Re: LUNATIC again

Christophe Grandsire wrote:
>         Until now, I didn't adress this thread, but I read each post of the
> subject. But here I can't accept this argument as most linguists I read
> books from wouldn't do. When you say "linguists reject conlangs as objects
> of study", you're totally wrong, as I know linguists that DON'T reject them.
But how can a linguist study a conlang?  It's artificial.  No matter how
realistic it is, how can it be an object of scientific study, at least
by linguists?  Studying conlangs (except *possibly* those created as
experiments) doesn't tell you anything about natural languages.

> Moreover, most people speak natlangs knowing only 2000 or less words
> (I read a study that said that an educated French person knows approximately
> only 5000 words -compare to the 1,200,000 words of French-).
No one really knows how many words people know, to use English as an
example, some have said that the average speaker knows a few hundred
words.  Another estimate put the number of words known by the *average*
American high-school graduate at 45,000-60,000, and that the average
*six-year old* knows about 13,000 words, so who knows how many words
people actually know?  It's very difficult to test, since people can
figure out what derived words mean without much difficulty, and homonyms
just totally screw everything up.  Is "hard" as in "not easy" and "hard"
as in "not soft" the same word or two?

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