Another Short History of Linguistics (79)

How the Dictionary Deal the 95% Words

Many years ago, before the internet dictionary had appeared, to deal with the unfrequently used words was biggest headache for the editor of any dictionary. No one knew that a suddenly emerged word would survival how long. Some new words, especially scientific and technical words or terms might disappeared before a dictionary going to be published; normally a process took one to two years. When a customer bought a dictionary it might contain many dead words that one could never meet in the future.

Today, we know that issue can be solved by the meaning alphabets or meaning letters. That is the pictogram, as Rene Descartes had dreamed for language.

By language law, we may easy to understand Chinese choosing the compound word system was based on the usage of tone and homophone. As they got roughly four times sounds as English and dozens time of homophones, their oral expression is shorter than English words, and shorter oral expression make the compound word easy to be pronounced. The key reason is still from the tone or quantity of sounds. English is undergoing to develop the tone this changing began from the Great Vowel Shift. The long and short vowel will finally lead English to a tone language like what happened in Chinese.