[B-Greek] 2nd year NTG on my own / followup
Eric Inman
eric.inman at wescorpflex.com
Mon Nov 5 09:27:41 EST 2007
I'm not surprised to see that you've already considered this. Similarly, I
think affixes such as -IZW, -MA, etc. would also need to be addressed before
the analysis could be considered very accurate. I think readers find them
very helpful when initially guessing the meanings of words. In a different
language (Indonesian) I found that even when speaking it was possible guess
not only the meanings but even the existence of words I didn't know yet by
forming them with roots and a system of affixes.
While ideally it would be nice to have the database loaded with information
for each word regarding whether or not its meaning can be inferred from the
meanings of its parts, I wonder if it might be sufficient just to sum all
that up in one or a small number of numerical coefficients, derived through
appropriate sampling. I don't know if that's what you were indicating in
your comment below about an empirical measure.
Anyhow, it sounds like a very interesting project and it'll be interesting
to see what it discovers.
Eric Inman
-----Original Message-----
From: James Tauber [mailto:jtauber at jtauber.com]
Sent: Sunday, November 04, 2007 7:37 PM
To: Eric Inman
Cc: 'B Greek'
Subject: Re: [B-Greek] 2nd year NTG on my own / followup
The fact that MONOGENH/S is fairly easy to guess the meaning of is one
of the things I had in mind when I said the "example does highlight
some of the shortcomings of this sort of analysis".
It would definitely be nice to take this into account, although one
might want some empirical measure of just how much of a "discount" a
word like MONOGENH/S gets if you know the parts.
There are many other things one might want to take into account
constructing the sort of "automated graded reader" I discussed in my
second post. A lot of information still needs to be added to my
underlying databases before that is possible, though.
James
On Nov 4, 2007, at 8:23 PM, Eric Inman wrote:
> It seems like this analysis would be improved it could factor in the
> fact
> that someone can probably guess what MONOGENH/S means even if they
> had never
> seen it before. More generally, compound words whose primary
> meanings are
> more or less the sum of the meanings of their parts could be
> considered
> known if their parts are known. Given the large number of compound
> words
> that are understandable in this manner, not taking this into account
> would
> seem to prevent the analysis from being realistic. Is this something
> that
> you try to take into account?
>
> Eric Inman
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: b-greek-bounces at lists.ibiblio.org
> [mailto:b-greek-bounces at lists.ibiblio.org] On Behalf Of James Tauber
> Sent: Saturday, November 03, 2007 3:05 PM
> To: B Greek
> Subject: Re: [B-Greek] 2nd year NTG on my own / followup
>
> The sort of numbers you have below can be misleading because they
> don't tell you want proportion of verses you could read, only what
> proportion of words.
>
> Reading theorists (e.g. I. S. P. Nation) have suggested that you need
> to know 95% of the vocabulary of a sentence to comprehend it. So a
> more interesting list of statistics would be how many verses can one
> understand 95% of the vocab of if one know a certain number of words.
> Of course, there's a lot more to reading comprehension than knowing
> the vocab. But it was enough for me to decide to write some code this
> afternoon to run against my MorphGNT database.
>
> To first of all give you a flavour in the specific before moving to
> the final numbers, consider John 3.16, which is, from a vocabulary
> point of view, a very easy verse to read.
>
> To be able to read 50% of it, you only need to know the top 28 lexemes
> in the GNT. To read 75% you only need the top 85 (up to KO/SMOS). With
> the top 204 lexemes, you can read 90% of the verse and only a few
> more: up to 236 (AI)W/NIOS) gives you the 95%. The only word you would
> not have come across learning the top 236 words would be MONOGENH/S
> but even that is in the top 1,200.
>
> This example does highlight some of the shortcomings of this sort of
> analysis, but I still think it's much more useful than the sort of
> statistics listed below.
>
> So let's actually run the numbers on the complete GNT. If you know the
> top N words, how many verses could you understand 50% of, 75%, 90% or
> 95% of...
>
> (hopefully this table will come out)
>
> any 50% 75% 90% 95% 100%
>
> 100 99.9% 91.3% 24.4% 2.1% 0.6% 0.4%
> 200 99.9% 96.9% 51.8% 9.8% 3.4% 2.5%
> 500 99.9% 99.1% 82.3% 36.5% 18.0% 13.9%
> 1,000 100.0% 99.7% 93.6% 62.3% 37.3% 30.1%
> 1,500 100.0% 99.8% 97.2% 76.3% 53.5% 44.8%
> 2,000 100.0% 99.9% 98.4% 85.1% 65.5% 56.5%
> 3,000 100.0% 100.0% 99.4% 93.6% 81.0% 74.1%
> 4,000 100.0% 100.0% 99.7% 97.4% 90.0% 85.5%
> 5,000 100.0% 100.0% 100.0% 99.4% 96.5% 94.5%
> all 100.0% 100.0% 100.0% 100.0% 100.0% 100.0%
>
> What this means is *purely from a vocabulary point of view* if you
> knew the top 1000 lexemes, then 37.3% of verses in the GNT would be
> 95% familiar to you.
>
> I should emphasis that learning vocabulary in frequency order isn't
> necessarily the fastest way to get this proportion of readable verses
> up. I blogged about this fact three years ago, see
http://tinyurl.com/2cmnmo
>
> for example.
>
> James Tauber
>
>
>
> On Oct 27, 2007, at 11:11 PM, James Bowick wrote:
>
>> Speaking not as a scholar but as a fellow student, it seems to me
>> that the
>> amount of vocab you want to learn can be determined by how many
>> words you
>> are prepared to look up as you read on avera. But there is a
>> diminishing
>> return in terms of reading speed. I used Ken Penner's Flash!Pro
>> data to run
>> some numbers and find the point of diminishing returns. (Ken's
>> program is
>> designed for memory, not for statistical study, so he knows better
>> than I
>> how suitable his data is for that, but it at very least should give a
>> pragmatic guide.) So here, very roughly rounded off, are the
>> results:
>>
>> Words Learned Word Frequency % of total words in text
>> 500 27 times or more 85%
>> 1000 11 times or more 91%
>> 1500 6 times or more 94%
>>
>> In other words, the first 500 words covers words that occur 27 times
>> or
>> more. When you have learned them you will still be looking up 3
>> words in
>> 20, or 1 1/2 in 10. The next 500 words brings you to looking up
>> less than
>> 1 word in 10. But the next 500 gains you only a minor increase in
>> frequency. To get to the point of looking up 1 word in 20 you need
>> to learn
>> well over 1500 words. I would suggest, based on this, that the
>> returns of
>> vocabulary memory drop off at around 1 in 10 to the point where you
>> are
>> better to learn by reading than flash cards or such.
>>
>> James Bowick
>> McMaster Divinity College
>> Hamilton, Ont.
>>
>>
>>
>> On 10/27/07, JMonte2000 at aol.com <JMonte2000 at aol.com> wrote:
>>>
>>> a message dated 10/27/2007 8:49:37 P.M. Eastern Daylight Time,
>>> gfsomsel at yahoo.com writes:
>>> You failed to mention it, so I must ask whether you have BDAG. If
>>> not,
>>> you
>>> should get it.
>>>
>>> george
>>> gfsomsel
>>>
>>>
>>> Hi George, yes I do have the 2nd edition of BDAG. I have many other
>>> Greek
>>> helps, I just didn't mention those.
>>> I have also Vincent's word study's, The Exhaustive Con. of the GNT
>>> & the
>>> NID
>>> of NTT by Colin Brown & other things like this. Also many of the
>>> NIGTC
>>> commentaries.
>>>
>>> While I'm back answering you. What is a realistic goal for word
>>> frequency
>>> memorization? Some mention 20 + Others mention 10 + which is about a
>>> thousand
>>> words. I was amazed the other day I was looking through Trenchard's
>>> Vocab
>>> guide. I saw as the words get lower they go up in count. a word
>>> that is 3
>>> x in the
>>> NT, I think was 470, 2 x goes up to 600 & something but 1 x (hapax
>>> legomena
>>> words) are over 2100!
>>> Does many every get to know all the words in the NT?
>>> What goal is realistic for an average NTG reader, expositor?
>>>
>>> Jim Montesano
>>> NJ
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
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