At 08:51 PM 6/15/97 -0500, rcannon@usa.net wrote:
>Glenn,
>
>This was an understanding I received sometime during my studies of
>biblical Hebrew. I have forgotten the source, so I will have to look it
>up again. I assure you, however, that it is true.
>
>This does not necessarily limit the ability of the language to be used
>to communicate meaningful ideas. Moreover, complex ideas can be
>represented by individual words. For example, the Hebrew word "go'el"
>which is translated "redeemer" in English would require thousands of
>English words to express the idea that is encapsulated in that single
>Hebrew word. This is because we reside completely outside the cultural
>domain in which the meaning of the word was so clearly understood. In
>other words, much is said that goes unsaid.
>
>For an example of how much can be communicated with few words, just look
>at the Hebrew Old Testament. There are some thoroughly complex ideas
>expressed in a vocabulary of less than ten thousand words. The
>complexity of a language need not always be measured in the number of
>words in its popular vocabulary.
I agree that many complex ideas are communicated by only 10000 words. But
these 10000 words have prefixes, suffixes, tense markers etc. don't they?
That vastly increases the number of words actually available. While I don't
know Hebrew, Chinese gives an illustration. Chinese has only 500 sounds each
with 4 ways of pronounciation. Thus there are only 2000 spoken sounds.
"Chi" means eat (pronounced chir). 'Chi le' means 'ate' 'yao chi' means
will eat.
The two thousand spoken sounds are combined in various ways to produce an
almost infinite set of words.
Shi (pronounced sure) means "is', 'ten' 'yes'
Lao shi- teacher
yao shi- key
Da shi guan- embassy
A typical Chinese dictionary that only listed the roots, like Strongs,
probably would only have 10,000 entries or so. But their language is quite
complex and has many many more words than merely 10000.
Secondly, one must distinguish between the written word and the spoken word.
Shakespear only used around 15,000 words in all his plays and sonnets. As
I noted earlier, the average high schooler knows 45,000. He doesn't use
them all in his English compositions.
Thus, even if written Hebrew only had 10000 words, I would suspect that
there were more spoken ones than there are records of.
glenn
Foundation, Fall and Flood
http://www.isource.net/~grmorton/dmd.htm