Silly Meme on languages

[maeve66]

But I prefer it to the personality quiz that is making the rounds. On that quiz, I basically score as hella balanced and BORING. Bo-ring. I've suppressed the hideous image that goes with this quiz, if that worked right. I hate tables in html.

Language Scholar You scored a 310 out of 400 on language knowledge.

Outstanding! You've scored higher than even most Anthropology students would. You are probably a Linguistics or Anthropology Professor yourself (or at least a Grad student). You may even speak several languages and are possibly working on a new one. If not, then you just have an endless drive to learn about the different cultures of our world. Regardless, you are one of the gems of any society, always promoting a deeper understanding amongst all people. Unless you cheated of course.

My test tracked 1 variable How you compared to other people your age and gender: You scored higher than 85% on knowledge

Link: The World Languages Test written by jeremie096 on OkCupid, home of the 32-Type Dating Test

Comments

[slit.livejournal.com]

I like the Arabic alphabet better than the English (Latin, whatever) one. It feels more precise, and more consistent. Knowing how each letter connects to the next makes it harder than English, but then again they don't have capitals vs. lower-case and print vs. cursive, so in the end it evens out, I think. The grammar, though: ugh.

Also, Semitic languages just have more words, period, compared to English. I'm not an authority on this; you would know better than I do, but I've been told you can function in English with a vocabulary of 2,000 words, whereas in Arabic you need more like 5,000. Have you heard/read anything about that?

[maeve66.livejournal.com]

I haven't, and now I'm fascinated. I think what I've heard is that English has one of the biggest crude numbers of lexical items -- in the range of hundreds of thousands, though I could COMPLETELY be pulling that out of my ass, too, and will go look it up once I've embarrassed myself publicly here. But ALSO that you can function in English not only just with 2,000 words, but with that Orwellian simplified 1,000 word vocabulary, which they've written a (very boring, no doubt) version of the Bible in.

I just did something with my students a few days ago where we looked at the notion of your working vocabulary. Apparently, from counts of lexical items and frequency in Shakespeare, he had an extremely, extremely large working vocabulary of around 29,000 words, where the average modern person (they didn't say if it was a modern English speaking person) has a working vocabulary of around 9,000 words. I hope that I'm up in the higher range, I've got to say. We're wasting an awful lot of words in English, if 9,000 words is more common.

Here is the Wikipedia stuff on English lexical items:

The Global Language Monitor, after combining definitions in the OED2 with those unique to other dictionaries, estimates that there are approximately 990,000 words in English. The editors of Merriam Webster's Third New International Dictionary, Unabridged (475,000 definitions) in their preface, estimate the number to be much higher. This is much greater than the 185,000 terms in German, and the 100,000 in French.