this post was submitted on 19 Jul 2024
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Science Memes

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Linguistics (mander.xyz)
submitted 4 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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[–] [email protected] 10 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Some N greater than zero, though probably at least two unless you're inventing a language/dialect on your own.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (1 children)

*Tolkien enters the chat.

And that guy who fleshed out Klingon.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 4 months ago

You're conflating two topics.

  1. How many people using a word in an existing language makes that word a word from a descriptivist context?
  2. How many people does it take to make a conlang?

The answer to the second is, of course, one, but that's a very different question than the first one. The first question doesn't have a definitive answer. The more people that use some new word the stronger the claim is that it is in fact a word is, but there's never a moment when you can definitively say everyone agrees that it is a new word. (If you could then we wouldn't need to ask the question at all lol.)