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Blocked Writers - Thought Experiment · Prompt Air

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  Welcome to the Deep Dive. Today we're tackling
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  a, well, a really fascinating linguistic paradox.
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  It's a great thought experiment. It really is.
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  How do you write a coherent history of the English
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  language? And I mean complete, with every slang
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  term, every archaic word. But here's the catch.
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  The huge catch. You're strictly limited. You
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  can only use any single word a maximum of 100
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  times. And that's the immediate tension, right?
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  English naturally follows a a zipfian distribution
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  meaning a few words do most of the work exactly
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  a tiny handful of words like the or and do you
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  know 90 of the structural heavy lifting but this
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  rule it imposes a uniform distribution. And that
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  cripples your most essential tools. It does.
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  Just capping the word the at a hundred uses is
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  the thing that makes the whole grammatical structure
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  threaten to collapse. Okay, so before we get
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  to the collapse, let's unpack the sheer scale
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  here. What does every known word actually look
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  like? Well, it forces you into what you'd call
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  a maximalist approach. So we're not talking about
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  just what's in a standard dictionary. Oh, not
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  even close. A standard dictionary, say, the OED,
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  gives you a baseline of maybe... 470 ,000 words.
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  Okay. But to meet this requirement, we need something
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  closer to 1 .07 million distinct words. We're
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  talking about the complete linguistic archive.
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  So where does that extra half a million come
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  from? It comes from three big long tails. First,
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  you have the archaic and obsolete words. Things
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  like Old English beorn for warrior. Exactly.
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  You need those to tell the history itself. Then
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  second, you have to add about 250 ,000 words
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  from global dialects. So words like draish from
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  Scots to describe miserable weather or from Caribbean
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  creoles like nyam for eat. Precisely. And finally,
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  you have the scientific long tail, another 250
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  ,000 specialized terms. So now you have the words.
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  And now we hit the crisis. The function word
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  bottleneck. Right. If the final text is over
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  a million words long, the word the would normally
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  show up. What, thousands of times? In a text
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  of this size, probably 70 ,000 times. But we
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  can only use it 100 times. How do you even begin
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  to build a sentence? That's the crunch. English
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  loves its little glue words, articles, prepositions.
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  In standard English, we only have about 400 of
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  them. So if you cap them all at 100 uses each...
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  You're left with just 40 ,000 tokens of grammatical
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  glue. That sounds disastrously low. Like trying
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  to build a skyscraper with a handful of rivets.
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  It immediately crumbles. The text would have
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  a lexical density of 96 .4%. And that means,
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  what, it's just a list of words? Very much. Almost
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  no grammar. It would read like, quick brown fox
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  jumped lazy dog, just, you know, for 1 .5 million
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  words. To be coherent, you have to get that density
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  way down. But wait a minute. The rule says all
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  dialects are allowed. Is that the loophole? Can
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  you just cheat the system? That is the entire
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  loophole. That's the key. You stop relying on
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  standard English grammar. You move into what?
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  Syntactic engineering? Exactly. You cycle through
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  alternatives. So instead of just the, use the
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  old English inflections. Say, say, say. And for
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  pronouns? Instead of just you. You bring in y
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  'all, use the Caribbean plural on you. Suddenly
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  you've multiplied your inventory. And you can
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  also borrow words that aren't typically connectors
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  and sort of force them into that role. You hit
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  the nail on the head. We use verb forms like
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  barring, concerning, regarding. That alone gives
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  you an extra 100 ,000 functional tokens. So the
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  solution isn't just linguistic. It actually forces
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  the structure of the story itself. It has to.
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  The narrative is written in grammatical epochs.
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  The old English phase is dense. The global phase
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  uses things like zero copula. Where you drop
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  the verb to be, like saying she the teacher.
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  Yes, to conserve your uses of is and was. Then
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  the scientific phase becomes like a list, using
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  commas and colons instead of conjunctions to
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  absorb all those technical terms. So after all
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  that linguistic gymnastics, what's the final
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  answer? What's the definitive word count? To
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  get that story to be coherent, to hit that threshold,
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  it would need to be approximately 1 ,520 ,000
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  words. Wow. That's about one and a half times
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  the entire Harry Potter series. The constraint
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  itself forces the story to become a living museum
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  where the grammar has to evolve along with the
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  history it's telling. So the whole project only
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  works if you respect the full, messy, diverse
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  history of the language. That's it. It rests
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  entirely on that. Which leaves you with a final
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  thought, doesn't it? When we think about challenges
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  in other fields, like big data or AI modeling,
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  what other knowledge could we unlock if we respect
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  the long tail of global variations? Instead of
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  always trying to optimize for a single clean
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  standard. Something for you to mull over.