A million English words, or only 600,000? Either way, it's a language packed with more words than you'll ever need

[Dennis Baron]

ok, i made some revisions in light of the discussion here. thx -- hope  
it's a bit of an improvement
____________________
Dennis Baron
Professor of English and Linguistics
Department of English
University of Illinois
608 S. Wright St.
Urbana, IL 61801

office: 217-244-0568
fax: 217-333-4321

www.uiuc.edu/goto/debaron

read the Web of Language:
www.uiuc.edu/goto/weboflanguage




On Jul 9, 2008, at 12:57 PM, Arnold M. Zwicky wrote:

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> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       "Arnold M. Zwicky" <zwicky at CSLI.STANFORD.EDU>
> Subject:      Re: A million English words, or only 600,000?  Either  
> way, it's a
>              language packed with more words than you'll ever need
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> On Jul 8, 2008, at 7:53 PM, Dennis Baron wrote:
>
>> There's a new post on the Web of Language:
>>
>> A million English words, or only 600,000?  Either way, it's a
>> language packed with more words than you'll ever need
>>
>> Paul Payack, professional word-counter and the founder of
>> YourDictionary.com, claims that someone coins an English word every
>> 98 minutes...e just don’t know what they are.
>>
>> ... Payack also predicts that some time around April 29, 2009 – mark
>> your calendars – the one millionth English word will appear...
>
> these claims appear, not on the yourDictionary.com site (which is just
> a compendium of on-line dictionaries), but on Payack's Global Language
> Monitor site (Payack describes GLM as "my company"), and the claims
> are based not on lexicographic research (there is  *no list* of those
> hugely many English words), but on corpus searches using a secret
> "algorithm" of his own devising.  (this means that there is no sense
> in which Payack can be said to be a "competitor" of the OED.) the man
> is a self-promoting charlatan (as Ben Zimmer, Geoff Nunberg, and
> others have repeatedly pointed out in various places), and it's
> dismaying to see Dennis give him still more publicity.
>
> i grant that Dennis's piece is gently mocking, and includes some
> criticism of the idea that you could count the words of English (or
> any other language) -- an idea that we've been around here, with links
> to discussions elsewhere, a wearying number of times. unfortunately,
> taking the idea seriously enough to mock it plays into Payack's hands:
> it gives him more publicity, and reinforces the mistaken idea in the
> public's mind.  (refuting claims often has the paradoxical effect of
> increasing people's degree of belief in those claims, especially when
> the claims are bold and when people have some reason to be sympathetic
> to the claims.  it's a sad thought that the effort, in writing and
> teaching, that some of us have put into the topic of the number of
> words for X in language L might simply have had the effect of helping
> to keep the idea alive.)
>
> arnold
>
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