Really love German, Finnish bop da is an agglutinative language, with long words including many components
English: suited bop nam for) play with words.As follows speak was presented at the multinational conference celebrating the twentieth anniversary of the American Society for Geolinguistics at Ny College on April 20 1985
Let me put my cards on the table at first of this speak. I'm a language chauvinist--I believe English is the best of all dialects as it pertains to wordplay. For sure, occasionally I awaken up in the center of the night with the uncomfortable reckoned that i'm a product of my ecosystem, and that when I were a Frenchman Iwould be saying the similar thing about French. But Anways, i do think that an example could be made for English on quite a few grounds--some well-established, others wanting more confirmation. To conclude:
The quantity of English words
The polyglot mother earth of English words
The numerical structure of English words
http://thelineishere.org/ vi nam The syntax of English
I take a large view of what constitutes wordplay--from letter-manipulation to form palindromes and word squares, or through puns and cryptic crossword puzzle hints. Words are clusters of correspondences, clusters of noises, or carriers of meaning, and wordplay could take place in the least three degrees.
The quantity of words in English is sort of ill-defined. There're maybe 400,000 phrases and words within the 2nd version of Merriam Webster's Unabridged, not counting plurals of nouns, past tenses of verbs, and participles. As well as that, there are lots of words in mechanic and special dictionaries. More about the point, there are many words in English-language try on that do not crop up in any dictionary--neologisms, hyphenated coinages, inventions with prefixes or suffixes (namely -intelligent words or -gate words). If you uncertainty this, look at Kucera and Francis' million-word sample of American English (as of 1962) that lists 100s of such words among its 35,000 dissimilar types. I think which the actual count for English is quite a few million--and you need to definitely add one million more if you count surnames of individuals living in the U.S. as "words". I am aware of zero other language which lays claim to such a stock of words.
The dimension of the terminology upright impacts wordplay in at the minimum two ways. First, there's a finer possibility that particular word may be transformed into an additional by a letter-change, a letter-omission, a letter-insertion, or a letter-pair inversion (namely MINUTE-MINUET). It is pleasant to notice which the Reader's Digest has for centuries had a "Excuse, Your Glide Is Expressing" column reporting on funny typos of this mother earth, but zero analogous column in its foreign-language version.
Otherwise to observe the dimension of the English local library is thru synonymy. One listens to of statements namely "there're forty dissimilar Finnish words for varied snow conditions" that English does not have, but the best-ever winner for synonymy appears like the English word "drunk" or "inebriated". Quite a few folk have assembled sets of words or phrases for this, consisting of such worthies as Benjamin Franklin, the critic Edmund Wilson, and the author Henry L. Mencken, however it continued to be for Paul Dickson to bring together the decisive list of 2 synonyms from "abuzz" to "zozzled". (These are publicized in his magnificent book titled Read Full Report Words, compiled by Delacorte Squeeze in 1982.) If any other language could top this, Iwould like to listen onto it.
Big as the English word-stock is, it isn't perfect. There're a number of eventualities that other dialects have a unmarried word for, but that English must express by a circumlocution. A few of these were described by Dmitri Borgmann within the Feb . 1970 Word Ways. For example, the English phrase ONE AND ONE HALF is succinctly described by Polish POLTORA, German ANDERTHALB or Latina SESQUIALTER. (In reality the Polish likewise have the word POLOSMA for SEVEN AND ONE HALF!) Comparably, English THE DAY BEFORE The previous day is more compactly reported by German VORGESTERN or Spanish ANTEAYER, and English THE DAY Next The next day to come, by German UBERMORGEN, Italian DOPODOMANI or Polish POJUTRZE. To talk about relations, German uses GESCHWISTER for BROTHERS AND Siblings, Polish uses STRYJ for the paternal uncle and WUJ for the maternal uncle, and SZWAGROSTWO for one's husband's bro and his spouse.
Although I am unable to prove it, I think which the polyglot mother earth of English is additionally the cause of a fertile source of wordplay--homonyms, words spelled in a different way but pronounced the equivalent (as "bear" vi nam and "bear"), and heteronyms, words pronounced in a different way but spelled the equivalent (as "polish" and "Polish"). If sound and spelling are homogeneous, since they are to a lot better scope in most other dialects, Homonyms and heteronyms are correspondingly reduced, and you do not get such blissful puns as the narrative about the mummy whose cowboy kids named their hacienda Focus--where the sons rise meat.
I come at present about the 3rd explanation for why I suspect English is actually a superior wordplay language--the numerical structure of English words. This is often a much less-known pasture than language size or diversification, and much work needs to be done to elucidate variances among dialects and their relevancy to wordplay.
As a retired statistician, I've got a comparatively dissimilar view of Language than high of my attendees. At the minimum several of you have heard Eddington's claim, first made in 1927, that when you had a military of monkeys strumming on typewriters you must finally recreate all that books within the Brit Art gallery. What he did not declare was the time it would take--for example, it might take a monkey keying in ten characters for each 2nd about A hundred decillion years to generate the initial nine words of Hamlet's "to be or not to be" soliloquy. Just before the Brit Art gallery had been replicated, the whole of the galaxy will be filled with books abundant with gibberish, and there will be no chance of sorting the wheat from a chaff.
But still, the theorem is helpful one simulate a language by its correspondence frequencies? Better yet, what about utilizing its conditional frequencies (given which an E has seemed, what's the likelihood of each likely alphabetic correspondence tracking it in a randomly-selected text?). There're two pleasant articles on this subject, one by William R. Bennett jr within the Nov/Dec 1977 journal The American Scientist, and one by Brian Hayes within the Nov 1983 Methodical American mag. I cannot get into listings here, but they found which dialects are adequately dissimilar throughout their letter-frequency statistics that it's not hard for a person to inform the variation amongst second-order simulation of Latina, English, German, French, et cetera. If one arrives to fourth-order statistics (each correspondence based upon its kin frequency of appearance tracking three specified earlier correspondences), one can really distinguish among individual writers namely Shakespeare, Poe, Hemingway or Faulkner, based on their statistics. For sure, it's really barely startling which language variances appear with less conditionality than author differences--but what surprises me is how minor conditionality is required to simulate the "feel" of a language or an author.
What letter-frequency statistics augment or impede the suitability of a language for wordplay? The answer's not clean. It is stated which it is more difficult to build Italian crossword riddles than English ones. The correspondence dispersal of the finale correspondences in Italian words--Italian has a taller component to vowels than English does--is explained to formulate hard knocks in crossword construction since one needs words with many vowels to match a string of word-ends. Is this why there're zero 9-by-9 Italian word squares?
Having said that, Hawaiian has just A dozen dissimilar correspondences with five vowels, which results in a much larger number of long all-vowel words in Hawaiian than in English. It also generates such curiosities as long cadences--the equivalent correspondence recurrent at even intervals really love I in DIVISIBILITY. English has appropriated a noteworthy Hawaiian example, HUMUHUMUNUKUNUKUAPUAA (the Hawaiian triggerfish).
. This can be explanation why its longest palindrome, SAIPPUAKAUPPIAS, surpasses the longest English palindrome, KINNIKINNIK, by four correspondences.
The finale explanation for why English is superior for wordplay is its syntax. One facet of this is exploited in cryptic crosswords-a word could be lots of different sections of speech, causing muddled statements really love FLYING PLANES May be Perilous, where "flying" is either a gerund or an adjective. Petr Beckmann, in his book The Structure of Language--A New Approach (Golem Pres, 1972), vistas natural dialects as samples of error-detecting and blunder codes--that is, syntax offers various words and word-endings that don't bring info but simply are employed to supply a research for constancy, prefer the verb putting an end to S within the 3rd person unmarried, or gender pronouns. Beckmann argues which English has a much flimsier system of such consistency-checks than other dialects (virtually no case endings likened to Latina or Russian, zero gender for nouns, few verb-endings corresponding about the topic, et cetera.). In lieu. English resolves ambiguity by much stricter policies of word order.
For instance, in English, one declares "It's Greek to me", so Greek is ranked more difficult than English, In turn, the Greeks have a manifestation "It sounds as if Chinese with myself", so by Govern 2 Chinese is more difficult than English. In reality, his studies imply that Chinese 's the hands-down champion, being ranked more difficult by Spanish, Greek, Polish, Hebrew, Finnish, Estonian, Flemish, Hungarian, Romanian, Russian, Serbo-Croatian, Switzerland German and Philippine! As well as that it in a roundabout way dominates Czech, German, English, Nederlander, Afrikaans, Portuguese and French. So to whom do the Chinese turn? To Heaven, as evinced by their saying "It's heavenly script with myself". The Danes picked Volapak as their dominating language-an man-made language of the Eighteen Eighties said to be simple, but eclipsed by Esperanto.
It's maybe elemental which the Tower of Babel was constructed in this thing in the globe. It is also time for me to give up before I munch by myself tail, prefer the Ouroboros Earthworm featured in Eddison's 1922 science-fiction narrative!
A. ROSS ECKLER
Morristown, New Jersey
