[Lexicog] News time

[Kenneth C. Hill]

One thing that strikes me about this list is the fact that these English-language favorite categories are often used to make judgments about other languages (and their speakers, of course). I work on Hopi, a language once thought to have no word for "time" -- which it does have, though time probably ranks quite low on the list of Hopi preferred conversational topics. People have made all sorts of strange judgments about a culture believed to lack our sense of time.

Regarding the second-place noun in the list: in my work on modern Mexicano (otherwise known as Aztec, Nahuatl) I found no native word for "person", instead the language uses the Spanish loan "cristiano". I don't know how this lexical caregory was treated in pre-European-conquest times. But note that the English word "person" is also a loan, though it has been used in English in the sense of "human being" since 1225 (according to the OED).

--Ken

"David K. Barnhart" <dvdbrnhrt at yahoo.com> wrote:                                  --- In lexicographylist at yahoogroups.com, "John Roberts"
 <dr_john_roberts at ...> wrote:
 >
 > It is not often that lexicographers feature on the BBC news website but 
 > there is a posting there today where they do. The OUP have
 researched what 
 > are the most common nouns in the English language. The most common is 
 > "time". This is partly because of the scores of expressions in English 
 > featuring time. But it is mainly because English speakers like to
 talk about 
 > time a lot.
 > 
 > TOP 10 NOUNS
 > 1 Time
 > 2 Person
 > 3 Year
 > 4 Way
 > 5 Day
 > 6 Thing
 > 7 Man
 > 8 World
 > 9 Life
 > 10 Hand
 > 
 > But I found the most interesting comment was this:
 > 
 > "The thing that struck me when I put together this list was that 90%
 of the 
 > top 100 words were one syllable, and that a large proportion were
 actually 
 > from Old English, meaning the 
 
 basic words we use all the time in basic 
 > sentences are from before the Norman Conquest," he said. "We always
 put the 
 > focus on new words, changing language and words from other
 countries, but in 
 > reality the basic language we use has been the same for hundreds and 
 > hundreds of years."
 > 
 > This means that at a fundamental level the English language hasn't
 changed 
 > much for over 2000 years.
 > 
 > John Roberts
 >
 
 It seems interesting to me that _time_ is also the first noun in The
 American Heritage Word Frequency Book (1971) and in The Brown Count
 (1967).  
 
 Regards,
 David K. Barnhart
 
 Lexik at highlands.com
 
 
     
         



 		
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