Posted on 05/09/2014 5:11:05 AM PDT by JoeDetweiler
Literary elites love to rep Shakespeare’s vocabulary: across his entire corpus, he uses 28,829 words, suggesting he knew over 100,000 words and arguably had the largest vocabulary, ever.
I decided to compare this data point against the most famous artists in hip hop. I used each artist’s first 35,000 lyrics. That way, prolific artists, such as Jay-Z, could be compared to newer artists, such as Drake.
http://rappers.mdaniels.com.s3-website-us-east-1.amazonaws.com/
(Excerpt) Read more at rappers.mdaniels.com.s3-website-us-east-1.amazonaws.com ...
Of course, he's really just counting the number of different words used, including slang. It would be interesting to see a similar study that factors in the "difficulty" of the vocabulary, the way some programs will rank written works in terms of educational levels; 6th grade, college level, etc.
I also would have liked to see him include something along the lines of The Beatles and Oscar Hammerstein.
Still, the Hip Hop guys did better than I thought they would.
There is so much more to poetry than making words rhyme ...
Of course it would have a miniscule vocabulary! Somebody needs to apply analytical skills to important topics. And no, I don't mean Country music either.
>There is so much more to poetry than making words rhyme ...
That’s 90’s hip hop.
Now every line doesn’t rhyme unless it ends with the “n-word”
I think this sentence pretty much invalidates the analysis:
“Each word is counted once, so pimps, pimp, pimping, and pimpin are four unique words.”
Apply the study to the news media and see the results.
That occurred to me too. But, in Moby Dick, whale, whaled, whaler and whaling would also be four unique words.
I guess there’s not judgement on the value of the words so...
Are we are? I mean, that this guy counted Moby Dick himself rather than accepting a word count from someone else who may not have used that guideline? Because he says:
As a benchmark, I included data points for Shakespeare and Herman Melville, using the same approach (35,000 words across several plays for Shakespeare, first 35,000 of Moby Dick). I used a research methodology called token analysis to determine each artist’s vocabulary...
And so "same approach" seems to refer to the 35,000 bit, not the "token analysis" part.
Well....there is very little that I am “sure” of.... ;-)
But, the way I read it, I believe that “each artist” refers to the Hip Hop guys and Shakespeare and Moby Dick (Melville.)
Perhaps I should point out that, unless I am mistaken, this is NOT some major scientific research project paid for with government money. This is a guy playing around on his computer and doing some interesting comparisons :-)
Under that criteria, from “Love’s Labour’s Lost”, light should count as four words. Much more distinct than variations of the word “pimp”.
‘Light, seeking light, doth light of light beguile.’
Bet he didn’t.
Although I could see a rapper rip that off and butcher it.
‘Pimp looking fo pimp, done gone pimpin and got all pimped up, pimperfect.’
George Carlin collected thousands of terms for masturbation.
Doesn’t make him a literary man.
Fun with Google Translate.
Take any rap song lyrics, and translate them into Latin.
Hippity Hop Schmippity Hop, I’m going to reference a more important series of scholarly studies:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wooly_Bully
The lyrics of “Wooly Bully” were hard to understand, and some radio stations banned the song. The lyrics describe a conversation between “Hattie” and “Matty” concerning the American Bison and the desirability of developing dancing skills, although no attempt is made to synthesize these divergent topics. The warning, “Let’s not be L-7’s”, means “Let’s not be squares”, from the shape formed by the fingers making an L on one hand and a 7 on the other. Sam the Sham underscores the Tex-Mex nature of the song by counting out the rhythm in Spanish and English, and the characteristic simple organ riffing...
m going to reference a more important series of scholarly studies:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wooly_Bully
The lyrics of
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