How many words are there in the list below?
a fly(noun), flies(noun), fly(verb), flies(verb), flew(verb), and flown(verb)
I suppose that both “a small insect” and “moving through the air” are treated as one word by the counter of known words.
I wonder whether “fly flew flown” is treated as a word or not by the LingQ counter.
“fly flew flown” are treated as 3 words
An additional question:
Are “fly” and “flies” treated as two different words by the LinqQ counter?
As far as I recall from Mark’s comments “each new form of a word is counted as a word”
In the Japanese language, there are no spaces between words in a sentence in ordinary cases, so it might be more difficult for computers to count new words, I suppose.
A nightmare!
In a sense, we are doing a morphological analysis all the time, and I feel relieved to see that computers are not always good at it. :-))
I’ve been looking for an excuse to quote one of my favourite rhymes:
A fly and a flea in a flue
Were imprisoned; so what could they do?
Said the fly, “Let us flee!”
“Let us fly!” said the flea
So they flew through a flaw in the flue.
Absolutely wonderful - and certainly no excuse needed! I thought I knew all popular rhymes, but clearly not, as this one is new to me. Thank you.
Mark called these different word forms (Paul Nation: word types) ‘unique words’. So ‘flies’ can be a verb form or a noun, but they are just one unique word, and of course they belong to the same word family.
In a way English is on the way to becoming more like Chinese in that a form can be a verb, a noun, an adjective… (I read this somewhere a long time ago). There’s different spelling sometimes, or else there would be even more homonyms in English (led, lead), but there are also same spellings with different pronunciations (tear/tear). Again, same spelling will mean 1 word counted - the only thing you can do is save a phrase in which the form is a verb or a noun respectively.
I must express my gratitude to everyone who replied to my inquiry. :-))
If there were some descriptions about these traits of the system somewhere at the web site, we would be very grateful. We need a user’s manual. :-/
“at the web site” should read “on the web site”