this post was submitted on 19 Jul 2024
1269 points (95.7% liked)

Science Memes

11111 readers
2427 users here now

Welcome to c/science_memes @ Mander.xyz!

A place for majestic STEMLORD peacocking, as well as memes about the realities of working in a lab.



Rules

  1. Don't throw mud. Behave like an intellectual and remember the human.
  2. Keep it rooted (on topic).
  3. No spam.
  4. Infographics welcome, get schooled.

This is a science community. We use the Dawkins definition of meme.



Research Committee

Other Mander Communities

Science and Research

Biology and Life Sciences

Physical Sciences

Humanities and Social Sciences

Practical and Applied Sciences

Memes

Miscellaneous

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
 
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] tiredofsametab@kbin.run 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.

[–] FuglyDuck@lemmy.world 9 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (1 children)

*Tolkien enters the chat.

And that guy who fleshed out Klingon.

[–] JackbyDev@programming.dev 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.)