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Research's Support Documentation
(Some excerpts taken from Cognate Linguistics)
Here we present some evidence of English and Spanish cognates out of unique word analysis. As you will see on table 2.1, text written before the 1900's sometimes defy the common minimum 25% of cognates in unique written words.
Wordlists
° GSL - The General Service List (West, 1953)
Words: 2284. Cognates: 736 (32%). False cognates: 158 (7%)
° BNL - The Billuroglu and Neufeld List (Billuroglu and Neufeld, 2005)
Words: 183. Cognates: 95 (52%). False cognates: 11 (6%)
° AWL - The Academic Wordlist (Coxhead, 2000).
Words: 570. Cognates: 405 (71%). False cognates: 41 (7%)
° Brown 5000 - The first 5000 most frequently used words from The Brown Corpus of Standard American English (Francis and Kucera, 1964).
Words: 5000. Cognates: 2207 (44%). False cognates: 184 (4%)
° Ogden's Basic English Word List (Ogden, 1930)
Words: 850. Cognates: 245 (29%). False cognates: 49 (6%)
° CIDE Defining Vocabulary (Cambridge International Dictionary of English, 1995)
Words: 3732. Cognates: 1375 (37%). False cognates: 148 (4%)
° Oxford 3000 Word List (Oxford University Press)
Words: 3457. Cognates: 1441 (42%). False cognates: 207 (6%)
° Oxford University Press' Business and Finance Words
Words: 270. Cognates: 150 (55%). False cognates: 9 (3%)
° Brian Kelk's UK English Word List (First 20000 MFW)
Words: 20833. Cognates: 8316 (40%). False cognates: 431 (2%)
° Voice of America's Special English Word List
Words: 1477. Cognates: 584 (39%). False cognates: 98 (7%)
News
From the Unique Word Analysis of the front page of the January 1st, 2007 online edition of:
° The Australian, Australia; cognates represent 33% of its unique words.
° Guardian Unlimited, England: 34%.
° The New York Times, USA: 33%.
° CBC-Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, Canada: 35%.
° El Universo, Ecuador: 42% (Spanish-English cognates)
Business
° From Deloitte's International Tax and Business Guides - Australia's Guide: 41%.
Vocabulary for admission to higher education in the USA
° TOEFL vocabulary practice, from supervoca.net: 44%
° SAT vocabulary practice, from freevocabulary.com: 46%
° GRE vocabulary practice, from supervoca.net: 43%
Miscellaneous
° From The Australian Constitution: 46.5%.
° From the speech "I Have a Dream", by M. Luther King, Jr.: 29.3% (spoken English)
° From The Statement of Good Practice of The Applied Linguistics Association of Australia: 48.1%
° From the headwords of the Taboo board game, by Hasbro, 1989 version: 37.6%.
° From the headwords of the Taboo board game, by Hasbro, 2000 version: 35.5%.
° From Australia's ABC Radio National's 'All in the mind': "The Moral Mind" (25/11/06): 36.2% (spoken English)
Movies (spoken English)
° From The Movie script of 'Babe': 17.4%.
° From The Movie script of 'Shine': 21.1%.
° From The Movie script of 'Forrest Gump': 22.3%
Table 2.1 Cognates in British and American Classics: unique word analysis
| Total | Unique | Cognates | ||
| Tokens | Words | |||
| By Charles Dickens | ||||
| A Christmas Carol, 1843 | 28956 | 4392 | 989 (22.5%) | |
| David Copperfield, 1850 | 361758 | 14933 | 3894 (26.1%) | |
| Great Expectations, 1867 | 175966 | 19233 | 2707 (14.1%) | |
| By Mark Twain | ||||
| The Adventures of | ||||
| Huckleberry Finn, 1885 | 114766 | 7092 | 868 (12.2%) | |
| The Adventures of Tom | ||||
| Sawyer, 1876 | 72240 | 8006 | 1732 (21.6%) | |
| The Prince & | ||||
| The Pauper, 1882 | 70081 | 8667 | 1947 (22.5%) | |
| By Jane Austen | ||||
| Emma, 1816 | 160364 | 8504 | 2312 (27.2%) | |
| Pride & Prejudice, 1813 | 122234 | 6658 | 2153 (32.3%) | |
| Sense & Sensibility, 1896 | 122850 | 7091 | 2197 (31.0%) | |
| By Oscar Wilde | ||||
| The Canterville Ghost, 1906 | 11699 | 2534 | 679 (26.8%) | |
| The Importance of Being | ||||
| Earnest, 1895 | 20916 | 2646 | 876 (33.1%) | |
| The Picture of Dorian | ||||
| Gray, 1891 | 79678 | 7226 | 1932 (26.7%) | |
| By Shakespeare | ||||
| Hamlet, 1603 | 32637 | 4635 | 1029 (22.2%) | |
| Macbeth, 1606 | 19130 | 3311 | 700 (21.1%) | |
| Romeo and Juliet, 1595 | 26864 | 3722 | 671 (18.0%) | |
| By M. W. Shelley | ||||
| Frankenstein, 1818 | 75024 | 7124 | 2435 (34.2%) |
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