"Well, Dan, how do you have his words if you have never heard him or seen him?" "Hey Dan, what does Jesus look like? Is he dark like us or light like you?" What if your religious conversations went something like this: Hence, they have no creation myths or histories. In this extremely conservative culture, Pirahas don’t give credence to any experience that wasn’t directly witnessed by themselves or their interlocutors. So they avoid such talk." And thus it has been with this people since their first encounters with Brazilians in the seventeenth century. As Everett puts it in his book, "To talk about things that have no place in their own culture, such as other gods, Western ideas of germs, and so on, would require the Pirahas to adopt a change in life and thought. We average about 60,000 words and counting in our workaday lives (see above) the Pirahas reject nonindigenous vocabulary. English uses about forty phonemes Piraha about eleven. He is now the world’s leading expert on this dialect, which is spoken by less than 400 Indian natives. Everett, author of Don’t Sleep, There Are Snakes: Life and Language in the Amazonian Jungle (Pantheon $26.95) and the subject of a controversial New Yorker profile last year, went to the Amazon jungle in 1977 to translate the Gospels into Piraha. Even in the popular imagination our paragon remains cornucopian Shakespeare, who wrote before standardized spelling.ĭaniel L. English is a monster with a very long tail, and that’s why attempts to tame it–from Roget to Strunk and White–are vulnerable to poetic backlash. That 1 percent of extremely rare, specialized words is what takes us from the average American high-schooler’s vocabulary of 60,000 words to the endlessly receding horizon of ever more exotic, but extremely precise, terminology. The hundred most common words ( from, because, go, me, our…) account for 50 percent of the corpus the thousand most common words ( girl, win, decide…) account for 75 percent of the corpus but at 99 percent of the corpus we may have a vocabulary of 1 million words, which include the likes of endobenthic and pomological. In lieu of a definitive answer to the question "How many words are there in English?" the Oxford English Dictionary Online has a chart listing tranches of vocabulary from most to least common, what percentage of the corpus each tranche represents and example words. We still live in that world, with technology-driven semantic fields birthing whole species of new vocabulary annually. #CLOCKMAKER SYNONYM FULL#In so many ways, English was a forest full of flora and fauna Roget was out to mold it into a botanical garden and zoo. But Roget’s Thesaurus was also the fruit of an age whose mania was classification, and the class/division/section of the book was the direct descendent of the phylum/class/order system first put in place in 1735 by Linnaeus to organize the plant and animal kingdoms. According to his most recent biographer, Joshua Kendall– The Man Who Made Lists: Love, Death, Madness, and the Creation of Roget’s Thesaurus (Berkley paper, $16)–his first list seems to have been "Dates of Deaths," which began with his father’s death date when Peter was 4. The first reverse-engineered dictionary was published in 1852 in London, when Roget was 73, after a lifetime of compulsive list-making.
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