Size of lexicon as a reflection of cultural emphasis:
Gatewood (1984) initiates his article “familiarity, vocabulary size, and recognition ability in four semantic domains” with the fact that Eskimos distinguish many varieties of snow and ice. The Nuer name many varieties of cattle by their markings. (See Hickerson 1980.) Both of these common anecdotal pieces of information are presented in introductory anthropology classes as a means of wowing the novice. (Well, they wowed us anyhow.)
What is America’s cultural emphasis? Gatewood says cars. Certainly one popular culture is built around cars. But, our overall cultural emphasis is: variety, especially with regard to knowledge. This has peaked with trivial pursuit taking guise in Password, Scrabble, Wheel of Fortune. Maybe knowledge is not the correct word; maybe it is information we emphasize. Expanding information of course created the need for computers. Our quest for information and knowledge has now peaked into artificial intelligence that relies upon degrees of expertise in many of its applications (Feltovich, et al. 1997).
Thus, there is no culture in the world that can begin to wow the total spectrum of the American community in lexicon size. Eskimos have no snow vocabulary advantage on modern meteorologists and/or ski-slope operators. (Kirchnner 1995:64). (And we haven’t even begun to touch upon slang as a phenomenon of complex societies to expand and curtail information flow via linguistic competence.) As for cattle and their markings, the U.S. controls the world cattle industry. Since anthropologists only recently have turned their attention to their own culture, they don’t know that cow “experts” abound at county fairs across the country, and their lexicon size will surpass that of the Nuer. In the vernacular of most anthropologists, those cow “experts” are simply and collectively referred to as farmers. This is another example of loose talk, indulged in by those who study cognition.