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From which Tom Scott video is this ?
Saussure feelings
If you want a clear definition, ask a mathematician:
A word is any written product of group elements and their inverses.
Or a computer scientist:
A word is a fixed-sized datum handled as a unit by the instruction set or the hardware of the processor.
Or, in either field (formal language theory bridges both) it can mean any string of symbols, letters, or tokens.
Maybe ironically, neither one would be appropriate as a linguistic definition.
Meanwhile, in Unicode land…
i wonder what the inverse of the letters in the english alphabet are. since it has a non-prime number of letters (26 to be exact), we know that some letters won’t have inverses. i wonder which letters don’t have inverses. i guess it would be pretty easy to find out if you use the standard alphabet ordering and then port the alphabet over to ℤ/26ℤ, but that’s not a particularly satisfying answer.
What IS a word?
vsauce music starts playing
“what” is a word, correct.
And I love them for it. Seriously comfortable society is built on and by nerds.
Yeah I love it too. It was quite an interesting deep dive into that topic.
Still even people new to writing have a good intuition about that but formalizing this intuition is a different story
As a linguist, I’d just shrug.
“everyone knows what a word is, that is the definion”
the cries of alien archaeologists from the far future echo in the distance
“word” is a four letter word
Word!
Please, it’s w*rd, we want to keep this f*mily friendly
jst blck ll vwls t b* sf
Recursive
acronymsdefinitionsI think you’ll find that in actual fact “bird” is the word
And it begins…probably be 2 days until I get the song out of my head
My body is ready!
That’s what I heard.
xnopyt
