Another Short History of Linguistics (78)

This topic is dealing with the most valuable 95% words of vocabulary vs. the most valuable 5% words of everyday use.

When we go to supermarket to buy something, the most cost (95%) of our money is not the real value of the goods but the price of distribution channel. Yet what we bought is the goods, and you can’t only buy the goods by its own value unless you avoid the distribution channel go to the place of production directly. Even thus they may not sell you the goods for protecting the distribution channel. Similarly, when we consult a doctor, 95% of our conversation is known by the patient, before seeing doctor. That means to say we pay doctor only for the rest 5% that we don’t know. Yet to tell you the most valuable 5% of conversation, the doctor had to spend 95% of his life time to learn it.

As for language study, these two examples tell us, it is easy to know 95% of our everyday conversation, because it just repeat less than 20,000 words (less than 5% of the vocabulary). But it is hard to know the rest 5% that occasionally and randomly encounter our life. It is represented by more than 95% of our vocabulary; as the English vocabulary is already over one million, it means around 980,000 words. A most difficult question is, no one knows when, which and where will meet one. Unfortunately, today, nearly all the linguists ignore this biggest and hardest issue, all of them focused on the easy 20,000 words, and busy on invent rules or grammars to teach people how to arrange these easy 20,000 words according linguists thought.