Numbers in linguistics

This page contains numbers appearing in linguistics (including alphabet-related combinatorics).

List of numbers appearing in linguistics

• There are 26 letters in the Latin alphabet, and 26 in the Greek alphabet.
• The character limit in Twitter messages was 140, but it has now been increased to 280, except for CJK languages.
• There are 214 Kangxi radicals.
• There are 676 two-letter combinations formed from the ISO basic Latin alphabet.
  • It is also the second largest undulating square number; this has been proved by David Moews.
  • 676 is an even perfect square number (676 = 26²).
  • Prime factorization of 676 is 2² × 13².
• There are 702 one- and two-letter combinations formed from the ISO basic Latin alphabet; they are used in chemical element symbols and vehicle registration plates of Germany.
• There are (including zero) 19 possible onsets, 21 possible nuclei and (including zero) eight possible codas in the spoken Korean language, resulting in 3,192 possible syllables.
• There are (including zero) 19 possible onsets, 21 possible nuclei and (including zero) 28 possible codas in the written Korean language, resulting in 11,172 possible syllables.
• In the German language, the number 12,000 is called “zwölftausend”. It is the largest number, whose German name contains different letters.
  • It was also the prize for correctly answering the first five questions in the French game show Qui veut gagner des millions ? in euros.
• There are 17,576 three-letter combinations formed from the ISO basic Latin alphabet.
• There are 456,976 four-letter combinations formed from the ISO basic Latin alphabet.
• 8,549,176,320 not only contains every decimal (base 10) digit (0-9), but all the digits are placed in alphabetical order:
  • 8 = eight, 5 = five, 4 = four, 9 = nine, 1 = one, 7 = seven, 6 = six, 3 = three, 2 = two and 0 = zero.
  • Its prime factorization is: 2¹⁰ × 3³ × 5 × 61,843.
  • The following are numbers that satisfy this property in other languages:

Language(s)	Analogous number
Czech	4,921,085,763
French	5,289,476,310
German	8,315,906,742
Greek (using Greek alphabet order)	1,967,208,543
Italian, Portuguese	5,298,467,310
Japanese (Romaji)	5,819,726,340
Klingon (using English transliteration)	2,896,407,513
Latin	2,908,763,451
Polish	4,291,857,630
Russian	8,290,157,346
Spanish	542,986,731 (zero is at the beginning here)
Turkish	6,519,428,037

• In any top-level domain, there are up to \(36 \times 37^{62}\) possible second-level domain names, but some correspond to illegal contents. This number is equal to 609,269,436,886,430,207,415,724,313,935,118,185,567,366,503,082,897,299,581,429,354,820,868,365,318,591,594,476,323,925,066,482,884.

Approximations in other notations

For 8,549,176,320:

Notation	Approximation
BEAF	\(\{10,10\}\)
Fast-growing hierarchy	\(f_2(29)\)
Hyper-E notation	\(8E9\)
Factorial	\(14!\)
Scientific notation	\(8.549176320 \times 10^9\) (exact)
Hardy hierarchy	\(H_{\omega^2}(29)\)

Sources

• Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Computing/2008 October 3#Just curious about website domain names