Whooo!

Dec. 17th, 2008 09:01 pm
hmpf: Me painted blue (fanatic)
Seems 'vague toe pain and what to do about it' is a topic that excites the minds hereabouts! ;-)

Thanks for all the replies. I don't have time/energy for individual replies today - my hour and a half of online time at work are almost over, and I'm also kind of really exhausted today. So, just a quick, err, heads-up on the toe matter, and other stuff:

1.) I've actually tried to go to the doctor today, only to find that he'd already left for his Christmas holiday. So I'll have to find another one (and pay extra) or wait till January. I am not *particularly* worried about the toe - I am aware that there's a 99.999% likelihood that it's something harmless - so I'm tempted to wait for January. Then again, the persistent pain is kinda annoying, so maybe I'll try a doctor near my parents' tomorrow after all. Oh, and to people who asked what the toe looks like, and how it reacts to being bent and prodded and whatnot: it looks completely normal, and has for all this time, even on the first couple of days when the pain was really strong; and poking, prodding, bending or pushing it with my fingers does not cause any pain beyond the dull ache that's already there.

2.) The next story arc, Torch, has begun at lightspeedpress.com. So far there's only seven pages, but they look seriously exciting. It seems that a lot of things that were only implicit until now are about to be made explicit. Carla Speed McNeil says that this is the beginning of the big story she always wanted to tell, and which will span the next three volumes of the series. So it seems that a lot of things are going to become explained, and a lot of dangling threads are about to be connected. I am excited and nervous - nervous, because it's kind of strange to be writing your thesis about what is in essence the prologue (or, in some cases, the epilogue?) to a much larger story that just happens to begin to be published as you're about to finish your thesis... A note to Finder newbies: from what I can see, this seems to be as good a place as any to jump in, and the seven pages that are up already give a surprisingly good introduction to the world of the comic, I think. I suspect that the story that's about to begin is going to feel a great deal more like an actual story than many of the previous offerings, which had more of a 'slice-of-life in a strange futuristic world' feel.

3.) I have figured out one small piece of the puzzle of why English is an erotic language to me. Specifically, why I enjoy *watching* people speak English: the "w" sound - a sound which does not exist in German - is essentially half a kiss placed on the air. 'course, it takes someone with nice lips to make this *really* erotic. (This finding brought to you by the scene in Miranda that has John Simm asking "why" four times in a row.)
hmpf: Cole and Ramse from the show not actually called "Splinter" (Default)
2008 is, as I noted earlier, the year I turn ten in fandom. I just noticed that 2007 also was the year of an important anniversary for me. Sometime in the latter part of that year I should have celebrated the 20th anniversary of my first acquaintance with another great love of my life: 1987 was the year I began to learn English. Heh.

(ETA: It was not, however, the year I fell in *love* with English. That happened later - around 1993, I think.)
hmpf: Cole and Ramse from the show not actually called "Splinter" (indescribable)
Watching the first episode of The Lakes, series two, and there's this scene with German tourists - naked German tourists, as it happens *g* - happily babbling away at Danny (John Simm's character) - and it felt so strange to suddenly hear German amidst all the English. I think it took me a moment - fraction of a second - to notice that there was a language switch, actually (this has happened to me before, this sort of slightly delayed realisation of 'hey, wait a sec, that's German!/English!'). And then I got sort of weirded out by the fact that Danny, of course, couldn't understand what they were saying, yet I could. It's odd to understand something the protagonist doesn't.

ETA: What's with the bizarre, 'We want to be Buffy the Vampire Slayer!'-type new credits???
hmpf: Cole and Ramse from the show not actually called "Splinter" (Default)
(Sorry, it's a "post many short entries day" in Hmpf country.)

As a native speaker of German, a fairly good second-language speaker (or, more precisely, writer ;-)) of English and a sometime dabbler in French, I've always "felt" that English had a lot more words than German, whereas French seemed to have a much smaller vocabulary than either English or German. However, I never had any "official" confirmation of this impression. Today, inspired by the Bill Bryson text, I actually did some research about this, and while I'm aware of the difficulty of trying to estimate the number of words in any given language, the estimates I did find seem to confirm my impression to some degree: according to the German Duden dictionary's website,

- German has between 300,000 and 500,000 words;
- English has between 600,000 and 800,000 words (another website put the number somewhere closer to a million)
- French has a puny 100,000 words.

(I tend to describe the difference between French and English this way: English has ten different words for everything; in French, ten different things have to share one word.)

ETA:

Bill Bryson: http://f2.org/humour/quotes/lang/bill-bryson.html

A German powerpoint presentation about English's tendency to acquire more vocabulary all the time: http://www.lrz-muenchen.de/~sprachwiss/sprawineuiso/web-content/downloadfiles/schmid/antrittsvorlesung.pdf - this contains a quote that gives the estimated English vocabulary as approximately 1,000,000 by summer 2006. It also has estimates for the "passive vocabulary" of people of a variety of levels of education:

secretary: 31,500 words
university lecturer: 56,250 words
voracious reader: 63,000 words

Of course, those numbers refer to native speakers.

Another paper I found (http://nti.btk.pte.hu/dogitamas/BHF_FILES/pdf/39Knipf/Kapitel%201-2.pdf) gives the active vocabulary of a native speaker well-used to writing as around 10,000 words, and the average passive vocabulary as 50,000. The average active vocabulary of a person *not* used to writing a lot can be as low as 6,000, though.

So, the passive vocabulary of a reasonably educated person looks to be of a fairly similar size for speakers of the two languages - slightly above 50,000 seems a realistic estimate. And since I have no comparable number for writers of English, and the size of the passive vocabulary seems to be similar, I think it's reasonable to assume that the active vocabulary of a practiced writer would be in a similar range, too - 10,000+?

I wonder where on those scales I am. The situation is complicated somewhat by the weird fact that in English, I seem to have two different kinds of 'active' vocabulary. My speaking vocabulary is very small - based on the numbers given above I wouldn't be surprised to find it in the 6,000 words range; perhaps even less. My active *written* English vocabulary, however, is on par with that of (slightly?) above average native speakers, I'd say. (Notice I said vocabulary, not grammar. I can get very confused by grammar, but I know lots of words. *g*) In German I notice no such extreme difference between the vocabularly available to me when speaking and when writing.

So... 6,000 for speaking English, slightly above 10,000 for writing English, and slightly above 10,000 for writing German, with perhaps a *little* less for speaking - 9,000, maybe? I'm almost certain that my written English vocabularly is larger than my spoken German vocabulary. Which... is a bit bizarre, come to think of it!

As for passive vocabulary... well, I'm a voracious reader in both languages. I've been reading German since around age 8 (that would be 22 years ago now), and English since around age 16 (14 years ago), and been reading predominantly in English since I reached the necessary level of proficiency (at around 20, i.e. ten years ago). I know I don't encounter many words that are completely unknown to me anymore, neither in German nor in English, and I read some authors with fairly large vocabularies. So... 60,000 passive, for both languages? Maybe. Maybe even more?

Not that it matters. I'm just kind of amazed by those numbers. :-)

July 2021

S M T W T F S
    123
45 678910
11121314151617
18192021222324
25262728293031

Syndicate

RSS Atom

Most Popular Tags

Style Credit

Expand Cut Tags

No cut tags
Page generated Jun. 7th, 2025 10:54 am
Powered by Dreamwidth Studios