Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 76.djvu/350

346 contains 317,000 words. How many of these are obsolete or obsolescent can not be determined because it is impossible to draw a hard and fast line. Every successive work of this kind is larger than its predecessor, and the growth is very rapid. This is true not only of English, but of every living tongue, since all are in the process of accretion. And yet no English dictionary claims to include all the vocables that belong to the language, or at least are English. For the outlaws we have special vocabularies of localisms, dialect and vulgar terms, and so forth, which by themselves fill a number of large volumes.

We have an illuminating demonstration of the process by which word-lists grow in the case of certain compounds. In the eleventh English and the first American edition of Johnson the number of compounds with the prefix poly-is twenty-six; in the Century there are more than 550. Johnson gives no compounds with psycho-; the Century furnishes several columns. Lexicographers who aim at completeness can not exclude such compounds, yet many of them can not be classed as strictly a part of our language. With only a slight variation they may be found in the lexicons of every civilized tongue. They form a sort of international code. They are easily understood by every one who knows a little Greek and Latin, the former furnishing by far the largest contingent.

In this connection we are almost involuntarily led to ask the question, How many words does an ordinary man use? How many can he comprehend which he would not venture to use? How many words is the strongest memory capable of retaining? To the first question we have on record several answers. The late Max Müller in one of his lectures reports the testimony of an English clergyman to the effect that some of the agricultural laborers of his parish employed less than a thousand. A recent authority on the Gipsies declares that some of these people living in the villages of Sivas, in Asia Minor, although speaking a language that is clearly related to the Indie branch of the Aryan, do not have in their entire vocabulary more than six hundred words. Testimony of this kind should be received with distrust, although its falsity can not be proved. Some of the statements about the vocabulary of children before the age of five have been shown to be far too low. A person of fair natural ability, but of limited education, can comprehend a long list of vocables which he would not venture to use. There is no doubt that the popular audiences to whom Cicero addressed his Catilinarian orations followed him understandingly and with a fair degree of appreciation, although they were utter strangers to the beauty of his diction. Most persons understand preaching and popular lectures, even when the exact signification of many of the terms used by the speaker is not clear. The general run of the discourse has always a great deal of influence on the meaning of the separate words used by the speaker or writer.