The basic set of Japanese kanji characters is about 2000, of which almost 1000 are used more for people's names than for normal communication. "Basic English" http://www.diac.com/~entente/basicpg.html appears to have 850 words. "5 to 6 year olds have a working vocabulary of 2,500 to 5,000 words" "The average student learns about 3,000 words per year in the early school years -- that's 8 words per day" http://www.balancedreading.com/vocabulary.html "Levels of Vocabulary 500 words: Enough to communicate the most basic needs and thoughts 2,000 words: A "working" vocabulary, i.e., enough to carry on a basic conversation. 15,000-20,000 words: The average size of the vocabulary of US high school graduates. Remember, how you count "active" (words you can use yourself) and "passive" (words you recognize when you see or hear them) vocabulary can change this number greatly. This is the TOEFL-level of vocabulary. 25,000-35,000 words: The average size of the vocabulary of a the same high school student after s/he finishes college. 35,000-50,000 words: The average size of the vocabulary of well educated writers and others who use English well. This is the GRE-level of vocabulary." I understand that the Shakespeare corpus contains approximately 30,000 words, but many of these have the same root, so it contains perhaps only 20,000 "unique" words. I think that chess masters memorize perhaps 25-50k patterns, which is a "vocabulary" of sorts. By the way, at an average of 5 characters per word, and 5 bits per character, an adult vocabulary takes approx. 1.25Mbits. Even with a significant amount of cross-linking, such a vocabulary would still not take more than perhaps 100Mbytes. Human DNA, on the other hand, is about 2-4GBytes (i.e., the size of a 32-bit address space). So, at least in terms of bits, "nature" beats "nurture" hands down. At 10:49 PM 6/10/2004, Thane Plambeck wrote:
From the Guardian, in a perhaps already suspect article about a dog with a large vocabulary: http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,3604,1236272,00.html
"From the age of two, children start to pick up 10 words a day: a teenager typically knows 60,000 words."
* * * * This seemed at bit high, at 60,000
Opening a 1500 page dictionary to a random page, I counted 25 main entries. Of these, I didn't know
"feer" (to draw the first furrow in ploughing) "feis" (an ancient Irish assembly) "feldsher" (in Russia and parts of Eastern Europe, a partly trained person who practices medicine) "Felibre" (a member of Provencal literary brotherhood)
and I was proud to already know
"feldgrau" (field-gray, the color of German military uniforms)
as well as one naughty word that happened to appear on the same page.
Some more random experiments yielded similar results.
I don't think many teenagers know that many words
Thane Plambeck 650 321 4884 office 650 323 4928 fax http://www.plambeck.org