Re: [ontolog-forum] One new English word every 98 minutes

On 11/06/2009 18:20, "Azamat" <abdoul@cytanet.com.cy> wrote:

> Adrian, its really a funny service.
> 
> I concur with John that monitoring "the number of words in the English
> Language" is an otiose and confusing job. For it is no more than a
> statistical count of new meaning situations: "each word was analyzed to
Perhaps that should read "new meaning situations *in English*"?

And given that URIs are meant to be language agnostic (even opaque), it is
not clear to me how many of these "new" words would result in new URIs in a
Semantic Web sense.
And as the proportion of English as the language used on the web has been
declining for many years, considering "meaning" as relating to English words
is perhaps a bit strange.
Once the Chinese and Spanish language communities start to generate more
URIs than they have hitherto, we may see an explosion in English phrases
trying to describe (and hence label), for example, Chinese idioms.
That will be fun!


As an aside, I was hearing recently that the compilers of the new OED report
that the rate of introduction of new English words (in the sense in which
they recognise them, so tending to ignore the Web!) is lower than it has
been almost since the OED started.

Best
Hugh

Received on Thursday, 11 June 2009 18:11:12 UTC