The Word, Part 2

I see now I never got to the final part of this assignment. Ah, well. Sorry about that. The word, structure, I have to admit, didn't get me thinking a lot in specific terms. One thing it did make me think about is the variability of meaning in English language vocabulary. The same word can mean so many different things. For example, I found 11 meanings listed for the word structure. it's interesting to me that the language has such a variety of definition for simple words. This led me to playing the dictionary game a little bit, in which I basically look through a print dictionary. It's not as easy to pick out random words in an online dictionary. "Stock" was a near neighbor of structure, and had 63 meanings in my dictionary (61 online). I'd be interested to know how true this is in other cultures and languages, and if this phenomenon make English difficult to learn. I suppose if I were going to propose a project, it would be a in-depth linguistic study to see how much variability of meaning exists in other languages. Off the top of my head, I would guess that Asian languages have little overlap, what with their huge character sets, each conveying very specific meanings. But that's just a jumping off point for some reading, I guess.

Sorry again that I didn't complete this appropriately. The complexity level was a touch high for me. I don't really have time for such convoluted processes at this time in my life. I'm operating on a just-in-time manufacturing structure around here.