LAST EDITED ON Sep-01-01 AT 04:00 PM (EDT)

>>14 million against the Earth's total population is close enough to "no
>>one" for government work...

14 million: ~6.5 billion ~= .05% so, a 20th of a percentage point *is* close enough to nothing for government work. (For example, the US Census only rounds to the nearest 10th of a percentage point.)

>Only 300 million or so speak English as their first language. If you
>add the people who speak it well as a second language, then you've got
>500 to 600 million English speakers. (I'm discounting people who
>think they speak English but can't actually function in the language.)

Would you care to give sources for your numbers? I have a hard time beliving that only 500 million speak english. And also, how do you count who can function in the language or not? standard kindergarten? or 5th grade (US), or with graduate degrees in the english language?

> Compare that to 750 million native Cantonese speakers, or something
>like 1.2 billion if you count all the various dialects of Chinese.
>(Which isn't really viable from a linguistic point of view, since
>they're not mutually intelligible. An Italian speaker and a Spanish
>speaker could understand each other more readily than someone who
>spoke only Mandarin and someone who only spoke Cantonese.)

No, not really. A Sicillian speaker and a Spanish speaker could get along pretty well, but italian and spanish have about as much in common as english and spanish. The only thing that they have in common is some minor grammer points, but other then that they are pretty much completely different. (I tried taking an italian class, figuring the same thing. No dice. I gave up, because it was acutally harder for me to learn it. I kept wanting to use spanish words, and pronunciations.

>And 14 million people is larger than the population of a number of
>European countries and Southeast Asian; many of those countries are
>not the kind that one dismisses as "no one." New York City has a
>population of about 8 million; I don't think you could say no one
>lives there.

8,008,278. And yes, I would, for purposes of a world langauge poll. "New York City speaks New York-ese" Or "New York cityites complain about life in general" Now, I wouldn't sneer at New York City its self, because of the history of the city, and the fact that it's almost impossible to get good challa, or pizza anywhere else. (I still think it's the water.)

>14 million people is nothing to sneeze at.

Well, if they speak Esperanto, no, not to sneeze at. To laugh at, yes, but sneeze at? No. I wouldn't want to sneeze 14 million times in a row.

--
-Pasha
Umm, right....I'll be with you in just a sec now...

All numbers from US census web site (http://factfinder.census.gov/servlet/BasicFactsServlet) or not mine.