dictionaries

I'm very please that my discussion of the "we can't ever know what a word is" Internet meme has elicited a response from Mark Liberman at Language Log. (here) Mark was very systematic in his comments, so I will be very systematic in my responses. 1. Without a careful definition of what you mean by "word" and by "language X", questions like "how many words are there in language X" are pretty much meaningless, because different definitions will yield very different numbers. This is very much off the mark. I can measure the distance from the earth to the moon using a variety of techniques,…