On 05/23/2001 08:31:40 AM Marco Cimarosti wrote: >Thou art right saying that thou doest not normally speak like an >international treaty. But wouldst thou say that these ><http://www.rosettaproject.org:8080/live/search/showpages?ethnocode=ENG&doct >ype=vocab&version=1&scale=six> really are the 100 most common words in thy >language? :-) How can anybody characterise "the 100 most common words in thy language"? The words I use most commonly today are different from what John uses most commonly today, and is also different from what either of us used most commonly a year ago. I suppose that you could take statistical counts of large corpora, like a month's worth of some large newspaper, but then even there it can be debated whether the sample is representative of common everyday speech -- but that brings us back to the very question of how we can decide what everyday common speech consists of. On the other hand, when I look at that list, it strikes me that my son probably knew and used all or nearly all of those words before he was five years old. To me, that is indicative that those words are pretty basic within my culture. It has been debated whether those exact semantic categories apply across all cultures or whether they can be considered basic across all cultures, but in the end, lots of linguists have found that list to be of some practical use. There are variations on the Swadish 100 list. In some situations I'm aware of, linguists have created regionally-tailored lists that basically extend the Swadish list by adding another 50 or 100 words that have been chosen with the cultures of only the given region in mind (not necessarily culture- or region-specific in the sense that they wouldn't exist elsewhere, but rather terms that are known to be appropriate for a given culture or region regardless of whether they would be appropriate elsewhere or not). But as far as I know, I believe linguists have typically extended the Swadish list rather than substitute a different list. - Peter --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Peter Constable Non-Roman Script Initiative, SIL International 7500 W. Camp Wisdom Rd., Dallas, TX 75236, USA Tel: +1 972 708 7485 E-mail: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
