The march to the millionth word

[kickingfrog]

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/nation...article1156218/

 

 

Erin Anderssen

 

Ottawa — From Thursday's Globe and Mail, Wednesday, May. 27, 2009 09:19PM EDT

 

What fundoo To mark a potentially Phelpsian achievement, a quendy-trendy online dictionary is predicting that the English language is about to acquire its one-millionth word.

 

Maybe it’s already sprouted over the internet, Twitter-ready. Or caught like a virus across the call-centre cubicles of India, those incubators of language innovation that added fundoo (a more cheerful version of cool) to the lexicon. Or fallen fresh from the lips of a student in China who’s mashed up a catchy new offering in Chinglish.

 

Wherever the word pops out, these days the English language – with its 1.5-billion speakers worldwide – is undeniably prolific. A web-based dictionary that tracks speech patterns of the planet’s most common tongue estimates a new word is born roughly every 98 minutes – which makes 5:22 a.m. EST on June 10 the due date for number one million.

 

At least that’s according to the somewhat arbitrary calculations of Paul Payack, president of the Global Language Monitor. Five years ago, he began adding words to traditional dictionaries by searching out new arrivals across the internet. To make his list, a word has to be cited 25,000 times across a wide range of sources and geographical locations.

 

“It has to have a global footprint,” said Mr. Payack, a marketing consultant by profession and wordsmith by preoccupation, who gushes about the marvellous utility of his favourite word: stuff. (Give it a try, he suggests: where doesn’t “stuff” work in a sentence?) More recent acquisitions to his list are entries such as Obamamania, noob and Octomom. Words which, as Mr. Payack admits, may not live forever – and don’t exactly roll off the tongue at the dinner table. But words that nonetheless will tell future generations something about the culture that produced them.

 

“Will people be using Obamamania 100 years from now? Probably not,” he said. “But you will not understand the 2008 presidential election without understanding the concept.”

 

Mr. Payack’s countdown to the millionth word, naturally, leaves many linguists speechless. The one word his critics choose most often is “gimmick.” As the lexicographers on the Oxford English Dictionary website explain, it’s impossible to settle on the question of word count: Where do you start the list? What gets included?

 

Count numbers – which Mr. Payack doesn’t – and you’d have an infinite stack of words. Chemicals, also not counted, would make 60 million to start, and there are enough different kinds of mushrooms to replace the roughly 290,000 stand-alone words in the Oxford, two times over. You may quibble with his criteria, but Mr. Payack – noting that Noah Webster, creator of the first American dictionary, wasn’t a trained linguist either – points out that at least his list documents new language in the mouse-click speed with which it appears.

 

The Oxford Dictionary, though more academic in approach, has also been picking up the pace, with online additions every three months. Last December, “ew” – as in “yuck” – made the cut. In March, the dictionary okayed “achy-breaky,” noting that the adjective had outlasted the Billy Ray Cyrus chart-topper that made it famous, possibly because of its “capacity to prompt either extremely positive or negative reactions in the people who hear it – not unlike the song itself.”

 

And criticisms aside, the Global Language Monitor clearly demonstrates how quickly English is morphing – and how slowly. “What’s interesting about a million is that it’s such a tiny number compared to all the words we could have,” said Mark Pagel, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Reading who studies the comings and goings of words across history. (Using any combination of seven consonants with two vowels, for example, creates more than 100-million potential words.) But even with a relatively small pile to call on, words are mostly fleeting. (The Oxford English Dictionary has a list of words that have appeared on record only once in hundreds of years.) A small number of essential words such as “two” or “you” – or their variations – are ancients in the language family, Dr. Pagel said.

 

“Had you been wandering around the plains of Eurasia 15,000 years ago, at the end of the last Ice Age, you probably could have said ‘thou’ and someone would have know you were referring to them. We think that’s pretty astonishing.”

 

On the other hand, he suggested, verbs such as “push” and “stab” likely don’t have long to last – maybe a few hundred years if they’re lucky. An adjective such as “dirty” isn’t likely to be rolling off the tongues of our future descendents, though one assumes they’ll still need a word to describe the condition. Dr. Pagel is also monitoring the steady demise of “couch,” steamrollered by “sofa.”

 

Bragging rights aside, the fact is we don’t need a million words, or, really, even a thousand – fun as “fundoo” may be. One quarter of everything we say can be pared down to 25 basic words: two, the, and, of course, me, among them.

[ozaibak1]

Interesting...