this post was submitted on 07 Nov 2024
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Science Memes

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Welcome to c/science_memes @ Mander.xyz!

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I thought it was an easy question ... (feddit.org)
submitted 22 hours ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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[–] [email protected] 50 points 22 hours ago (4 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 hour ago

Or, in either field (formal language theory bridges both) it can mean any string of symbols, letters, or tokens.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 hours ago* (last edited 7 hours ago)

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.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 16 hours ago

Maybe ironically, neither one would be appropriate as a linguistic definition.

[–] [email protected] 19 points 20 hours ago

Meanwhile, in Unicode land...