this post was submitted on 19 Jul 2024
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Science Memes

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[–] tiredofsametab@kbin.run 10 points 3 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 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (1 children)

*Tolkien enters the chat.

And that guy who fleshed out Klingon.

[–] JackbyDev@programming.dev 3 points 3 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.)