by Alan Knapp, Forbes
Mark Liberman, a Professor of Linguistics at the University of Pennsylvania, decided to take a more analytical approach. Faced with Davidson’s claim that Twitter was phasing out longer words in favor of shorter ones, he decided to see if that was the case…. The result? The mean word length in Hamlet (in modern spelling) was 3.99 characters; in P. G. Wodehouse’s Jeeves stories, the mean word length was 4.05 characters; in the DP‘s tweets, the mean word length was 4.80 characters. Once again, numbers foil an unsubstantiated claim!
http://www.forbes.com/sites/alexknapp/2011/10/31/no-twitter-isnt-ruining-the-english-language/
Share on Facebook