A Basic Course in Anthropological Linguistics (Studies in Linguistic ...

WORDS 71
inflected classes (such as boy and boys) from all other words, calledparticles
(to, with).
The term vocabulary is used to indicate the total number of words in a
language. That number is, however, always changing. As life becomes more
complex, people devise or borrow new words to describe new ideas and things,
and they change the meanings of existing words to fit new circumstances.
New words are often constructed by derivation. For example, shortly after
microwave ovens became available, the verb to microwave appeared in sentences
such as “John microwaved the frozen rolls.” The same type of derivational
process can be seen in the coining of the following recent verbs, from the
computer and Internet areas:
Noun Derived Verb
e-mail e-mailing
Internet Internetting
word-processor word-processing
format formatting
People have two kinds of vocabularies. Their active vocabulary is made
up of the actual words they tend to use in speaking or writing; their passive
vocabulary consists of words they understand when listening or reading, but
which they do not use with regularity. Many people have a passive vocabulary
several times larger than their active vocabulary. For the average American,
the active vocabulary is 10,000 words, but the passive vocabulary is 30,000 to
40,000 words. The range of a person’s vocabulary is a clue to the person’s
education, experiences, preferences, or interests.
Edward Sapir (1921) was probably the frrst to point out the presence of a
“vocabulary blueprint” in the human brain that allowed speakers of different
languages to communicate the same ideas with the specific vocabulary resources
at their disposal. To show this, he simply got speakers of several indigenous
languages of the southwestern US to render the English sentence He will give
it to you in their respective languages (Sapir and Swadesh 1946):