When I try to understand a particular sentence, I have a feeling that my mind is automatically trying to break the complex words into simpler sentences and then trying to process the whole meaning. A program that can rephrase a sentence to its minimal vocabulary might help me find a way how a brain understands language.
Let’s say I have a sentence – “This is hilarious”, the brain made it simpler by rephrasing this sentence to “This is very funny”. The next time I want to say something is very funny I might simply use “Hilarious”.
All we need a very small set of words to express each and every thought in our mind. The Aesop tales contains a vocabulary of around 5000 words only. One of the most famous story books of all time was written with only 5000 words.
Rudyard Kipling’s “Jungle book” has a total word count of 51,401 out of which there are only 8,533 unique words. The book has been taken from here
Inference:
The number of words used in Jungle Book and many other famous children books had no more than 10,000 unique words. Most of those complex words if translated to much lower forms reduces the unique word count to even less number even if it increases the total word count of the whole book. Grus need not mug up the entire dictionary, he needs to understand how to express thoughts using a minimal set of words.