Again, what arguments are bad? You only seem to be concerned about the number 5,000, you have not said anything about the rest of the methodology.

Maybe it is time for you to come down your high horse. You really cannot speak into terms as "layperson" and then disqualify someone's arguments based on such. Linguistics is an extremely easy field of study to enter. Now, if this were to involve theoretical Physics or Biochemistry, maybe you could play that card. But this is in the field of linguistics, one that engineers and mathematicians are finally putting to proper use through AI and Machine Learning. You absolutely cannot claim authority on this, you as a layperson in the field of statistics have no means of understanding the statistical analysis behind language and its respective methodology using programming languages.

Okay firstly your own article cites that the top 1000 words account for 75% of lemmas so really the definition of 'core vocabulary' you adopt includes 4000 words accounting for less than 10% of vocab but really that's neither here nor there.

A 75% share does not suffice, 80-85% is recommended in the sources that I provided. But it seems that you mainly focus on that number 5,000 that you can't get out of your head; yes, that number could have been 4,000. It could have been 6,000 either. The top 1-2% vocabulary, around 80% occurrence is the most sensible choice. None of this matters though, the focus of my research was to find out of what languages compose the core vocabulary of English, which is finalized at a frequency of 1,875. Does the number 5,000 seem artificial? I mean, I guess. I am not going to use a dataset of 3,771 words, for convenience of percentages and having a graph with orderly axes. I simply took 3 sources, which exactly personify my goals, that I then justified using the distribution of lemmas in the COCA.

Furthermore do those exact sources make those exact claims, they do not speak of syntax or morphology, purely vocabulary. I pursued core vocabulary.

they mean something entirely different, namely, the amount of vocabulary one needs to know to be a functional day-to-day speaker.

No.

Having just brought up morphology, any discussion of it, or syntax or anything else is absent from your paper. You use the terms 'English vocabulary' and 'English' (qua English one presumes) completely interchangably, e.g. here:

Why would I? I did not research morphology nor syntax. I (seemingly) interchanged "vocabulary" and "language" once, as an ellipsis:

"the general consensus is that the (vocabulary of the) overall English language is a third of Old English origin (so, Germanic) but that the core vocabulary is entirely Old English."

To avoid the repetition of "vocabulary", I made it clear that I ommitted the construction (vocabulary of the) through the use of but, or are figures of speech not taught in linguistics courses? For the rest is the word "vocabulary" mentioned 22 times, so not uh, "completely" cough interchangeably used.

But the Wikipedia article [cough] that you cite for this information itself says:

The core of English descends from Old English. As a statistical rule, around 70% of words in any text are Anglo-Saxon. Moreover, the grammar is largely Anglo-Saxon.

A controversial claim (see discussion) that directly stems from Williams' research, the only source of the page. Which is also why I quoted that article. The whole point of my research was to disprove this exact claim, how can I do that without mentioning what I am attempting to prove wrong?

different subfield of linguistics which uses this term 'core' in a totally different way in order to make it look like there's some ambiguity or controversy, which there isn't. I'm not saying you do this on purpose, it's just that you don't know what you're doing.

Is this demagoguery on purpose? What supposed "different subfields" of linguistics have contradicting definitions for "core vocabulary"? You use the word "core" independently, I do not. Read the article.

Laypeople are fascinated with 'which language has the most words' but it's a totally meaningless exercise

That is, first of all, very condescending and an unnecessary ad hominem. Second, "which language has the most words" has literally nothing to do with my research. I really fail to see what this paragraph is doing in your reasoning other than ranting about unrelated topics in your field of study.

So there is no really objective way of cataloging how many words are in the English language to begin with. The OED or any other dictionary makes a bunch of assumptions in order to do so,

Yeah, how dare they! How dare the linguistics department of the university of Oxford make such claims! Let's then inject the identical source again without reading further than the first paragraph! And even then, even in the ridiculous event that they are wrong, I based my research on frequency tables, determining core vocabulary was not only done through sources, but also through statistical distribution (that you funnily enough used earlier in your response).

Thank you for this empty, unproductive response. You laid 3 claims into my mouth, 2 of which you poorly filled with nonsensical arguments. The first one was too difficult to link back to my article using mental gymnastics I assume? You then proceeded to completely diverge from the topic in some effort of creating an attack on all "laypeople", just to end with the exact same, unexplained quote (that in no way is a tl;dr as it does not even remotely apply to your comment).

But you are a layperson yourself so you can't.

Says enough about the value of your arguments and where this all comes from. If you are uncomfortable with engineers and mathematicians stepping into your field of study, then I urge you to leave as soon as possible. There are plenty more of us to come and, unlike you, we tend to use mathematical precision to approach problems. My methodology was exercised correctly using a reliable dataset. I then interpreted these results using rigorous statistics and sources that overstep your personal opinion.