Native speakers are expected to deal with vocabularies of about 3000 words.
Many foreigners know that many and yet can’t speak.

Why is that?

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A native speaker knows his 3000 words each with more than one meaning.

If there is an estimated average of 5 meanings per word, your 3000 word vocabulary represents a 15 000 item knowledge.

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HOWEVER, here comes the catch: a native speaker also combines his 3000 words all with each other to create thousands of new meanings :

Bring up ….educate
bring down ….topple
bring in …. earn
bring out…publish
bring off ….succeed

Break up ….. interrupt
break up ….disintegrate
break down …. collapse
break down …. analyze
break off … interrupt
break away ….escape
break out…erupt, escape

Estimating about 10 new combinations per word, that would give your native speaker a command of over 150 000 lexical items.

Now add ……

…… literary quotes
…… fixed phrases
…… abbreviations
…… technical terms

and you end up with 200 000 lexical items known to the native speaker .

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Definitions

………………….. Active vocabulary = words that you use

………………….. Passive vocabulary = words that you recognize in context. The passive vocabulary is always much larger than the active one.

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C r e d i t s

The stats and the idea are based on “Cambridge Companion to the English Language”.

The little kid with his cell phone is from a drawing by Gary Olsen at http://www.dubuque.k12.ia.us/cartoons. He allows taking his drawing if you link it to his collection.

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Added March 24 2011

More recent examples:

Uptick …….. I asked three Spanish engineers. They knew “tick” and of course “up”, but were unable to guess the meaning of “uptick in the radiation readings” .

Axe ……. These three were also unable to understand “Calls to Axe MP” though they knew “axe” and understood “call”.

Their English level is high, but they only read technical literature. One of them very recenly passed the GMAT with a 6 and maximum punctuation in his essays ……

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http://images.jsc.nasa.gov/luceneweb/caption_direct.jsp?photoId=AS11-44-6549

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In the past they had to  make the best of little bits and pieces of information obtained from people who had been abroad and from the poets :

Here is a map made by Hecataeus in the fifth century bC:

This map is in public domain at http://www.livius.org/a/1/maps/hecataeus_map.gif

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And this is how Herodotus imagined his Earth, also in the fifth century bC :

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The map of Herodotus reconstructed and released to public domain by bibi saint pol at  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Herodotus_world_map-en.svg

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Isaac Azimov wrote and illustrated a story on the shape of the Earth, in public domain at http://www.arvindguptatoys.com/arvindgupta/earthpix.pdf

The Greeks saw that ships on the sea appear as if they came up from somewhere behind and below the horizon. They deduced that the Earth had to be round, but they had a hard time trying to explain why things don’t fall off.

(By the way: why don’t things fall off?)

Elsewhere some thought that the Earth rested on pillars, and a much older passage in the Bible says that God suspended the Earth from nothing.

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Socrates too had a theory and before he died he explained why he believed that the Earth probably looked like a sphere of luminous colour patches. He reasoned that those colours had to be brighter and purer than any you can see on Earth :

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And Aristotle said that from Egypt you could see stars that were not visible from Greece. He concluded that the Earth had to be round and not very large.

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And the next map was drawn by Saint Isidore in Seville, Spain:

It is in public domain at http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Karte_Isidor.jpg

Saint Isidore lived in Seville some 1500 years ago. He was a bishop and a scholar who was influential and world famous for several hundred years.

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And this map is from the 15th century, in theory 2000 years closer to us.

The Earth is spherical, but you cannot get to the other side because you would risk falling off the Equator.

In the upper part of this map there seems to be a ship on a mountain. It must be Noah’s ship, for the map was still largely a story-telling device.

The map is in public domain at http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/5f/T-O_Mappa_mundi.jpg

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Some of the maps tried to show all of the available knowledge:

It is called the Ebstorfer World Map and was destroyed in WW2, but put back together from fragments. There is a 5 mega version at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Ebstorfer-stich2.jpg. It is similar to a modern film director’s storyboard showing what and where and when everything took place.

In the center of the map, if you look up the larger version,  you will find Jerusalem, because at the time most of the information still came from the Bible, and Jerusalem was the center of the world and also of the universe.

There are also animals on this map:

Published by Kolossos under a GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2  at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Ebstorfer-stich2.jpg.

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Some maps included information about the monsters that the sailors had met at sea.

On the original map at Wikipedia you can see the monsters one by one, but it is a very large file : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carta_Marina

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Below is the map with the most illustrous copyright owner:

According to Wikipedia, it may have been drawn by Christopher Columbus and his brother Bartolomé. Now it is in public domain with a larger version published at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:ColombusMap.jpg.

They drew it to figure out how to navigate around the globe.

They had studied the Bible and other books expensive to obtain at the time and they wrote their observations in the margins:

Notes by Columbus on a text by Marco Polo in public domain according to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:ColombusNotesToMarcoPolo.jpg

The ships that were built for Columbus to cross the Ocean are lost, but exact replicas have been made, and the photo shows them sailing past Cape Canaveral spaceflight center.

The photo is freely available for non-commercial use from NASA at http://mix.msfc.nasa.gov/IMAGES/HIGH/9265044.jpg

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World maps were based on imagination, tradition, and hearsay, and there was room to include castles and people, animals, and ships.

This map was a puzzle sold online, but the page is no longer available.

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This map  shows the Pacific Ocean. They still did not mind proportions. You can see individual people, the sailors on that ship and also a winged creature with a red skirt:  maybe it is an angel.

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….. The point is that in the past there were many divergent ideas on what the Earth was like. Even Socrates’ famous view was just one of many. They  had to make the best of little bits and pieces of information obtained from people who had been abroad and from the poets.

Everybody could have a try, and they did. –

Now there is only one theory, and everybody knows about it, but very few can understand it really.

The drawing is one of Chris Madden’s science cartoons

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And they sent up a laser beam to create  a referent for photography in the Milky Way.

Photo by  ESO/Yuri Beletsky  under CC Attribution 3.0 Unported license at  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Laser_Towards_Milky_Ways_Centre.jpg

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This photo by Ikiwaner is under a GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2 only license  at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Etosha_elefant.jpg

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It is an iguana and he is surprised and a little scared to meet you.

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And here is your friend, the camel.

The portrait is by S. Taheri under a CC license at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Camel_portrait.jpg

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The camels, the sand, those long shadows, and the setting sun : it’s on countless office walls and in all the travel agencies.

But deserts could supply solar energy. Mostly they are not arable and poorly inhabited and their sunshine could one day become a lucrative export business.

See http://www.desertec.org/

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The desert in Lybia, a photo by Lucca Galuzzi considered outstanding by Wikipedia.

The large version is at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Libya_4985_Tadrart_Acacus_Luca_Galuzzi_2007.jpg

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Now that would be another surprise encounter. A lot would depend on his size. He is in Australia.

The original picture is at http://www.outback-australia-travel-secrets.com/

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The photo is by David Shankbone.

The large version is at Wiki ttp://tinyurl.com/ccm4ox.
The desert is in Judea, Israel. At the back, those vertical tracks of sand rolling down : they look the same as the tracks  that little avalanches leave in the snow on the side of a mountain.

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Faiman, who is a specialist, says that with existing technology  you could produce electricity for the whole world with  10 per cent of the Sahara Desert.

The Sahara is the world’s largest desert, more than twice the size of the next in line, the
Great Australian Desert.

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Desert flowers must be particularly pretty.

The spectacular photo  and the desert are American from a travel agent at http://www.qtours.com/

Below a cactus flower that comes as a wallpaper free at http://www.scenicreflections.com/media/376434/Desert_flower_Wallpaper/

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Here they are again, walking in the hot sand…

and drinking at the fountain …

The paintings are by Jean Leon Gerome from http://hoocher.com/Jean_Leon_Gerome/jean_leon_gerome.htm

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Desert animals have a hard time, and it shows.

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Dromedaries  : This photo and the one below were made by the son of a trader who used to take the caravans across the Sahara from one country to the next. He explains that  the caravan trade had to stop when the Western powers drew frontiers between the countries.

The dromedaries are all parallel to each other. Sheep do that, too. Why?

The photo is at http://www.adventuresfromsahara.com/gallery03.htm, a great place with Sahara knowledge and photos .

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The desert in Egypt as seen at a travel blog whose link is broken http://www.beatenpaths.net/.
On the left, of the same colour as the landscape, is a camel. Isn´t the blue figure a woman?  Did she go shopping all alone?

The picture below is from http://www.flickr.com/photos/healinglight/159395792/sizes/z/in/photostream/

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The photo of a Berber village is by Jean-Marie Akkerman at his Travel Blog .

Elsewhere I read that these houses are not typical of that landscape, because those people formerly lived as nomads. The Arab people who live as nomads in the deserts are called Bedouins.

That kind of life is difficult to maintain because it runs contrary to most modern conditions. A bedouin’s income would come from his herds, and that would not yield cash enough to buy machinery or computers or even medication.

Below is a Bedouin family in their tent.

This photo by Tanenhaus from Brooklyn is  licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Bedouin_family-Wahiba_Sands.jpg.

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And below is a desert village in Egypt, lines of caves, the header of a blog on Egypt and its agriculture

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And yet another picture of a caravan, camels resting.

Sometimes they have to walk for hours or days.  In the past they carried  trade and traders, and along with their merchandise they brought the news across the desert.

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The best photos of camels and the desert under a CC Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.0 Generic  (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0) license are by “Templar” see http://www.flickr.com/photos/healinglight/, where these last three photos are from.

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Yet another  desert flower?  See  http://www.gracehilladultcare.com/id13.html

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Metaphors are all over everybody’s language. It is an illusion that they are mainly a poet’s domain. A poet uses them  lucidly, that’s all, but in everyday language they are so common that nobody views them as an artifice anymore :

a broken heart
a hot issue
deep thought
a superego
a stirring speech
an offhand remark
truth comes to light
things go to hell

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You can’t talk about music, politics, psychology, religion, music, philosophy or any other word-based disciplines  without relying on metaphors.

the “barriers” between “classes”
the “field” of sociology
the government “watchdog”
a “foolproof” system
a “gesture” in politics
a “tool” for the mind
a “key” to understanding
the “source” of many problems…

As soon as you talk about something non-physical, non-material, you have to look for metaphor.

That is the reason why it is so difficult to talk about a melody or a painting without simply saying WOW or LOL.

And especially in words of Latin descent you can often still see their metaphoric or figurative origin:

Con-dition = given at the same time
trans-fer = carried over
access = come near

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Even children discover rather early that words can be manipulated, secretly or openly, for fun or for war.

They name the teacher Spinach and their slowest classmate Blitz.

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The idea is to turn a common word into a new sock puppet, a new character in the game. –

However, sometimes a metaphor goes on and on for a paragraph or an entire book, and some are famous the world over :  Melville’s Moby Dick, Cervantes’ Quixote, Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea, Steinebeck’s The Pearl.

Plato’s cave is  long and  clumsy,  but Heracles’ river¹ and Kant’s dove² are each just a line or two.

Kafka’s  Message from the Emperor³ is less than a page.

And every day  metaphors come as  cartoons:

The Kite by Chris Madden

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¹ “You cannot step twice into the same stream“  meaning that all things keep changing and flow by like water in a river.

² “The light dove, cleaving the air in her free flight and feeling its resistance, might imagine that its flight would be still easier in empty space” meaning that metaphysical and religious thinking tends to be delusional because it is not restrained by the need to furnish proof.

³ Below is Kafka’s “Imperial Message”:

The photos are by ghD and the Kafka translation is from the website of Ian Johnston

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