Science Memes

11047 readers

4866 users here now

Welcome to c/science_memes @ Mander.xyz!

A place for majestic STEMLORD peacocking, as well as memes about the realities of working in a lab.

Rules

Don't throw mud. Behave like an intellectual and remember the human.
Keep it rooted (on topic).
No spam.
Infographics welcome, get schooled.

This is a science community. We use the Dawkins definition of meme.

Research Committee

[email protected]

Other Mander Communities

Science and Research

Biology and Life Sciences

Physical Sciences

Humanities and Social Sciences

Practical and Applied Sciences

Memes

Miscellaneous

founded 2 years ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

1315

Linguistics (mander.xyz)

submitted 4 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

236 comments fedilink hide all child comments

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 10 points 3 months ago (12 children)

I’m curious. How many people does it take to make a word a word?

[–] [email protected] 9 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Some N greater than zero, though probably at least two unless you're inventing a language/dialect on your own.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (1 children)

*Tolkien enters the chat.

And that guy who fleshed out Klingon.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 months ago

You're conflating two topics.

How many people using a word in an existing language makes that word a word from a descriptivist context?
How many people does it take to make a conlang?

The answer to the second is, of course, one, but that's a very different question than the first one. The first question doesn't have a definitive answer. The more people that use some new word the stronger the claim is that it is in fact a word is, but there's never a moment when you can definitively say everyone agrees that it is a new word. (If you could then we wouldn't need to ask the question at all lol.)

load more comments (10 replies)