In May 2012, a thread appeared on rec.puzzles that linked to findings about self-reference in the French language. Since there are some slight differences in number naming between France ("Franch"), Belgium ("Belgian") and Switzerland ("Swiss"), I wondered if the reported Franch limit would still apply in the other two variants.
A control run on the Franch one turned out to be quite surprising, as the purported limit could be significantly bettered, and furthermore there seemed to exist no such limit indeed.

Subsequent runs in Swiss, English, Dutch and German gave quite similar results, while Chinese behaved in a slightly different way due to its structure for the names.

Whatever the language, there seems to be a maximum length (about 110 letters) for the initial sentence, but not for the embedded one (up to 512 letters at least).

All in all, my conviction is now that each and every language contains some infinite sequences, or at least some whose end I cannot reach with the tools I have (32-bit machine, no way to generate and use the names past 250 million or so) and there is little incentive to explore other languages (I did not even try Belgian, as I prefer Swiss anyway).

Since writing that (in 2014), I have seriously enhanced my hardware, but it does not matter, still ends up crashing.

Last update 2018-08-03