This was tossed out in the 'What is the most obscure thing you know" thread. How exactly do you reduce a language to numbers. The only way I can think of is A = 1 , B = 2, etc. Is there another way??? :smack:
Also I remember reading somewhere ( no I don’t remember where) that there is a “mathematically perfect” langauge and it is used as a kind of linguistic Rossetta Stone when translating one language to another (kind of a bridge language) anyone know anything about this ???
Take any word.
[list=1][li]Count the number of letters. []Write the number as a word. []Take this number and go to step 1. [/list=1]This will eventually get you to the word “four”. When you do this procedure on that word, you get the same word back.[/li]
Example: “mathematically”.
“fourteen”
“eight”
“five”
“four”
I think this applies to any phrase and even misspelled words as well.
The reason this works is that “four” is the only number-word that has the same number of letters as its mathematical value. If the word for 5 was spelled “phive”, there would be two possible ends to the sequence.
It’d also fail if “three” was spelled “threee”, for example, because then you’d get:
six
threee
six
threee
six…
I think a standing wave of number-words like that would be pretty cool, but unfortunately there aren’t any in English. Spanish has “cuatro” (4) and “seis” (6) as well as “cinco”, so there are two possible terminations if you count in Spanish.
> Also I remember reading somewhere ( no I don’t remember
> where) that there is a “mathematically perfect” langauge and it
> is used as a kind of linguistic Rossetta Stone when translating
> one language to another (kind of a bridge language) anyone
> know anything about this ???
From everything I know about linguistics and mathematics (and I have master’s degrees in both), that sounds not just wrong but incoherent. There are no “bridge languages,” and I can’t even make any sense of what it would be to call a natural human language “mathematically perfect.” I don’t think this could possibly be true.
The nearest thing might be Loglan (LOGical LANguage), but I don’t think anyone has seriously proposed using it as a bridge. Which seems impossible anyway, since different languages divide semantic space differently, so such a bridge language would have to make every distinction made in any language, which is completely unfeasible. It might be possible between two languages, but it still would be very unlikely to be worth it.
Here is one example that is particularly important to teaching mathematics. In English, the word “if” defaults to if and only if, so that “If you eat your broccoli, you will get desert” is generally understood as saying that if you don’t eat your broccoli, you will NOT get desert. In a similar way, “or” defaults to xor and the latter is, I have been told, not true in every language. In fact, Latin had two words for “or”, namely “aut” which was exclusive and “vel” which was inclusive and from whose initial letter the mathematical “or” sign is taken. Anyway, one of the things you must do when teaching formal logic is to explain clearly these differences between common usage and mathematical usage. And if another language does it differently, you better know that too.