djwebb2021 wrote:
This reflects the way in which Irish makes phrases out of existing words (Irish is periphrastic). E.g. in English "evict" is a separate word, but in Irish "cur ó sheilbh", using three words that occur in the list, can be brought together to mean "evict". So the 4122 headwords will make enough phrases to cover the same ground as 10,000 Russian ones.
Does it, or does it just reflect the weakness of the Irish speakers in the corpus? I'm not sure which corpus it pulls from, but if it's sufficiently modern (post-1960), I would wager it reflects more the declining usage of words among younger, weaker speakers. Or, probably, a combination of the two.