The Millionth Word

Discussion in 'Linguistics' started by Gustav, Aug 15, 2009.

  1. Gustav Banned Banned

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    “As expected, English crossed the 1,000,000 word threshold on June 10, 2009 at 10:22 am GMT. However, some 400 years after the death of the Bard, the words and phrases were coined far from Stratford-Upon-Avon, emerging instead from Silicon Valley, India, China, and Poland, as well as Australia, Canada, the US and the UK,” said Paul JJ Payack, president and chief word analyst of the Global Language Monitor. “English has become a universal means of communication; never before have so many people been able to communicate so easily with so many others.”

    /eek

    "Web 2.0" takes the honors
    why i do not know
    obscure
    looks like shit
    is it even a single word?

    But it's hardly new. Indeed, volume 12 of my treasured Oxford English Dictionary tells me that the word 'web' has been knocking around since the beginning of the 8th century, when it meant: 'Woven fabric; spec. a whole piece of cloth in process of being woven or after it comes from the loom.' (It must have been a huge relief to the nation's cloth-weavers when 'web' came along, to spare them having to repeat that mouthful 50 times a day.)

    The digits 2.0 have been around even longer, since the revolutionary decimal Hindu-Arabic numeral system was invented in India in the middle of the 6th century. But they're a number, for goodness' sake, not a word. You can't just stick an ancient word and an ancient number together and claim you've coined a spanking-new word. (link)
     
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  3. Fraggle Rocker Staff Member

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    Weave, web, weft, woof, warp... These are all related words from the same Germanic root. They all pertain to the craft of weaving.

    I agree that calling Web 2.0 a word is stretching the definition. It's a rule in English, and I believe in all languages that use phonetic alphabets or abjads, that a written word contains no embedded spaces. After all, a space is the universally recognized delimiter that tells us where one word ends and the next begins!

    Dog house, window sill, surf board and rail road are all two word phrases. They did not become two-syllable compound words until the space between them disappeared: doghouse, windowsill, surfboard, railroad.

    So if you see it written Web2.0 then we can talk. Of course what we'll talk about then is orthographic conventions. Written English words are spelled out using ONLY letters of the alphabet (and lately we've become generous with foreign extensions to the Roman alphabet such as ç, ñ and ü), hyphens and apostrophes. Not other punctuation marks such as periods, exclamation points or parentheses, and not numerals! That is computer code, not English!
     
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  5. Pandaemoni Valued Senior Member

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    I think the "Global Language Monitor" is a bit of a scam.

    First, that is a bit of a ostentatious title for the organization

    they claim to track the creation of "every word" in English? The most they could say is that Web 2.0 is the millionth word that they bothered to take note of, not that existed.

    Second, they seem to using the subsequent media coverage to sell a book. In fact, I have a sneaking suspicion that they used this "count" to drum up media interest so their President and Chief Analyst Paul JJ Payack could sell his book about there being a million words. (The book is here and it is hawked as the first thing on their home page.)

    Third, "Web 2.0" has been around since at least the late 1990s. So why is it now the millionth word? How the Hell have they tracked it to a specific time and date? 10:22 a.m. GMT on June 12. Sounds like impressive accuracy, but it's too impressive given that the term existed for at least decade before then.

    For some reason, this company bugs the crap out of me. They seem to use British accents in their videos, use "GMT" as a measurement, a lot of the news reports I've seen were from the BBC and Guardian and other British press outlets. This company is based in Texas. The British-realignment of this Californa-transplanted-to-Texas company feels calculated to me, to make them seem more official. If they had announced in a Texan accent "We done passed a million words, yall!" that would not sell as many books.

    I think "a million words" was what they rest of call "free publicity."


    Edit: OMG. Looking at their site more, they seem to have two officers (at least two listed officers). Paul JJ Payack, who is selling a book. The only other listed officer is Millie Lorenzo Payack, who at a site for "The Global Language Monitor" that analyzes trends in the development of the English language is listed as their "Director & Fashion Correspondent."

    Strange that the Oxford English Dictionary does list their Fashion Correspondent on their website. I'll bet the OED and GLM Fashion Departments have a TOTAL rivalry.
     
    Last edited: Aug 16, 2009
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  7. Nasor Valued Senior Member

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    It was obviously just some idiots trying to get free publicity by making an announcement that they don't actually have any particular authority to make.
     
  8. Fraggle Rocker Staff Member

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    The English language is not overseen by an academy, like French, or by the government, like German. No authority decides what words are part of its vocabulary, so there's no "official list" anywhere.

    It's reasonable to say that our language has a million words. I assume so anyway; I haven't actually looked up the sources for this statistic, and in order to be absolutely certain it has to be quite a bit over a million. But there's no way to say precisely on what date the millionth word was added, and there's absolutely no way to say which word it was!

    Moreover, as I noted earlier, I question the scholarship of these people. They nominated a character string that violates the definition of "a word" in at least three ways:
    • Numerals
    • Period/Decimal point
    • Embedded space
    If they want to call it web-two-point-zero (or even web-two-dot-oh) with hyphens, the numerals spelled out, and no blanks, then at least it satisfies the definition. Then we can argue over whether it's really hyphenated as a single word. If it's spoken as web two-dot-oh, with the same space they used in spelling, then it is inarguably more than one word.

    No one ever says Windows-ninety-five or Windows-ex-pee run together like it was a single word. It would be like saying Rolls-Royce-Silver-Cloud or Harley-seventy-four is one word.
     
    Last edited: Aug 17, 2009
  9. Gustav Banned Banned

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    i like an exception to be made.....n00b
    thanks

    Payack counts staycation, Facebook and Wikipedia as words. But he also follows some of the old rules. For example, words that are both noun and verb, such as "water" are counted only once.

    i disagree
    count em twice

    turns out the dics are data mining as well tho with more exacting standards

    Groups of editors at a dictionary watch specific subject areas, logging the hits a new word gets. A "hit" is a mention in a book, newspaper or Web site. Then they put the hits in a database and compare the new terms to words they already have. So although Facebook, being a brand name, doesn't qualify, every word in Shakespeare's plays does – including cap-a-pie ("from head to foot") and fardel ("burden").

    the million word march
     
    Last edited: Aug 18, 2009
  10. Gustav Banned Banned

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    oh and one more thing about data mining in cyberspace, would it not be the case that the deck would be stacked in favor of computer jargon?
     
    Last edited: Aug 18, 2009
  11. Fraggle Rocker Staff Member

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    "Water" is one word. Lots of words have more than one meaning and can serve as more than one part of speech.
    • The sheep are grazing out on the village green. Noun.
    • Don't wear a green dress to my wedding. Adjective.
    • Our company is greening the cafeteria and reducing the use of plastic. Verb.
    There are of course a few cases in which two words from two different sources with two unrelated meanings become homonyms due to accidents of phonetics. They should be counted separately.
    Yes but probably only slightly. Truly, people and organizations who use computer technology are likely to know more IT terminology than those who don't. Nonetheless most of the content in cyberspace is not about IT. There's a limit to how much geekspeak you can use in a love letter or a blog about mosquito abatement.
     

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