My 7-year-old son Parker asked me this good question last night: how many words are there in the world? I started by saying, well, it’s not an infinite number (he understands about infinity), and I happen to know (from a really fun project for my work) that one source, Ethnologue, lists about 14,000 existing languages. If you assume that most of those languages have far fewer than the 1 million sometimes attributed to English, and you assume some rate of language extinction over the last 30,000 years, you wind up with a SWAG of maybe 100,000 languages in human history, with 100,000 words, each, or 10^10 — that’s 10 billion words — that have ever existed. Then, of course, new words are already being created.
Such is the power of synchronicity in life that no sooner had I gone through this calculation than I got an email from my alma mater, Swarthmore College, mentioning that a professor there is an expert on language extinction. So I thought I would ask him for his opinion on the question: how many words are there in the world?
Swarthmore College | News | Swarthmore Linguist Calls Attention to Dying Languages
Speakers of thousands of the world’s languages are now abandoning their ancestral tongues at an unprecedented rate. What is lost when a language dies? And what are the implications?
“Languages are the repository of thousands of years of a people’s science and art – from observations of ecological patterns to creation myths,” says Swarthmore College linguist K. David Harrison (right),
Technorati Tags: linguistics, Swarthmore, language extinction
BBC NEWS | Business | US ‘no longer technology king’
The US has lost its position as the world’s primary engine of technology innovation, according to a report by the World Economic Forum.
The US is now ranked seventh in the body’s league table measuring the impact of technology on the development of nations.
A deterioration of the political and regulatory environment in the US prompted the fall, the report said.
Let’s take a closer look:
1: Denmark
2: Sweden
3: Singapore
4: Finland
5: Switzerland
6: Netherlands
7: US
8: Iceland
9: UK
10: Norway
Aside from the skepticism-inducing source of the report (what does a rich people’s thinktank know about technology innovation?), these are all little tiny countries. Scale matters.
Technorati Tags: innovation
Ace Books (2003), Hardcover, 576 pages
Del Rey Books (1988), Mass Market Paperback
Free full text PDF of The JESUS FAMILY TOMB Controversy by Dillon Burroughs is here.
DILLON BURROUGHS is a staff writer for the award-winning television and radio program The John Ankerberg Show, which is broadcast into over 185 countries. He is the author or coauthor of fourteen books, including the best-selling book What Can Be Found in LOST?, the revised Facts On series (with John Ankerberg and John Weldon; over 2 million sold), and the Comparing Christianity series (over 1 million sold). Dillon is a graduate of Dallas Theological Seminary and lives with his wife and two children in Tennessee.
www.readdB.com
www.myspace.com/readdB
http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=710828874 (Facebook)
Crown (2006), Hardcover, 384 pages
Paul C. Lauterbur, 77, Dies; Won Nobel Prize for M.R.I. – New York Times
Paul C. Lauterbur, who shared the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 2003 for developing magnetic resonance imaging into a way to look inside living organisms, died yesterday at his home in Urbana, Ill. He was 77.
This guy’s life work, which saved thousands, if not millions of lives (and made HOUSE, M.D. possible), should be front page news everywhere.
Technorati Tags: House M.D., Lauterbur, MRI, heroes
Rand McNally & Company (1950), Hardcover
tags: First Edition, no jacket
Sarpedon Pub (1999), Hardcover, 352 pages
wfzimmerman’s review: “A prequel to THE TAR-AIYM KRANG. Notable for the "Flinx meets Pip" scenes and for the "Flinx flips out" scene at the end where he zaps a bunch of bad guys.”
Ballantine Books (1983), Paperback
tags: collecting author highlights, collecting humanx novels, collecting Commonwealth novels
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