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Originally Posted by Worldwalker
I don't know every word in the English language, but I know most of the ones likely to turn up in books. The ones I don't know, I can usually dig out by their roots or figure them out from context.
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Ditto.
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You see, back before someone invented "phonics" and taught children to read by teaching them to sound out the word, then figure out which word from their speaking vocabulary matched it, we were taught to understand the written word, not its sound. We learned to deconstruct words down to their roots, to pick up clues from context, and so on. That way, unlike today, our reading vocabulary could be much greater than our speaking vocabulary. We weren't limited by just the words we had heard and had explained to us; in fact, it used to be common for a well-read person to make goofy mistakes in trying to pronounce a word, because they'd read it for years but never heard it spoken.
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That's a good observation. My reading vocabulary is much, much larger than my speaking vocabulary. My speaking vocabulary was shaped by the conversations held with my elders and peers, who did not use the more esoteric phrasings. My reading vocabulary, though, was formed by all the books I've read over the course of my life. There are still words that I don't use in everyday speech because I'm unsure of the pronunciation, even though I know what they mean when I read them.
I happen to like paper dictionaries, especially old ones. They make fascinating reading, and I can get lost in them. I don't find that to be true of electronic dictionary functions, where you're just given the definition of the word you queried and there's nothing else to catch your attention and let your mind stray. I tend to use them only to verify spelling, not meaning.
This thread was not meant to be an "us vs. them" type of confrontation. I'm finding it interesting to learn of the differences in our approaches to reading: how some of us will stop to look up words, or make lists of unknown words, how some of us will just try to puzzle them out, and how some will just pass over words they don't know.
Regarding the English language, The Teaching Company has an excellent course called "The History of the English Language", that really explains how the language evolved from numerous roots and dialects. It wasn't merely a combination of the Saxon and Norman French languages. There is no one language that is "better" than another; English just happens to be a language that keeps actively evolving and growing because it easily absorbs words from other languages and readily incorporates them, in addition to constantly giving new meanings to words. The result being that archaic past tenses are retained, archaic spellings are retained even though pronunciations have been streamlined by the dropping of certain vocal sounds from the pronunciations (e.g. we no longer use the sounds from the back of our throats for words like "bought" and "thought").