Re: lujvo policy

["Arthur W. Protin Jr." (GC-ACCURATE) <cbmvax!uunet!PICA.ARMY.MIL!protin>]

Folks,
    (I am still at it..)

Lojbab says:
> Finally, answering coranth - the key problem is that while the number
> of weords that a person in a given language 'knows' is reltively constant,
> the selection of words differs for each person.  There is no set of
> 20000 words that meets everybody's needs,and indeed probably by the
> time you get to the 100 active people we have learning Lojban now,
> you need a vocabulary base of 50000 to cover all of their individual
> needs if each needs only 20000.  (Of course the limit mentioned is
> statistical, and some people have vocabularies over 100000 words
> while others may have only around 10-20000)

Nice try.  Now go get the real data.  I can not remember all of it,
nor do I have good references but:
    1) There was(is) a word list that was used for the King James
        translation of the Bible,
    2) The Japanese have a "standard vocabulary" list that is used
        for both the testing of students for graduation from (their
        equivalent of) high school and for their newspapers,
        (every student should be able to read anything in the
        newspaper and the newspaper should print things that are
        universally readable)
    3) The New York Times has a vocabulary list that they try to
        limit their contributors to using.

I do not remember the exact size of these lists but they were within
the range of 6k to 16k.

Art


Arthur Protin <protin@pica.army.mil>
These are my personal views and do not reflect those of my boss
or this installation.