Esraa A.S.'s List: arts2090 presentation info

• Paul J.J. Payack, president and chief word analyst for the Global Language Monitor, says, however, that the million-word estimation isn’t as important as the idea behind his project, which is to show that English has become a complex, global language.
• It’s a people’s language,” he said

• Other languages, like French, Payack said, put big walls around their vocabularies. English brings others in.

  “English has the tradition of swallowing new words whole,” he said. “Other languages translate.”
• Words must make sense in at least 60 percent of the world to be official, he said.
• And they must make sense to different communities of people
• His computer models check a total of 5,000 dictionaries, scholarly publications and news articles, as well as billions of Web sites, to see how frequently words are used, he said. A word must make 25,000 appearances to be deemed legitimate.
• English terms like “Obamamania,” “defriend,” “wardrobe malfunction,” “zombie banks,” “shovel ready” and “recessionista” all have grown out of recent news cycles about the presidential election, economic crash, online networking or a sports event, he said. Other languages might not have developed new terms to deal with such phenomena, he said.

• Language experts who spoke with CNN said they disapprove of Payack’s count, but they agree that English generally has more words than most, if not all, languages.

  “This is stuff that you just can’t count,” said Jesse Sheidlower, editor at large of the Oxford English Dictionary. “No one can count it, and to pretend that you can is totally disingenuous. It simply can’t be done.”

6 more annotations...

• GLM used its NarrativeTracker Technology in this study. NarrativeTracker is based on the global discourse, providing a real-time, accurate picture of what any audience is saying about any topic, at any point in time. It analyses the Internet, the top global print and electronic media, as well as new social media sources such as Twitte

• According to the president of GLM, Paul JJ Payack, Twitter is a word that sums up the recent rise of social media.
• The success of the word is not just because social media are "taking the world by storm,
• it's "a fun word" which has spawned a whole vocabularly of tweets, twictionaries and even twitterature.
• GLM's software tracks the frequency of words and phrases in print and digital media, the internet, the blogosphere and databases such as Lexis-Nexis,
• We look at broad swaths of the internet, we try to get at everything."
• since people use social media, such as Twitter, Facebook and Linkedin, as well as blogs, to such a great extent, we can see how they are thinking (and feeling) to an unprecedented extent
• According to Fiona McPherson, a senior editor at the Oxford English Dictionary, it's a very different exercise from the lists of new words published by dictionaries every year. "We've already got 'vampire' in the dictionary," she pointed out. However there are overlaps in the kind of data they are looking at

  • a comparison of between OED and GLM in relation to twitter
• "It hasn't made it into the OED yet; because nothing ever comes out once it's gone in we normally need to have a history of usage over five years. But it's certainly something that could make its way in."
• individual tweets might be valuable references in the future: "If the dates were verifiable, and they were properly archived then I don't see any reason why not
• But Twitter's number-one slot is perhaps a function of the kind of data GLM is looking at, she continued. "It's self-perpetuating in a way – you're talking about what you're doing."
• "global warming
• Payack suggests is an indication that mainstream political parties are trailing behind voters when it comes to their perception of green politics.

10 more annotations...