A Web Of Words
The Reith Lectures
BBC
4.2 • 770 Ratings
🗓️ 27 February 1996
⏱️ 29 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
This year's Reith Lecturer is Jean Aitchison, a Professor of Language and Communication in the Faculty of English Language and Literature at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of Worcester College, Oxford.
In her fourth lecture, Professor Jean Aitchison examines words themselves. An educated native speaker of English knows at least 50,000 words and word-learning ability is inbuilt in humans. Professor Aitchison explains how we manage to recall these words at speed when we need them, and how meaning and sound are interwoven.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is a podcast from the archives of the BBC Ruth Lectures. |
| 0:04.4 | This lecture in the series The Language Web, given by Jean Aitchison, was originally broadcast in 1996. |
| 0:12.2 | Dean Farrar, a respected 19th century intellectual, once eavesdropped on some apple pickers. |
| 0:19.2 | I once listened for a long time to the conversation of three |
| 0:22.4 | peasants who were gathering apples among the boughs of an orchard, and as far as I could conjecture, |
| 0:28.4 | the whole number of words they used did not exceed a hundred, he guessed. They managed with this |
| 0:34.9 | low number, he suggested, because the same coarse expletives |
| 0:39.9 | recurred with a horrible frequency in the place of every single part of speech. |
| 0:46.1 | Dean Farrar, like numerous others, grossly underestimated the number of words known by native speakers of English, or any language. |
| 0:55.0 | Words are the topic of today's lecture. |
| 0:58.0 | The language web is the title of all these lectures, |
| 1:02.0 | and the human word store, with its multitude of links, |
| 1:06.0 | is perhaps the most truly web-like of all aspects of language, |
| 1:10.0 | even though, up till recently, both the size and the importance is perhaps the most truly web-like of all aspects of language, |
| 1:16.9 | even though up till recently, both the size and the importance of the internal dictionary or mental lexicon has been underestimated. |
| 1:21.9 | A false but popular view is that the size of a person's lexicon |
| 1:26.3 | is about two-thirds of Shakespeare's vocabulary, |
| 1:29.7 | whose plays contain around 30,000 different words. But far more words exist now than in Shakespeare's |
| 1:36.9 | time, and many speakers probably know twice as many as he did. An educated native speaker of English |
| 1:45.2 | knows at least 50,000 words |
| 1:47.8 | according to our best guesstimates. |
| 1:50.8 | The word no refers to |
... |
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