> Also, while it's easy to calculate word frequencies for stuff like newspaper articles, there aren't any good statistics (last I checked) around just normal everyday conversation. Because that stuff isn't getting recorded and transcribed.

Linguists have resorted to spying on people in parks and shops and restaurants, to get "natural" language unperturbed by observer effects, audience tailoring, the filter of writing, etc. (In most cases that would not be considered ethical today!)

The gold standard is something like: get acculturated to the language community you wish to study, make some acquaintances and friends, somehow finagle an invite to their homes or workplaces or social venues, and then with their permission, record their conversations as unobtrusively as you can.

There is so little data on how language is really used it is quite bedevilling. As soon as people know you are listening they change how they speak.

There is also a whole different language used to talk to toddlers and small children that native speakers know but very few adult learners ever pick up. And slang used among teenagers and young adults that often times not even their parents understand fully.

Beware though that only learning words may leave you confused as in my experience Americans tend to overload the same word with a different meaning depending on the context. They also often resort to idioms and cultural references.

For reasons unknown to me, instead of using the word with the meaning they probably are trying to convey, they rather use vague analogies or metaphors.

It always made me question if Americans in contrast to the British are a bit afraid to be precise.

I read years ago that:

1. TV vocabulary is 2,000 words

2. High school vocabulary is 10,000 words

3. College vocabulary is 30,000 words

4. English language has 1,000,000 words

This is good news - you can be proficient in a foreign language by learning only 2,000 words!

After years of reading technical and scientific materials, listening to lectures and youtube tutorials and learning English exclusively through them I hit a wall when I watched a cooking youtube video for the first time.

I was pretty confident in my English but I couldn't understand half of the sentences since I didn't know any of the vocabulary related to cooking. From tools (spatula) to ingredients (parsley) or even actions (frying). My delusions of proficiency shattered as I found out my everyday vocabulary is smaller than an elementary schooler.

I think a lot about this. It's funny how there are certain domains of language, familiar to all native speakers, but that you are simply not likely to learn as an adult language learner, at least not without diligent and focused study.

I live and work in a foreign country, and have a modest but functional grasp of the language here. Which is to say, I know how to say 'sustainability', 'union-negotiated collective agreement', and 'offensive conduct in the workplace'.... but if you asked me the words for 'cedar', 'robin', 'pond', or 'linen' I would be struck dumb. And yet presumably every ten year old I walk past in the street would know those words as comfortably as I knew them in English as a ten year old in England.

I tried to teach 'magicE vocab', sorting them by difficulty level for an English language plan, and got them easily arranged. For example, sham/shame and slide/slid are for hard to learn level, while ate, pale, kite, are for the easy level.

Kinda like how there's no average-sized airplane pilot

> While if you are living somewhere, it's really important to know a lot of basic supermarket items that you wouldn't prioritize for other usages.

Why? Having spent a good amount of time living in Shanghai, I found it important to be able to understand menus. But there's no pressure to know the words for supermarket items; you can just go to the supermarket and look for the item.

Otherwise your point is correct; all semantic words are equally difficult and which ones you know depends on the things you like to talk about. Grammatical words are more difficult, and more important, but this is so widely understood that language-learning material already treats them as an entirely separate class of things to learn.

> Also, while it's easy to calculate word frequencies for stuff like newspaper articles, there aren't any good statistics (last I checked) around just normal everyday conversation. Because that stuff isn't getting recorded and transcribed.

(1) You seem to want COCA, which includes a bunch of transcribed telephone calls.

(2) Word frequencies are still the wrong concept. If you want to understand a particular document, you need to understand almost all of the words that appear in that document. (You'll be able to learn some of them from their use in the document.) If you decide to learn a list of "frequent" words, you're unlikely to be able to understand more than a couple of isolated sentences in any given document.

I don't follow your reasoning at all. It's a shift and what people talk about and write about. It can't be anything more than that, by construction.

What I see is shifting from a focus on individuals and close personal relationships to a focus on the functioning of society and, well, identity.

It seems like a swing of the pendulum to me. Encouraging people to create their own identities, creating vocabulary to describe one's identity, and advocating for a restructuring around society that is relatively collectivized economically, but culturally celebrates individual diversity. I'm not a professional historian, but I think that's somewhat of a new phenomenon historically.

And it's clearly a reaction to the perception that the ideals of equality and being uniformly kind to each other we're not enough to bring about a just and equitable society, and if anything were abused in order to suppress diversity. We still have to be kind to each other at a basic level, but it's not enough anymore.

So maybe now there's too much focus on that stuff and not enough focus on the part where you should actually just be nice to your neighbors and be humble and all that. Or, maybe people are disproportionately writing about it, because it's a new thing, and a lot of people know a lot to say about it, and a lot of people want to talk about it.

I don't think it makes a shred of sense to conclude that somehow the world is now more equal than it was in the 50s. It's disappointingly far from equal, though, and I think the change in lexicon is a change in people's focus specifically because the old system clearly wasn't working, and people are eager to try something different.

I can't quite follow your point. Are you saying there is more inequality today than in 1953?

I would blame it more on globalization.

In 1953 people were not exposed as much to different groups of people far away.

Here’s one verse from the Bible itself that shows that language changed: 1 Samuel 9:9:

> (Formerly in Israel, when a man went to inquire of God, he said, “Come, let us go to the seer”; for he who is now called a prophet was formerly called a seer.)

I love that one because it translates so well into English because we also have an older and a newer word for close enough to the same thing. Though when saying older and newer I should note that the words “prophet” and “seer” have been used consistently since the very first English translation, Wycliffe’s in ~1382. Maybe it’s more the feel of the words. (In Bible Gateway’s catalogue of English translations, only the CEV doesn’t use both of those words: <https://www.biblegateway.com/verse/en/1sam9.9>; I disqualify OJB as not English.)

That’s the only one I can think of off the top of my head that’s specifically about language, but there are plenty of others about changed customs over time, in Old and New Testaments.

Huh, English has changed perceptibly over just my lifetime.

I thought the same thing.

This is the worse I have seen.

Most of these kind of website have the animation on the centre of the screen. This one animate at the bottom

A new fad I've seen more and more lately is removing the scroll bars. Arrgh.

I thought it was one of those paywalls that give you a taste. Since it wasn't enough for me to pay I was going for close when more came up. Only then did I realize what was going on. It was still annoying enough give up after a few more pages.

Interesting one if you look at Google Ngram Viewer – usage dropped off massively to 70s/80s, and it's picked back up since but not to 1953 or earlier levels, so even that doesn't explain it.

Must just be the combination of that increase as well as other words decreasing in usage I suppose. E.g. perhaps we're a bit less keen, but also much less passionate, so keen ends up making the cut.

I don't agree with the assumed equivalence between precision and objectivity. Language can be precise when describing a subjective perspective, and it can be imprecise or ambiguous when describing objective facts. The tendency toward increasing precision is unambiguously a good thing, in my opinion. If anything, precision in language allows writers to tell better, more nuanced stories about subjective perspectives.

Eh, this seems somewhat right, but somewhat not right either.

Language has to do with our Monkeysphere, that humans over long periods of time in the past were limited to a very small subset of people they interacted with socially and closely. A few institutions likely had a large effect on your language like the church depending on where you were. After that it was the people you interacted with to stay alive. Because almost everything was in person or person to person transfer of information a lot of socially encoded clues were involved which lessened the need for well defined words.

Books were the first stage of homogenizing language as they could be shared over long distances and to many people, but more sequentially than latter forms of communication. After that radio and TV had a huge effect, for example the 'General American' used in broadcasts that was based heavily on a midwestern accent.

As we encroached on the 70s and 80s the previous technological advances and things like high speed interstates and trucking shrank America to something you could drive across in less than a week, and you could reach anywhere by voice nearly instantly. Suddenly people in California, Texas and New York all could be in the same meetings and local colloquialisms would need explained, so people would trend to a shared vocabulary.

It's also odd to me to say an LLM isn't subjective. Each LLM has it's own behavior, it's that there are like 20 or 30 big LLMs in all, and people are using them millions to billions of time so we're getting that one LLMs language everywhere. And that's why I disagree and will say natural language is computable, but it's also lossy and probabilistic. And for the most part it's single prompt and being ran by the user for the cheapest price possible.

Evidently grammar's become slacker

That is indeed how it works

https://news.ycombinator.com/pool

But not in this case. It's a slow Sunday afternoon and getting a few upvotes quickly is enough

Great work HN team, since it’s indeed an interesting story.

Mods might be amused to be described as fairly godmothers.