Ku rupapuro rw'ibirimwo
Kwishura

100 words

ca, kivuye

Ubutumwa 13

ururimi: English

Cheeky (Kwerekana umwidondoro) 17 Nyandagaro 2010 18:06:16

Could someone please post an Esperanto version of The Tony Buzan idea that 50% of any language is made of 100 words.I've come across a it in both English and Portuguese but not Esperanto.

Thanks
Kevin

Miland (Kwerekana umwidondoro) 17 Nyandagaro 2010 18:21:01

According to Colin Allan's Take Note in Pitmanscript, it is 69 words which account for 50 per cent of words used in ordinary English.

However, if I correctly understand the idea that you have referred to, here's one suggestion:

Cent vortoj respondas pri duono de la vortoj uzataj en iu ajn lingvo. "A hundred words account for a half of the words used in any language."

ncowham (Kwerekana umwidondoro) 18 Nyandagaro 2010 14:22:51

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Most_common_words_in_...

This is a wikipedia article that is useful, but seems to be biased due to an unrepresentative sample of the available corpus. Read the 'talk' page to see some of the problems with this list and ways to improve it.

ncowham (Kwerekana umwidondoro) 18 Nyandagaro 2010 14:26:25

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Most_common_words_in_...

This is a wikipedia article that is useful, but seems to be biased due to an unrepresentative sample of the available corpus. Read the 'talk' page to see some of the problems with this list and ways to improve it.

erinja (Kwerekana umwidondoro) 18 Nyandagaro 2010 15:04:48

lernu has some lists of most-frequent words, by category; that is, category 1 = most frequent, category 2 = next most frequent, etc. You can learn the words category by category to improve your vocabulary in a targeted way. The lists are incorporated into lernu's word learning system here, or else you can get a complete list (appropriate for printing or importing into a flashcard program) here (the number after each word indicates which frequency category it's in)

qwertz (Kwerekana umwidondoro) 18 Nyandagaro 2010 15:59:37

@erinja: Thanks for that. I assume that the lernu.net word frequency lists are pedagogic blended and not a raw statistic result? A couple of weeks ago I used the Word List Expert tool to extract a word frequency list of some e-o music lyrics (Eterne Rima). I did need that for creating some tujrimado folioj.

horsto (Kwerekana umwidondoro) 18 Nyandagaro 2010 16:36:15

erinja:lernu has some lists of most-frequent words, by category; that is, category 1 = most frequent, category 2 = next most frequent, etc.
Very funny, Ho! is a category 1 word.

erinja (Kwerekana umwidondoro) 18 Nyandagaro 2010 17:17:01

The word lists are based on a 1976 study of a corpus of Esperanto texts. I don't know which texts were included in the corpus but the study was done by the Akademio de Esperanto, so I assume it was a fairly large group of texts.

That accounts for word lists 1-6 on that page. Word list 7 contains some words from the study, and also some other words that were chosen based on the needs of the publication that published these lists (the magazine Juna Amiko). Juna Amiko is a magazine for beginners and it actively limits its vocabulary to the words contained in these lists; any word that it uses, which is not included in the lists, is defined for the reader.

qwertz (Kwerekana umwidondoro) 18 Nyandagaro 2010 19:47:43

Ahh, okay. Thanks. Sorry that I didn't read the introduction very carefully.

Juna Amiko is a magazine of the Internacia Ligo de Esperantistaj Instruistoj(ILEI).

saasmath (Kwerekana umwidondoro) 18 Nyandagaro 2010 21:06:35

Kevin:

I think one needs to be careful about looking at word frequency in terms of reaching a conclusion as to the number of words (or roots or morphenes) one needs to be fluent (or even functional) in a language. I am not suggest that you are drawing this conclusion, but others might.

For example, one should not try to conclude that if you know 100 words, you are "half way there"! Probably in Esperanto, a word (or word part) knowledge between 1000 to 2000 is sufficient to read most common journal articles or chapters in a novel, for example. But even then, you would probably be a bit puzzeled about words that you would not consider technical or specialized in your native language (and still need a dictionary or use context for the meaning). You probably need 3000 to 4000 morphenes before you would not be struggling at times with non-technical words, at least in my experience, unless one is reading about a subject that one is quite familiar with.

--Gary

Miland:According to Colin Allan's Take Note in Pitmanscript, it is 69 words which account for 50 per cent of words used in ordinary English.

However, if I correctly understand the idea that you have referred to, here's one suggestion:

Kvindek vortoj respondas pri duono de la vortoj uzataj en iu ajn lingvo. "Fifty words account for a half of the words used in any language."

Subira ku ntango