

Teenagers 'only use 800 different words a day' - mickeyben
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/educationnews/6960745/Teenagers-only-use-800-different-words-a-day.html

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patio11
I would attribute this result more to "substantially all corpora of human
languages will exhibit a zipf distribution in word frequency" than to "kids
these days."

For example, off the top of my head I know you can do about 90% of jpop songs
with 200 words, and I say without fear of contradiction that Wikipedia, the
Bible, the contents of the Gutenberg free library, or any other substantial
corpora will also evidence a zipf distribution.

Bonus points: the zipf distribution for the King James version of the Bible
and the zipf distribution for text messages would be virtually
indistinguishable if you rank ordered them and then swapped n% of the words
across the two lists. I think n is likely to be about 10. A fun project for
after Easter if they've published their dataset anywhere...

Sorry -- natural language processing is my first love.

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vital101
This isn't to say that all teenagers only use 800 different words a day. I'm
sure some do, but there have to be some that only do so to communicate
effectively with their peers. I know that when I was in high school, using
large words really didn't get many anywhere with my classmates.

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Semiapies
I'm reminded of this: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_English>

Now, shall we perform similar analysis on vocabulary use by the adults
currently working in all those jobs British teenagers supposedly risk not
getting?

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blintson
That's a good thing. If you can say the same thing using simpler, or fewer
terms you should. It's not hard to make something simple seem complicated,
it's hard to make something complex seem simple. Look at lisp.

