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from Brown Corpus
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If word classes differ in their resistance or liability to stem replacement within meaning slot, it is conceivable that individual meanings also differ with fair consistence trans-lingually.
Hoijer's Athabascan and my Yokuts share 71 identical meanings ( with allowance for several near-synonyms like stomach-belly, big-large, long-far, many-much, die-dead, say-speak ).
For Yokuts, I tabulated these 71 items in five columns, according as they were expressed by 1, 2, 3, 4, and more than 4 stems.
The totals for these five categories are not too uneven, namely 20, 15, 11, 16, 9 respectively.
For Athabascan, with a greater range of stems, the first two of five corresponding columns were identical, 1 and 2 stems ; ;
the three others had to be spread somewhat, and are headed respectively Af ; ;
Af ; ;
and Af stems.
While the particular limits of these groupings may seem artificially arbitrary, they do fairly express a corresponding grouping of more variable material, and they eventuate also in five classes, along a similar scale, containing approximately equal numbers of cases, namely 19, 14, 15, 11, 12 in Athabascan.

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