2014年3月13日星期四

Multilingualism, Mission: Impossible (XI)

We have talked ten times of ‘impossible’ now let’s say something possible. The idea of mastering millions words in short time is from rationalism. Start from Aristotle and matured by Leibniz, The sample of practice is the Binomial nomenclature of Swedish natural scientist Carl Linnaeus Suppose in the world, there is one million biologic species, if we remember them one by one, it is impossible. For as we have told, normal person can only remember 30,000 words during life time. Biologist have to live in a society, so he have to leave room for some other words for communication with people.
Beside this, sometimes a single name may represent different species in different area of the globe, and likewise, some different name represent the same species too. In other words, if one can remember all the one million words and their detail, there are no problem. Since our memory don’t allow us to do that, so we find a special way to do it. For instance, we classify the similar species into one thousand groups, then we use the same profiles to describe every species in these groups. Suppose every group has one thousand members, and we describe them with same profiles, so we only remember the name of the one thousand groups and the name of one thousand profiles of every group.  We only remember the two thousand name but we mastered one million name of species. It give us a much clearer image according my post ‘How Our Memory Is Built?’ that with less words, we can repeat more times, the more times lead to better remembrance. Not only this, the Binomial nomenclature give us a chance to compare different species between groups and different profile of species in the same group, while the normal nomination system could not do this.

Likewise, today we may use the same principle to deal with the one million English words and the further few million too. That is to say, after the reform we only learn few thousand fundamental words and we can master few million normal words. And this is rationalism.

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