Which is the richest language?

Yesterday I had an discussion with a friend on which language is the richest in terms of vocabulary. He insisted that English language has the longest vocabulary.

Years ago, when I was at the first year of Lyceum, there was a Greek literature professor who was always saying that Greek language has the biggest vocabulary. I remember him claiming that computer programmers want to adopt the Greek language as a standard in creating programming languages because of its unlimited vocabulary. Based on that, I decided to bet that Greek Language has the biggest vocabulary against my friend's believing that English is the richest.

We searched the web to find an answer. The first results were declaring that "English is at all the richest language". However I read an article on the economist [1] analyzing why this question cannot be answered. More or less the article supported that it is impossible to count the words consisting a language for the simple reason that there are no rules to do that. For instance, if we count the word "home" and the word "run" as two separate words then the word "home run" should be counted or not?

English language is generally believed to be the richest language while Greek language isn't considered at all in such a "competition" (the top-5 languages participating in this competition are English, French, Tamin, Mandarin and German). However, I strongly believe that Greek language has a characteristic that is very important in this concept. There are very few words that the Greek vocabulary borrowed from foreign languages while the Greek vocabulary is used widely in languages like English. Should these "imported" words be counted as part of the English vocabulary? If you don't believe me, then read the following speech that was written by X. Zolotas the 177th president of Greece:

Kyrie, it is Zeus' anathema on our epoch for the dynamism of our economies and the heresy of our economic methods and policies that we should agonize the Scylla of numismatic plethora and the Charybdis of economic anaemia. It is not my idiosyncrasy to be ironic or sarcastic, but my diagnosis would be that politicians are rather cryptoplethorists. Although they emphatically stigmatize numismatic plethora, they energize it through their tactics and practices. Our policies have to be based more on economic and less on political criteria. Our gnomon has to be a metron between political, strategic and philanthropic scopes. Political magic has always been anti-economic. In an epoch characterized by monopolies, oligopolies, monopsonies, monopolistic antagonism and polymorphous inelasticities, our policies have to be more orthological. But this should not be metamorphosed into plethorophobia, which is endemic among academic economists. Numismatic symmetry should not hyper-antagonize economic acme. A greater harmonization between the practices of the economic and numismatic archons is basic. Parallel to this, we have to synchronize and harmonize more and more our economic and numismatic policies panethnically. These scopes are more practicable now, when the prognostics of the political and economic barometer are halcyonic. The history of our didymus organizations in this sphere has been didactic and their gnostic practices will always be a tonic to the polyonymous and idiomorphous ethnical economies. The genesis of the programmed organization will dynamize these policies. Therefore, I sympathize, although not without criticism on one or two themes, with the apostles and the hierarchy of our organs in their zeal to program orthodox economic and numismatic policies, although I have some logomachy with them. I apologize for having tyrannized you with my Hellenic phraseology. In my epilogue, I emphasize my eulogy to the philoxenous autochthons of this cosmopolitan metropolis and my encomium to you, Kyrie, and the stenographers.

Yes, all these words are of Greek origin. That's the grandeur of the Greek language.

[1] http://www.economist.com/blogs/johnson/2010/06/counting_words