Talk:Defining vocabulary

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What does "culturally accepted" mean? Hyacinth 22:20, 3 May 2004 (UTC)[reply]

I'm not sure quite how to respond to this article without using POV terms like "horseshit", but perhaps someone can work in these points:

There's no particular reason to believe that Basic English would make a good defining vocabulary. At the very least, one would need to normalize the inflections. Given that it's less than half the size of Longman's list, which was actually used in a dictionary, it seems doubtful that this quirky and soemwhat arbitrary list would be up to the job.
E-Prime is just English without the word "to be". How could this be used to develop a defining vocabulary.
A nit: A defining vocabulary can't be a core glossary. A core glossry would include definitions.
How does one define a defining vocabulary? Clearly there will have to be some circularity. On the other hand, it would be good to take care to avoid circularity as much as possible, and where possible to move from "more complex" to "less complex" terms where possible until you hit the inevitably circular bottom. But this is good practice for any set of definitions, which probably explains why most dictionaries don't have explicit defining vocabularies. The line between defining vocabulary and the rest of the lexicon seems quite arbitrary.
This all rings of the utopian ideal of solving all our problems if we can just agree on vocabulary, particularly the idea of a culturally neutral vocabulary.