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mollusque commented on the word lexisphere
The domain of all words.
December 16, 2007
bilby commented on the word lexisphere
Can I rename my home town to Lexisphere? Pleeeeaaaaase???!!!
December 16, 2007
reesetee commented on the word lexisphere
No, me!
December 17, 2007
adoarns commented on the word lexisphere
That's the webbie's way. Since I was trained in the biological sciences, my proposal would be the lexome.
December 17, 2007
mollusque commented on the word lexisphere
I'm a biologist too, adoarns. Lexome is a great analogy, given how words and languages evolve and recombine and memes compete for prominence. (For non-biologists, the reference is to genome, proteome, metabolome, transcriptome etc.)
You should list lexome first, as you're the coiner. I was thinking in terms of biosphere, atmosphere, lithosphere. Places where the Wordiemobile could travel.
December 17, 2007
skipvia commented on the word lexisphere
Lexome is a gem! A quick Google search reveals that it's an Albanian word but no English instances seem to occur. Grab it!
December 17, 2007
reesetee commented on the word lexisphere
Which Wordiemobile, mollusque? The one that drives around like a bookmobile or the one you hang over your baby's crib? ;-)
December 17, 2007
mollusque commented on the word lexisphere
If my daughter were still of an age to be in a crib, her Wordiemobile would have little wordiemobiles on it.
December 17, 2007
adoarns commented on the word lexisphere
In furtherance of the biological analogy (the field is quickly creating new -omes, such as the proteome, the interactome, the transcriptome), language should have a syntactome, a clausome, a sententome.
In the spirit of Borges's Library of Babel, I have written a short program that, given infinite time, will generate every single utterance of any given size, thus exhausting the utterome. Eventually.
December 18, 2007
mollusque commented on the word lexisphere
So how far can we push this analogy? Genome has two meanings: the complete genetic material of a living organism, and the idealized genome of a species. With millions of species, there are millions of genomes in the second sense and many quadrillions in the first sense. Genomics is the study of all of these.
So is the lexome the (potential) vocabulary of an individual, of a language, or of a species? Individuals can speak more than one language, so do they have more than one lexome? (They have more than one genome: mitochondrial and nuclear.)
Does the lexisphere contain multiple lexomes or only one? Is the lexisphere the set of things describable by a (the) lexome, or are lexisphere and lexome synonyms? Interestingly, the word genosphere, most broadly defined as "the genetic content of the universe at anytime" has been around for at least a dozen years.
What do the linguists have to say about this?
December 18, 2007
bilby commented on the word lexisphere
If you're pushing lexispheres, isn't that a sister sport to cheese-rolling?
December 18, 2007
skipvia commented on the word lexisphere
I'm not a linguist, but I sometimes play one on Wordie.
Mollusque, I loved your original analogy: "how words and languages evolve and recombine and memes compete for prominence." It's a perfect mirror for biome in just about every aspect.
December 18, 2007
jennarenn commented on the word lexisphere
Isn't cheese-rolling a sister sport to zorbing?
December 18, 2007
seanahan commented on the word lexisphere
I would say the English lexicon is the domain of all English words, and lexome would refer to only the words of a specific language, so they seem to overlap.
December 19, 2007