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Rappers, Sorted by Size of Vocabulary

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Re: Rappers, Sorted by Size of Vocabulary

#41

Post by maaku »

mbillie1 wrote: post #28
Aardwolf wrote: post #24

> Shakespeare’s vocabulary: across his entire corpus, he uses 28,829 words, suggesting he knew over 100,000 words Why does that suggest he knew over 100k words? Maybe it means he knew 28,829 and used all of them? Would he really know over 70,000 words he never used in his works? What would those 70,000 words be? Probably very obscure ones. How can you know that many obscure ones?

Vocabulary has for a while been considered in terms of 'receptive' and 'productive' capacity, with the assumption being that ones 'receptive' vocabulary can be larger, since it is easier to hear/read/understand a word than it is to use it correctly in reading/writing (this is not necessarily the popular opinion anymore [ http://www.readingconnect.net/web/FILES/english-language-and... ] but may provide the context for…

Assumptions tend to break down at the extremes.

E.g. Shakespeare actually invented a lot of the obscure words he used.

Re: Rappers, Sorted by Size of Vocabulary

#42

Post by orbitur »

unfunco wrote: post #14

This is fascinating. I'm only a recent listener of hip-hop (primarily because of Earl Sweatshirt and Odd Future) and I'm in awe of the vernacular. And similarly, as a boredom exercise a few weeks ago I did some lexical analysis of the song Timber (the monstrosity was being constantly played on the radio at the time) and here's what I came out with: "83.1% of the words in the lyrics are five letters or less, 58.9% are…

> Eleven people were involved with the writing of the song, each of them capable of producing just nine unique words each.

I'm not sure why this is notable when you consider that lyrics are probably the least important aspect of a song intended for the top 40.

If you take a moment to listen to the melody and production, you'd probably see why it's credited to 10+ people. That song is a well-oiled machine.

Re: Rappers, Sorted by Size of Vocabulary

#43

Post by christiangenco »

skylan_q wrote: post #3

Kool Keith should be exempt from this list. He's not from any of the 4 regions listed, but from Jupiter.

For those who didn't get the reference:

> Dr. Octagon is a persona created and used by American rapper Keith Matthew Thornton, better known as Kool Keith...Dr. Octagon is an extraterrestrial time traveling gynecologist and surgeon from the planet Jupiter. [1]

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dr._Octagon

Re: Rappers, Sorted by Size of Vocabulary

#44

Post by sroerick »

Aardwolf wrote: post #24

> Shakespeare’s vocabulary: across his entire corpus, he uses 28,829 words, suggesting he knew over 100,000 words Why does that suggest he knew over 100k words? Maybe it means he knew 28,829 and used all of them? Would he really know over 70,000 words he never used in his works? What would those 70,000 words be? Probably very obscure ones. How can you know that many obscure ones?

The 28K figure is acheived by counting multiple spellings of the same word. Shakespeare lived before dictionaries, so there was never a single standard way to spell a word.

Re: Rappers, Sorted by Size of Vocabulary

#47

Post by krick »

Really interesting, but not as representative as it should be. It's not clear why some have larger vocabulary than others. It could be using words like "zeitgeist" (in case of Aesop Rock) or some clever wordplay (I don't know much about hip-hop, so I can't find example for some artist from the list right off the bat, but I remember Marilyn Manson using word "gloominati" for instance) or pretty meaningless made up words like "schizzle" (in case of Snoop Dogg) or usual derivatives like "fuckedy fuck". Moreover, in many transcripts for hip-hop people write down words as they are pronounced, which can be pretty much distorted for some artists (which of course ideally shouldn't count as a "new word", but that's complicated, yeah).

While Aeson Rock and DMX are clearly extreme and not surprising at all, it's not that clear for some guys in the middle.

So, first off, for every data project sources should be provided, or at least more specific definition, how text was processed, tokenized, analyzed. Second, several more "data slices" should be provided, for instance 100 most used words which are unique for that artist compared to other artist in the list.

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