How do we count specialized language? By this I mean stuff like technical or scientific specialties, which are chock-full of jargon. The more specialized they are, the less they share with related topics. I would expect we do a lot more jargon generating now than before, and jargon words are mostly stand-ins for entire paragraphs (or longer) of explanation.
Related to jargon: academic publishing styles. Among other things, academic writing style is notorious for being difficult for outsiders to penetrate, and making no accommodation for the reader at all (even the intended audience). I have the sense that papers in research journals have almost evolved in the opposite direction, all though I note my perception is based on examples of older papers with an excellent reputation, which is a strong survivorship bias. Yet those papers were usually the papers that launched new fields of inquiry; it seems to me they require stylistic differences like explaining intuitions because the information is not there otherwise.
Unrelated to the first two, it feels like we should circle back to the relationship between speaking and writing. How have sentences and wordcount fared when spoken? We have much less data for this because it requires recording devices, but I seem to recall this being important to settling the question of whether the Iliad could be a written-down version of oral tradition. The trick there was they recorded some bards in Macedonia in the early 20th century performing their stories, transcribed the recordings, and then found them to be of comparable length to Homer. Therefore, oral tradition was ruled in.
How do we count specialized language? By this I mean stuff like technical or scientific specialties, which are chock-full of jargon. The more specialized they are, the less they share with related topics. I would expect we do a lot more jargon generating now than before, and jargon words are mostly stand-ins for entire paragraphs (or longer) of explanation.
Related to jargon: academic publishing styles. Among other things, academic writing style is notorious for being difficult for outsiders to penetrate, and making no accommodation for the reader at all (even the intended audience). I have the sense that papers in research journals have almost evolved in the opposite direction, all though I note my perception is based on examples of older papers with an excellent reputation, which is a strong survivorship bias. Yet those papers were usually the papers that launched new fields of inquiry; it seems to me they require stylistic differences like explaining intuitions because the information is not there otherwise.
Unrelated to the first two, it feels like we should circle back to the relationship between speaking and writing. How have sentences and wordcount fared when spoken? We have much less data for this because it requires recording devices, but I seem to recall this being important to settling the question of whether the Iliad could be a written-down version of oral tradition. The trick there was they recorded some bards in Macedonia in the early 20th century performing their stories, transcribed the recordings, and then found them to be of comparable length to Homer. Therefore, oral tradition was ruled in.