Talk:Leipzig–Jakarta list

false Swadesh list criticism

That "The Swadesh list, however, was based mainly on intuition", is a somewhat too negative and mistaken interpretation. Although it is not very well decribed from a linguistic field worker's view, it has been primarily aimed at listing universal concepts, as to be translatable in as much as many languages. In my very lon experience, this list may have as many advantages as more shortcomings against the Swadesh list, in particular regarding the unambiguousness needed in glottochronology, e.g. "breast", which is extremely vage defined in many languages. HJJHolm (talk) 06:44, 9 February 2014 (UTC)

Other innovation types

Any comment on if the L-J list accounts at all for lexical innovations other than loaning (onomatopoetic, derivational etc. origin) would be interesting. --Trɔpʏliʊm • blah 19:14, 13 August 2014 (UTC)

Precisely. As far as I know (I haven't read the actual source though, so I might be wrong), the list accounts for neither internal/autonomous innovations, nor for contact-induced, but non-material (i.e. structural) loans, such as calques, which might be interersting to consider too.--Pet'usek ^{[petrdothrubisatgmaildotcom]} 10:09, 17 January 2015 (UTC)

Alphabetical order vs. ranking

I don't understand why the list is ordered alphabetically here, which has no bearing on linguistic issues. I suggest that we either change the table, adding a separate column for the ranking, or create another table listing the words by their ranking, like the one below (sorry, it's incomplete, because I'm too busy at the moment, but feel free to use it in the article):

Leipzig-Jakarta list

Ranking	Word meaning
1	fire
2	nose
3	go (verb)
4	water
5	mouth
6	tongue
7	blood
7	bone
9	2sg pronoun
9	root
11	come (verb)
12	breast
13	rain (noun)
14	1sg pronoun
15	name
15	louse
17	wing
18	flesh/meat
19	arm/hand
20	fly (noun)
20	night
22	ear
23	neck
23	far
25	do/make (verb)
26	house
27	stone/rock
28	bitter
28	say (verb)
28	tooth
31	hair
32	big
32	one
34	who?
34	2sg pronoun
36	hit/beat (verb)
37	leg/foot
38	horn
38	this
2	nose
2	nose
2	nose
2	nose
2	nose
2	nose
2	nose
2	nose
2	nose
2	nose
2	nose
2	nose
2	nose
2	nose
2	nose
2	nose
2	nose
2	nose
2	nose
2	nose
2	nose

--Pet'usek ^{[petrdothrubisatgmaildotcom]} 10:05, 17 January 2015 (UTC)

I agree, it's hard to see a point to showing the alphabetical list. —Tamfang (talk) 18:57, 15 May 2018 (UTC)

@Petusek: Six years later, I think your proposal would be a lot better, especially if it could also be combined with a comparison to the Swadesh lists - Fredlesaltique (talk) 11:58, 11 February 2021 (UTC)

body parts

25% of the words in the Leipzig–Jakarta list are body parts

When the total is 100, the ‘%’ sign is redundant!

I count at most 23: nose, mouth, tongue, blood, bone, breast, wing, flesh/meat, arm/hand, ear, neck, tooth, hair, leg/foot, horn, navel, back, knee, liver, skin/hide, thigh, eye, tail. (For those of you who can't handle proportions without ‘%’, that's 23% of the total.) Did I miss a couple? Egg maybe?

If the text said "one-fourth" I wouldn't mind. —Tamfang (talk) 04:19, 26 April 2018 (UTC)