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/lit/ - Literature

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20613834 No.20613834 [Reply] [Original]

Shakespeare is well regarded as to use 25-35k words in his plays.

On comparison, haruhi susumiya, a novel that is used as literacy test on some japanese colleges has around 7-8k diferent words.

What can we conclude from this?

>> No.20613837

>>20613834
>What can we conclude from this?
That this is a low-effort thread.

>> No.20613844
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20613844

>>20613837
>muh board quality

>> No.20613899
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20613899

Logographic scripts tend to have smaller vocabularies than phonetic scripts, for obvious reasons. Japanese is partially a logographic, partially syllabic language, while english is purely alphabetical (if you don't count arabic numerals, which are technically logograms).

>> No.20613917

>>20613899
yeah, but I wasnt expecting such radical diferences of japanese having a 4-5X times smaller vocabulary size than english or spanish.

WTF

I mean, this is fucking amazing for me, but still wtf.

>> No.20614094
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20614094

>>20613917
An even starker comparison is Korean and Japanese, given their geographic and cultural proximity. But logographic languages are also uniquely unsuited for movable-type printing, which has typically ballooned vocabularies. Japan only adopted it in the early 1800's, ~350 years after it's dissemination in Europe. They're also terrible from modern word-processors and keyboards. And they cant absorb foreign languages very readily either, unlike phonetic scripts.

>> No.20614404

>>20613899
>Logographic scripts tend to have smaller vocabularies than phonetic scripts,
scripts do not possess a vocabulary

>>20614094
>logographic languages
"logographic" is a type of writing systems, not a language

>>20613917
Are you actually so retarded that you compare the vocabulary of a renaissance playwright to a light novel and make conclusions regarding entire languages?

>> No.20614613

>>20613834
it's probably got more to do with the fact that japan wasn't conquered by, say, the chinese, and had its entire ruling class replaced wholesale by chinese who then used chinese exclusively as an administrative language, while also developing an extensive institutional religious system intertwined with the state that exclusively used, say, sanskrit for all of its documents and rituals, in addition to having large populations of semi-hostile non-japanese living in different parts of the country speaking distinct languages but derive from the same language family as japanese.

>> No.20615018
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20615018

>>20613834
>What can we conclude from this?
That different works have different lengths? What the fuck are you on about?

>> No.20615102

>>20613834
shakespeare also invented a bunch of words as well