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2 counter points: 1. Language needs to be somewhat homogenous. At an extreme, if the languages spoken by two academics are entirely heterogenous, they (literal
by nomilk 5y ago
2 counter points:
1. Language needs to be somewhat homogenous. At an extreme, if the languages spoken by two academics are entirely heterogenous, they (literally) won't understand a word the other is saying!
2. I recently investigated why there were 300 (!!) words I did not know the meaning of in a single George Orwell novel. Google N-Gram Viewer shows around 60-80% of these words to have been in common usage in 1934 when the novel was written, but not in common usage for some decades now [1]. Using these words today would increase lexical diversity, but at the expense of communicative effectiveness!
[1] https://tinyurl.com/2p8ujk7e https://tinyurl.com/2p8ujk7e
- airstrike 5y agoQuick, someone make a 1934 version of Wordle!
- avs733 5y agoI can hear the steampunk aesthetic from here.
- pcrh 5y agoI'm surprised you were unfamiliar with words like "mauve", "wanton" or "sallow". These are fairly common in today's UK, but maybe less so in the US vernacular? Jocosely is the only one I had a question over, until I realised it had the root "jocose".
- xwolfi 5y agoIt's because British people have such bad taste they still have mauve stuff. In French, the language it comes from, this color is synonymous with ugliness and the 60s hehe