has certainly _not_ been the case. Improvements in typesetting
> and reproduction, and more recently in information technology, have
> steadily driven down the actual cost of producing dictionaries. I believe
> this is the principal factor in the increasing size of desk dictionaries,
> _not_ purported expansion of the lexis. When these costs have reached
> equilibrium, so will the size of a given brand of dictionary.

Well, an interesting position, but two things: (1) we'll have to wait a
while to find out if the prediction is true; (2) even if dictionary sizes
do stabilize, that doesn't falsify my position: it only means that pruning
must become more ruthless, and that dictionaries must become more
selective.

> I think a good analogy can be drawn with newspapers. Today's typical
> regional paper (circulation on the order of 20k-200k) is much larger and
> more colorful than its counterpart of 100 years ago. That doesn't mean
> that we have much more, and more colorful, news than folks did in 1900,
> or that our lives are much larger and more colorful. It reflects the much
> lower cost, with modern technology, of producing newspapers and
> reproducing photographs.

Well, interesting, but I can't see that this is a striking analogy.  It may
well be the case that the total amount of daily news in the world is
roughly constant over time, but I can't see that it follows that the size
of the English lexicon must therefore also remain roughly constant.

During the last century, the number of mother tongues on earth has
declined.  Yet the terminology of linguistics has been growing steadily in
size.  This is true even in my own field of historical linguistics, which
has been established far longer than any other branch of the subject.  In
writing my dictionary, I found only a tiny handful of terms which were once
prominent but which have now dropped out of use, such as 'surd' and
'proethnic'.  But I found myself including several hundred terms which have
entered the literature only in the last few years: 'accretion zone',
'decliticization', 'lexical diffusion', 'weak-ties theory', 'punctuated
equilibrium', 'exaptation', 'junk', 'abrupt pidgin', 'Northern Cities
Shift', 'Monte Carlo test', 'historicization', 'language missionary',
'language cluster', and loads of others.  Is there any reason to suppose
that linguistics is atypical?

Larry Trask
COGS
University of Sussex
Brighton BN1 9QH
UK

larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk

Tel: (01273)-678693 (from UK); +44-1273-678693 (from abroad)
Fax: (01273)-671320 (from UK); +44-1273-671320 (from abroad)



More information about the Indo-european mailing list