Peter CostelloBooks Editor
The other week our reviewer discussed how Mártin Ó Cadhain, in writing his celebrated novel Cré na Cille, resorted to creating new words in Irish to express his meaning. In this he had many precedents, such as William Shakespeare. But words are odd things.
Recently it was reported that the rapper Eminem has the largest vocabulary of any current singing artist, a phenomenal word count of 8,818. Bob Dylan, often thought of as the most lyrical of folk artists, had only 4,883 words.
Curiously the Beatles had the lowest score. But the size of people’s vocabularies has long been a vexed matter.
Max Müller, the pioneer linguist, remarked back in 1862: “We are told on good authority by a country clergyman that some of the labourers in his parish had not 300 words in their vocabulary.”
However, he continued, “a well-educated person in England who has been at a public school, and at the university, who reads the Bible, his Shakespeare, The Times, and all the books in Mudie’s library, seldom uses more than 3,000 or 4,000 words in actual conversation”.
He thought accurate writers and thinkers might command 10,000 words. Milton is said to use about 8,000 words. Shakespeare “who probably displayed a greater variety of expression than any writer in any language” wrote his plays with about 15,000 words.
Another writer thought the playwright used about 21,000 words, while Milton used only 7,000.
The critic Wilfrid Whitten attempted a comparison between Milton and Shakespeare on the basis of the words ‘world’, ‘hell’ and ‘sea’. The playwright out passed the poet. But he added that Shakespeare’s words were words from the world of men and everyday life. The size of his vocabulary was “proportionate to the multitude and urgency of his ideas”.
Whitten thought that in every man the word follows the idea. Though Max Müller again claimed that the Hebrew Bible “says all that it has to say with 5,642 words”.
But these Victorian notions were subjected to more scientific American criticism in the 20th Century, as H. L. Mencken notes in his classic book The American Language. In the 1920s, research showed that even children of five or six had vocabularies of between 2,000 and 3,000 words. Even the stupidest Americans, Mencken felt, knew at least 5,000. “As for the educated, their vocabularies range from 30,000 words to maybe as many as 70,000.”
However, further research by Dr Leonard P. Ayres showed the 50 commonest words accounted for half the total of words commonly used, 250 for about 25% and 100 for 90%. This indeed was the basis of Dr C. K. Ogden’s BASIC English, which used no more than 1,000 words.
Smaller vocabularies
In this era of texting and Twitter and so on, brief communications seem to call for even smaller vocabularies. Many fear that the rising generation is losing the use of real words – such as used by Shakespeare, reeking of the real world of work and politics.
But finally, as a matter of national pride we should not assume that the small vocabulary credited to the English rural labourer applied to country people speaking Irish. The archaeologist and scholar R. A. S. Macalister addressed the point in the preface to a volume he edited for the Irish Texts Society in 1908 of two 18th Century versions of Arthurian tales. “I have prepared a complete vocabulary of the second and longer of these two tales, and find that it employs 2,341 different words – not counting oblique cases and verbal inflexions.”
He concluded that for the country men who had copied the stories “to be able to use freely so large a vocabulary, even in narrating the adventures of transformed princes and ladies with magic steeds, was surely no mean or despicable or ‘silly’ accomplishment”.
All of which suggests as in the contrast between Eminem and Shakespeare, that is not a matter of how many words you know, but how you use them. Hence the world shaking nature of what the Bible achieved with its 5,000 words.