Date: Wed, 6 Dec 1995 15:35:30 -0700

From: Rudy Troike RTROIKE[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]CCIT.ARIZONA.EDU

Subject: Vocabulary size of historians



Mary,

My example was purely hypothetical. I know mathematicians who have

larger vocabularies than I do, and historians with smaller ones. My point

was simply that level of abstractness in thinking ability is independent

of vocabulary size. In general, I suspect that historians may have larger

vocabularies than linguists, especially syntacticians (among whom I include

myself when I am not doing ethnolinguistics and other interesting things),

simply because most historians probably read more broadly than most linguists.

Shakespeare had a larger vocabulary than any of us, probably, but he was no

Newton.

--Rudy Troike (rtroike[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]ccit.arizona.edu)