I’m not sure what your first paragraph is disagreeing with me about. Specifically, when you say “In many cases a 2nd Ten Hundred pick would do”, do you mean to imply that the reason for MikkW’s choice was signalling? I don’t see any particular reason to believe that. For any particular word choice, the actual explanation may simply be something like “well, there are five different words that would do and I picked one more or less at random”, but of course that doesn’t do much to explain how the language grows.
Your third paragraph appears to me to be making much the same point as I was: fancy words are useful for communication because clarity and conciseness matter.
One thing you make more explicit than I did, which may be worth making more explicit still: language isn’t just for communication with other people, but also for thinking with, and thinking may be easier with a richer vocabulary. This is of course exactly the claim contradicted by MikkW’s title, but I don’t think the article does much to justify that contradiction: MikkW first claims that “cadence of information is constant”, but supports it with one example comparison, where the difference is in phonology not vocabulary, and where the “poorer” language is in fact still slower—which doesn’t seem to me to offer much reassurance—and then assumes that the same goes for thinking as for communication, which also seems entirely unjustified to me: I can speed up my speaking if my language is “naively” less dense, but I don’t think at the same speed as I speak, and it’s not at all obvious that the same speedup opportunities are available there.
[EDITED to fix miscapitalization of “MikkW”, which I carelessly copied from the parent comment without checking.]
Yes, we’re on the same page here in general. I was specifically objecting to your first paragraph, and noting that mikkw was using larger than necessary words throughout. Possibly unconsciously, though.
I still don’t understand what in my first paragraph you were objecting to. (Sorry to belabour the point, but it seems like I’m missing something and I would prefer to avoid miscommunication if possible.) It seems like you think I was saying that MikkW was not using words fancier than strictly necessary throughout, but I wasn’t: I was saying the opposite, which is the same thing you were saying.
The only other claims in that first paragraph were (1) that most of MikkW’s usage of fancy words (and indeed most of MikkW’s OP) was not primarily signalling and (2) that his explanation of vocabulary in terms of signalling was primarily signalling. Those are both disputable, but I don’t think you said anything to dispute them.
So I’m still confused about what, specifically, you were objecting to in what I wrote. What am I missing?
I’m not sure what your first paragraph is disagreeing with me about. Specifically, when you say “In many cases a 2nd Ten Hundred pick would do”, do you mean to imply that the reason for MikkW’s choice was signalling? I don’t see any particular reason to believe that. For any particular word choice, the actual explanation may simply be something like “well, there are five different words that would do and I picked one more or less at random”, but of course that doesn’t do much to explain how the language grows.
Your third paragraph appears to me to be making much the same point as I was: fancy words are useful for communication because clarity and conciseness matter.
One thing you make more explicit than I did, which may be worth making more explicit still: language isn’t just for communication with other people, but also for thinking with, and thinking may be easier with a richer vocabulary. This is of course exactly the claim contradicted by MikkW’s title, but I don’t think the article does much to justify that contradiction: MikkW first claims that “cadence of information is constant”, but supports it with one example comparison, where the difference is in phonology not vocabulary, and where the “poorer” language is in fact still slower—which doesn’t seem to me to offer much reassurance—and then assumes that the same goes for thinking as for communication, which also seems entirely unjustified to me: I can speed up my speaking if my language is “naively” less dense, but I don’t think at the same speed as I speak, and it’s not at all obvious that the same speedup opportunities are available there.
[EDITED to fix miscapitalization of “MikkW”, which I carelessly copied from the parent comment without checking.]
Yes, we’re on the same page here in general. I was specifically objecting to your first paragraph, and noting that mikkw was using larger than necessary words throughout. Possibly unconsciously, though.
I still don’t understand what in my first paragraph you were objecting to. (Sorry to belabour the point, but it seems like I’m missing something and I would prefer to avoid miscommunication if possible.) It seems like you think I was saying that MikkW was not using words fancier than strictly necessary throughout, but I wasn’t: I was saying the opposite, which is the same thing you were saying.
The only other claims in that first paragraph were (1) that most of MikkW’s usage of fancy words (and indeed most of MikkW’s OP) was not primarily signalling and (2) that his explanation of vocabulary in terms of signalling was primarily signalling. Those are both disputable, but I don’t think you said anything to dispute them.
So I’m still confused about what, specifically, you were objecting to in what I wrote. What am I missing?