According to this article, it's a great day for English!

Don't yell at me. I'm only the reporter.

Well, now that that's over perhaps we'll get some rest until the billionth word arrives..

Of course, Language Log have an article by Geoff Pullum: Millionth word story botched.

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Language Log have an article

Or, for US readers, "Language Log has an article..."

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Originally posted by zmježd:
Well, now that that's over perhaps we'll get some rest until the billionth word arrives..

I doubt it. People who live by self-promotion are usually very good at coming up with new self-promotion. If you missed the last scam, I'm sure there will be a new one along soon.

Now that the millionth word has been coined, it is only a matter of time before lawyers for businesses either copyright it or trademark it so it can't be used by us plebes.

Language Log

LOL. And after all the fidgety waiting what was the ord(10^6) word? Web 2.0! Ye gods! How 2005.

And as Pullum says, it's not even a word; it's a phrase. I do have to look up "zombie banks" though.

WM

I completely get how stupid Payack is, and Web 2.0 seems even more stupid. Furthermore, I have the greatest respect for the OED, Mr. Simpson and Jesse Sheidlower...but...this is what I don't get:

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"This is stuff that you just can't count," said Jesse Sheidlower, editor at large of the Oxford English Dictionary. "No one can count it, and to pretend that you can is totally disingenuous. It simply can't be done."

In the sciences we develop operational definitions. Why couldn't this be done for words? The comment that it's impossible to count words seems naive to me. I know everyone here disagrees with me, but I can't be convinced that it can't be done.

In the sciences we develop operational definitions. Why couldn't this be done for words? The comment that it's impossible to count words seems naive to me. I know everyone here disagrees with me, but I can't be convinced that it can't be done.

Well, we have discussed this, haven't we, and neither of the sides will be convinced by the other, but besides having to define what a word is. Is it an orthographical word or a dictionary entry (which includes compounds with and without spaces or hyphens? If it includes the latter, as Payock's group did, then you have a potentially infinite number of words. He hedges on this and says it's only idiomatic phrases and compounds, such that the meaning cannot be discerned from the constituents. Then there are the criteria for counting something as a word. How old is it, how many people use it, etc.? He says after it's shown up in print 25K times, he counts it as a word. And so on. What I'm getting at, is, sure, you can come up with a bunch of criteria for inclusion of "words" in English (the problems with other languages that are structurally significantly different from English have been gone over in those other threads, too), but getting two people to agree on some set of them is probably asking too much and in the end what does this definition of word mean or gain you?

Remember the hubbub over Pluto being demoted from planet to dwarf planet? Nothing changed physically with Pluto, just how astronomers refer to it when writing in scientific literature. You'd have thought the Solar System was coming apart at the seams. So, if you or somebody's PR firm want to count "words", what can lexicographers and linguists do about it? And what does it mean to have identified the millionth word? How is it different from the first or tenth word? Can you identify words at the other end of the scale? Are they're negative words? Perhaps, words that have dropped out of the language and are no longer used. And then there's those pesky foreign borrowings. Can I get interest on those words?

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Originally posted by zmježd:
In the sciences we develop operational definitions. Why couldn't this be done for words? The comment that it's impossible to count words seems naive to me. I know everyone here disagrees with me, but I can't be convinced that it can't be done.

Well, we have discussed this, haven't we, and neither of the sides will be convinced by the other,

With zm's permission I'll have another go though.

Consider these groups of words. For each group how many different words are you counting them as? If there are separate words that you are counting think about why you are counting them separately. If there are some words you don't count think about why you aren't counting them.
I don't want answers, because there are no sensible consistent answers. I just want you to consider why you think of one thing as a word and another thing as not a word.

Group 1

help, helps, helped, helping

Group 2

help, helpful, helpless, unhelpful, helplessness, helpfulness

Group 3

help, helper, helpers

Group 4

helpful, helpless, sorrowful, sorrowless, insightful, insightless, sadnessful, sadnessless

Group 5

establishment, disestablishment, disestablishmentarian, disestablishmentarianism, antidistestablishmentarianism

Group 6

flower, pot, flower pot, flower-pot, flowerpot

Group 7

fascist, neofascist, cryptofascist, neocryptofascist, cryptoneofascist, cryptoneofasistic, cryptoneofasistical, cryptoneofasistically

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For all of these cases and the many, many other questions it's perfectly possible to devise an arbitrary "rule" about what does and doesn't count but that's all it would be, arbitrary.

What you would be counting wouldn't be words, it would be "words that meet this completely arbitrary set of definitions of what a word is". That's exactly what the millionth word rubbish does. It sets up its own totally arbitrary definition of what constitues a word and then says, "Hey, we've got a million of them."

Of course it can be done. It's just meaningless to do it.

---------------

Damn, it's good to be back.

Look at the bright side: Now they've got nothing to talk about until 2,000,000.

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Well, we have discussed this, haven't we, and neither of the sides will be convinced by the other,

Yes. I was giving my perspective. It's hard to have an active language board going for nearly 7 years (Wow!) without having repeat subjects from time to time.

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And what does it mean to have identified the millionth word?

Bob asks this, too, and he says it's meaningless. Obviously it means nothing to many; I surely don't care at all. Some, those who like numbers particularly, enjoy it, even if it's relatively meaningless in the history of life. I suppose much that I do in work is relatively meaningless....<sigh>

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Perhaps, words that have dropped out of the language and are no longer used. And then there's those pesky foreign borrowings. Can I get interest on those words?

I have an interest in one of them.

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Consider these groups of words.

It might be drivel and meaningless and aggravating to linguists, but, Bob, I still say it could be done. You'd just have to have some real specific definitions that would cover everything. There are some minutiae experts out there who would love to come up with the them!

Has Payack succeeded? Most definitely not. His definition is much too simplistic and it doesn't work at all. One article I read online, in fact, said that the Global Language Monitor tracks the frequency of words and phrases; that's how Web 2.0 snuck through. It's not a word; it's a phrase. And a pretty ridiculous one at that. If you count Web 2.0, you'd have to count all the medical lab tests, wouldn't you? Like the peritoneal fluid analysis (159,000 Ghts). I bet that's not in their million words. His operational definition is a failure.

Nobody denies that it could be done. It's just that none of us can see what it would mean.

Take my first group - help, helps, helped helping

If the definition includes "for verbs only the root form counts" this is one word. If the definition says "for verbs all different inflected forms count" then it's four words.

What have we proven? Just that on one definition there are approximately four times as many "verb words" as on the other definition. That's why we struggle to see what such counting would mean.

OK, so say I come up with some excruciating criteria and I determine that English has 0.5 million words. Payack sez it's 1 million and climbing. What do these numbers mean? To anybody? Even the bean counters? Is a language with 50,000 words "better" than one with 8,000? "Worse", more "expressive", or just have a bigger vocabulary? So, like the shallow Hal who dies with the most toys, is the language with the largest lexicon the "winner"? I think you can come up with a definition of what a word is, but I still don't think you can count words. A million is a big number. Your task would be like painting the Golden Gate Bridge, a never-ending one. That's why the millionth word guy had to come up with an algorithm (a faulty one at that) to count them. I always get the feeling that these lexical statistics of English are some deep-seated desire to prove English the best of all possible languages. So, it's not the counted, flawed and hopeless as it may be that dismays me, but the ulterior motive.

But, if you really want to count, using a simple definition (though, of course, a meaningless one), try this.


word: an uninterrupted* sequence of letters of the alphabet that form a meaningful lexical string

*i.e. containing nothing but letters, no punctuation and no spaces (so n00b isn't a word after all.)

There you go, a straightforward definition. Check back with me when you have counted them.

What is a word? Three linguists answer.

This message has been edited. Last edited by: goofy,

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I always get the feeling that these lexical statistics of English are some deep-seated desire to prove English the best of all possible languages.

You are probably right about that. Good point.