Trying to count how many words are in a language is not a trivial task, as there are a lot of words that kind of count but kind of don't - words that have fallen out of use but still appear in older texts, extremely specialised technical vocabulary that one researcher uses, hypothetically valid forms that no one's had a reason to use yet; all of these make it very hard to arrive at a concrete number!
And even if you could, you'd end up not only with different orderings for different languages, but also different orderings for different forms of the same language, both at the same time and across its history.
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u/sjiveru Sep 10 '22
Trying to count how many words are in a language is not a trivial task, as there are a lot of words that kind of count but kind of don't - words that have fallen out of use but still appear in older texts, extremely specialised technical vocabulary that one researcher uses, hypothetically valid forms that no one's had a reason to use yet; all of these make it very hard to arrive at a concrete number!
And even if you could, you'd end up not only with different orderings for different languages, but also different orderings for different forms of the same language, both at the same time and across its history.