Re: English - One-Million Words!

Evan Kirshenbaum filted:

Chuck Riggs <chriggs@xxxxxxxxxx> writes:

If Isaac Asimov can make an educated estimate for the number of atoms
in the universe, as he did in one of his books, surely it is not
beyond a good linguist to estimate the number of words in one of the
Earth's languages.

Even ignoring the fact that "atom" is far more precisely defined than
"word", I'm curious as to what Asimov's error bounds were. I'd be
willing to go out on a limb and say that English has ten million
words, plus or minus two orders of magnitude.

Actually, the sort of estimate that Asimov did is probably easier for
language, too. It maps more to "How many English words are spoken
each day"[1] which can be estimated by estimating the number of
speakers, the average number of sentences spoken each day, and the
average number of words in a sentence.

Didn't Heinlein actually do this one, in one of his "Tales from the White
Hart"?...(or was it one of Asimov's "Black Widowers" stories?)...r


--
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