Now let’s check, how many English words an English
speaker has? Scientist found a 9 to 15 months baby might
know its first word, 17 to 19 months they might learn 50 words. Later, it might
get 8 words for every week. As their understanding developed when
they were 6 years old, their vocabulary might be 2500-13000. It seemed, after
this age, no one had ever studied carefully. So the numbers were quite
different, someone said an educated person had to have 50,000 words; other said
it could be 70,000 words, the maximum was 250,000 words. Now let’s check the
number by math. Suppose a new born baby, from the first day, it learnt 10 words
daily and never forgot them again. During
365 days, it got 10x365=3650 words. When it was 10 years old, it got
36,500words. When it was 80 years old, it got 10x365x80=two hundred and ninety
thousands words. Coincidently, it was the number that listed on last version of
Oxford dictionary. Yet that dictionary only contained the word of literature, as
for the scientific words, they said scientific words from appearing to
disappearing was quick, before the dictionary was printed, the word might have gone.
But the Webster Dictionary took scientific words, it was about 400,000 words.
Today, the English could be two million words already. From history record, we
know that Winston. Churchill was said to have
30,000 words, professor like Haldane was known as 50,000 to 60,000 words. At Shakespeare’
time, English only had 30,000 words, so scholars believed that Shakespeare only
had 20,000 words. If the standard of educated person was 50,000 words, then both
Churchill and Shakespeare were illiterate, at least semiliterate. Comparing
with the Chinese educated person, they only learnt 3,000 characters that is enough.
If they were smart as 6 years old knowing 2500-13,000 characters like above
mentioned. Then they didn’t need to learn any words after this age. In the year
1988, China published a Chinese-English dictionary; they used 4,800 characters
to match more than one hundred thousand English terms. And at the same time an
English-Chinese dictionary using the same 4,800 characters to explain 1,480,000
English words.
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