Rappers, Sorted by Size of Vocabulary • Hacker News Board

Re: Rappers, Sorted by Size of Vocabulary

#51

Post by redacted » Sun, May 04, 2014, 5:14 PM UTC

octo_t wrote: post #15

htk wrote: post #5

"Each word is counted once, so pimps, pimp, pimping, and pimpin are four unique words" So much for the modern Shakespeares on the list.

unlike shakespeare who was so high class and never made 'your mom' jokes or used any toilet humour or anything like that.

And literally made pimp jokes:

http://poetry.rapgenius.com/William-shakespeare-hamlet-act-2...

Re: Rappers, Sorted by Size of Vocabulary

#52

Post by habosa » Sun, May 04, 2014, 5:16 PM UTC

Not surprised to see Wu Tang at the top and Drake at the bottom. Started from the bottom ... still there.

Re: Rappers, Sorted by Size of Vocabulary

#53

Post by htk » Sun, May 04, 2014, 5:17 PM UTC

VMG wrote: post #7

htk wrote: post #5

"Each word is counted once, so pimps, pimp, pimping, and pimpin are four unique words" So much for the modern Shakespeares on the list.

As well as the old Shakespeare who was ranked according to the same rules.

I haven't read all his work, but I guess Shakespeare didn't use "hangn" and "hangin" as an alternative to "hanging". The author could validate the words against a dictionary, but it would still be flawed due to conjugations being counted as different words.

Re: Rappers, Sorted by Size of Vocabulary

#54

Post by sarreph » Sun, May 04, 2014, 5:18 PM UTC

We might all be self-confessed hackers, but we'll never explicitly confess our adoration for the gloriousness of the genre that is gangster rap.

Re: Rappers, Sorted by Size of Vocabulary

#55

Post by Crito » Sun, May 04, 2014, 5:18 PM UTC

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?

I'm curious if words that Shakespeare invented count. There are many words that we see first used by Shakespeare, though some of them were probably words invented during his time by others with him merely being the first to record (in documents that survived until today).

Re: Rappers, Sorted by Size of Vocabulary

#56

Post by coherentpony » Sun, May 04, 2014, 5:20 PM UTC

quux wrote: post #45

I wonder where Weird Al Yankovic would come in on this ranking.

Weird Al's songs are not articulate masterpieces, but cheap parodies of other rap songs and rappers. He's probably somewhere around the 5,000 mark with the other artists.

A cursory google on the size of the average vocabulary [1] yields an interesting fact. I'm not sure how watertight it is. I realise it's probably unfair to compare the size of the average vocabulary to that of a series of songs. Songs being shorter for one. Still, it's interesting.

Re: Rappers, Sorted by Size of Vocabulary

#57

Post by jemfinch » Sun, May 04, 2014, 5:21 PM UTC

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?

Just like you or I know tens of thousands of words, but only use some small subset of them in any given work, you wouldn't expect that Shakespeare would use his entire productive vernacular in producing the limited corpus of his literary works.

Re: Rappers, Sorted by Size of Vocabulary

#58

Post by michaelt » Sun, May 04, 2014, 5:22 PM UTC

jebus989 wrote: post #40

sfrank2147 wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem with average per song is that you "use up" words in every new song, so all things being equal each marginal song has progressively fewer new words.

Strange comment, you realise that's not an inherent truth of language? Unique words per song is trivial to calculate

If a rapper released one song using n distinct words their score would be n/1, and if they released a second song using the same set of words their score would halve, to n/2, despite the fact their demonstrated vocabulary is still n words.

In fact, if their first song used n distinct words and their second used a completely distinct set of words, but the second song was shorter than the first, their score would drop.

That would be unusual behaviour for a measure of vocabulary.

Re: Rappers, Sorted by Size of Vocabulary

#59

Post by msutherl » Sun, May 04, 2014, 5:23 PM UTC

I would love to see this analysis without filters. Who is the rapper with the largest vocabulary? What does the distribution look like at the top? Surely Antipop Consortium or MF DOOM have larger vocabularies than Aesop for instance.

Re: Rappers, Sorted by Size of Vocabulary

#60

Post by S_A_P » Sun, May 04, 2014, 5:23 PM UTC

I think the only problem I see is that some rap groups are listed as rappers. For instance beastie boys, de la soul and wu tang are listed. So there is some collective vocabulary being compared to single rappers. That said this is cool and pretty telling. From what I could see it is probably loosely couple to the intelligence of the rappers listed. I will echo the sentiments about DMX here. Looks like some shock jock rappers definitely are low on the list (too short).