language silhouettes

okay, okay. this will be the last time that i blast you in your face with word-number charts that i made on an airplane. for this final graph, i thought it would be a hoot to generate a kind of “silhouette” of the unique word length schemes of the numbers of each language.

notice how almost 60% of all german numbers are spelled with 14 letters. also—how half of all vietnamese numbers have ten letters. observe how when many languages max out at about 15 letters per number, polish is just warming up (and stretches all the way to 24). compare the strikingly similar silhouettes of italian, spanish, and portuguese. contemplate how neat and tidy turkish is and how chaotic and sprawling french seems.

i’m left wondering whether these graphs would be similar for say, the length of the most used words in each language, or the length of each language’s colour terms. are the majority of vietnamese colours spelled with ten letters? are some of the most used words in polish a whopping 20 letters or more? are there no words in malay that are exactly six letters? who knows? i may need to charter another flight to thailand to sort it all out.