What do you reckon? Made me think, might make you think too...
2006-12-28 10:30:50 · 6 answers · asked by Buzzard 7 in Society & Culture ➔ Other - Society & Culture
English language including scientific and technical terms rounds to about 1 million words. The English language surprisingly is the largest followed by German with roughly 480,000 words.
Total land suitable for agriculture = 57,000,000 miles2 x 0.11 = 6,270,000 square Miles
= 6.27 million x 640 acres/mile2 = 4,012.8 million acres or 4 billion acres.
At 0.625 acres per person: 4012.8 million + 0.625 acres/person = 6420.48 million or about 6.4 billion people.
Therefore, based on the above assumptions, the world can support about 6. 4 billion people.
Population today -----> 6.67 billion people.
With English being the largest language and including 1,000,000 words you can multiply that by the the 2,700 languages in the world and that only comes out to 2.7 billion words.
2006-12-28 10:58:20 · answer #1 · answered by drifting_saint 3 · 0⤊ 0⤋
My guess is that there are more words than people. We could probably work it out by estimating the number of words in the English language and multiplying it by the number of different languages and subtracting a bit from the result because English has more words than some others (e.g Aboriginal Australian!) and some words are the same in different languages.
2006-12-28 10:36:29 · answer #2 · answered by Anonymous · 1⤊ 0⤋
Questions like that make the world very complicated. You may as well just ask how many drops of rain fall from the sky during a storm.
2006-12-28 10:33:03 · answer #3 · answered by Ally 4 · 1⤊ 0⤋
At this instant there are 6,566,248,472 people on the planet.
There are about 7330 languages.
That would be about 895,804.7 words per language to break even.
What is your opinion?
2006-12-28 10:39:32 · answer #4 · answered by Barkley Hound 7 · 0⤊ 0⤋
How are we mere mortals to know the answers to such a question?? I would go with no...
2006-12-28 10:32:46 · answer #5 · answered by ~Grace~ 5 · 0⤊ 0⤋
maybe i'd say equal alot
2006-12-28 10:34:19 · answer #6 · answered by hey 4 · 0⤊ 0⤋