Words, words, words

August 19, 2005

The Patrick O’Brian aficionados are cranking up their annual ‘flowing sheets’ competition, a writing contest with essays limited to 600 words. Here is an exchange between participants having English as a second language.

On Fri, 19 Aug 2005 09:42:46 +0200, Satyam wrote:

>600 words sounds like a practical limit to me, that’s about the
>number of English words I know! Can you repeat words?
>
>Actually wondering how many words does an average person
>know, ‘average’ meaning those who don’t know that fornicate has
>to do with scales.
>
>Satyam

It depends. Many years ago I read some articles on this subject, but I may be slightly off target in the figures. I hope more knowledgable Lissuns will correct me where needed.

In one’s mother tongue the average person comes by with between 1500 and 2500 words actively used, including 200 to 500 specific jargon connected with one’s profession or hobby. A lowly educated person who never writes and hardly ever reads has (far) less, an academicaly trained and/or heavily reading person like your avearge Lissun may easily be up to over 5,000 actively used words or more. Passively known words (=words one can easily enough understand but would not or hardly use oneself) are several times the number a person uses actively.

If one actively knows 600 words in a foreign language, one has a workable knowledge of that language, sufficient for daily use, like for ordering a hotelroom or a meal, instructing a taxidriver, and conducting simple conversation at the level of “Where are you from?” and “I like
your beautiful country very much!” and discussing football (which is about my level in French or Indonesian). For more profound
conversations and reading simple literature (like James Bond or Harry Potter) more is needed: at least 1200 active and 5,000 passive, a level
that I had in English when graduating from HighSchool at A-levels. I believe Mira now has attained it in the Dutch (she is reading HP5 in
Dutch now), allowing her to enter into university to take a course for a Master Degree. (Which she has an interview with a study-councillor
this morning and it’s only her linguistical skill that may disqualify her.
If they do turn her down, she should take another course with classes in English, but for several reasons we prefer Dutch).

I think foreigners reading and enjoying the Canon (which of course includes all non-anglophone Lissuns) must have at least 5,000 passively known general words plus several hundred jargon, both nautical, medical and other jargon like ‘tumblehome’ and ‘treepanning’ and ‘calling out’. So I
make no doubt Satyam has much more then 600 actively known words and therefor his contribution should be allowed to be longer as well.

Jaap, who had to look up both ‘debauched’ and ’sloth’