How many words do you need?
Posted: Fri May 11, 2012 7:35 pm
I thought I'd share this little fact with you that had me mildy astonished this afternoon. I was processing some folk tales and it turns out that across 25 A5 pages of text, this storyteller only used 632 roots. What I mean with roots is that, for example, using balach, bhalach, balaich counts as one root or chì, chunnaic, faca, faicinn, fhaicinn only count as one root, even though it's a lot more words.
It reminded me of something Niall said at some point, something about terminology overload or rather, the idea of learning a language with a fairly small vocabulary to begin with. Of course Gaelic makes thinks a little more time-intenstive but each root having so many different forms but on the bright side, it seems Niall was right, you can say a lot with relatively few words.
It reminded me of something Niall said at some point, something about terminology overload or rather, the idea of learning a language with a fairly small vocabulary to begin with. Of course Gaelic makes thinks a little more time-intenstive but each root having so many different forms but on the bright side, it seems Niall was right, you can say a lot with relatively few words.
