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Mathematicians prove the triviality of English

theguardian.com

1–10 of 64 posts

Re: Mathematicians prove the triviality of English

#5

Well, if we set all letters to equal 1, then what is stopping this from working out? Haven't they just shown that the product of any combination of 1's is equal to the product of any other combination of ones?

This wouldn't work in eg German, where there's no way to cancel out pronunciation like that.

Re: Mathematicians prove the triviality of English

#8

Well, if we set all letters to equal 1, then what is stopping this from working out? Haven't they just shown that the product of any combination of 1's is equal to the product of any other combination of ones?

What they proved is that, for certain words, all letters can work as a multiplicative identity element (which if we were talking about numbers it would be 1)

Or, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghoti

Re: Mathematicians prove the triviality of English

#9
post #5

Well, if we set all letters to equal 1, then what is stopping this from working out? Haven't they just shown that the product of any combination of 1's is equal to the product of any other combination of ones?

This wouldn't work in eg German, where there's no way to cancel out pronunciation like that.

Yes, because German pronunciation is very close to the written form of words

Re: Mathematicians prove the triviality of English

#10
Click-bait title much? I don't know about anyone else, but when I read that title I thought it would have something to do with syntax or semantics, not as a monoid word problem[1]. Also, why did they call it "semigroup with identity" instead of monoid?

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Word_problem_for_groups

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