Counting the root words

In the oral tradition, the clan could process likely, 50-100 stems in everyday life. The total capacity is follows the pattern: Consonant, vowel, consonant, which come to around 1-2 thousand.

All the oral societies have dance and song rituals, an absolute necessity to train the clan in their stems. In Spanish, based on a written tradition of Latin, there are close to the 1,000 basic verbs made directly from IE roots.  How does that work?  The oral dialects differed considerably between national clans. Latin being a foreign language dictionary would have over collected.   Some Latin words originally were dialectal modifications of the same stem, I suspect. The Latins would collect the nuances.

Look at your own activities. I doubt most of us use more than 20-60 during everyday events. but we have access to written dictionaries, we can shift context and focus on one set of roots for a specialized business. Oral tradition has limited bandwidth, relative to written.

In my spare time I am thumbing through the Spanish dictionary looking for verbs based  one syllable roots. About half way through I count some four hundred, very roughly. 

Then we have a whole class of compound stem combinations, combinations that only exist because of wide spread writing technology. These multi-prefixes verbs were designed not to be remembered, but to be calculated on paper, like Fibonacci and his position, value tables. Pure written grammar, absent the restrictions of the oral tradition exists in science and literature.

Today we have handheld intelligent paper. We will be making some history, no doubt about it.