Friday, August 6, 2010

The numbers 1 through 10 in 5,020 languages

Language enthusiast Mark Rosenfelder keeps a pretty darn extensive list of number words in over 5,000 languages. Check it out here. The list includes many extinct languages, artificial languages, reconstructed protolanguages, and dialectal varieties; the number of living, natural languages is 3,952. He keeps an accompanying list of sources here, though not all are scholarly. The main problem with the list is that it doesn't use a consistent orthography (much less the IPA), and it's not always clear what kind of orthography is being used for a given language. It also lacks modern ISO 639-3 identifiers for the languages, so it will be messy to try to cross-reference them with other databases. Still, it's an awful lot of data and I'm sure something interesting could be done with it.

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