It seems like their long-tail data is full of misspellings. Try typing in "vacillate" and looking at the other words on the graph in relative frequency, for example.
The Long Tail of the English Language
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Re: The Long Tail of the English Language
#52I wonder how other languages compare to English. I know English is far from pure. "The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don't just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary." -- James Nicoll
Zipf's law [1,2] generally holds for a corpus in any natural language and can be applied to a lot of other things outside linguistics as well.
[1] Zipf’s word frequency law in natural language: http://colala.bcs.rochester.edu/papers/piantadosi2014zipfs.p... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zipf%27s_law
Re: The Long Tail of the English Language
#53It seems like their long-tail data is full of misspellings. Try typing in "vacillate" and looking at the other words on the graph in relative frequency, for example.
No corpus is ever "clean". Depending on the type of corpus there might be many misspellings, so obviously they will occur in the graph alongside other low-frequency words.
Re: The Long Tail of the English Language
#54If you have the right kind of friends you can play "Who knows the most obscure word?". Everyone picks a word from memory, check each word's position (We used to use google ngrams, but this would work well.), whoever gets the least common word wins that round, repeat until it's not fun anymore. That's how I learned defenestrate, obsequious, and a few other words.
I love "sesquipedalian", because it's so self-referential.
I love "non-self-referential" because if I use it enough times with all the correct stresses and pauses, I can build a computer.
Re: The Long Tail of the English Language
#55Earlier quoted context omitted.
What do you mean by "pure"? Lack of loanwoards? Lack of any linguistic changes (e.g., sound, meaning) for existing words? Lack of any innovation, i.e. no new words for new concepts/objects? You could try to find some of these things in languages spoken by rather isolated groups. Yet I don't think one should call such a language "pure", implying some kind or (moral) superiority.
Compared to Classical Latin for instance, I can sort of intuitively see how a "purity" comparison might make some sense. The grammar is more rich and precise, suffixes and prefixes attached to primitive roots are more regular in terms of meaning. Meaning is very decoupled from word order, which allows much richer possibilities for rhyme and prose. If the restored pronunciation is anything to go by, then the pronuncia…
Isn't the 'purity' of Latin due more to the fact that we just don't have much data on the languages that informed it? I'm sure Latin borrowed heaps of words and grammar from other languages, but those languages are mostly lost to history now, since the people who spoke them didn't conquer and hold the Mediterranean for one thousand years.