What makes a word pronounceable?

[Mafio]

I was wondering how long mankind could survive if we would establish a rule like "You are not allowed to give your child a name that is already been taken".

 

To calculate this I need the number of births each day and the names which are already assigned (or rather the number of words that exist).

 

This is quite easy to get, but the real problem is the measurement of the existing letter combinations which are pronounceable and therefore usable as names.

So I need to write a little program that checks all combinations of letters from 2 to "supercalifragilisticexpialidocious" of their pronounceability...

 

But this pronounceability-check depends on rules I don't know. And thats were you come in, dear reader.

Are there any kinds of rules that determine weather I (or any other human) can pronounce a word? Let's start with English and then we might find rules for other languages...

[Schrödinger's hat]

I was wondering how long mankind could survive if we would establish a rule like "You are not allowed to give your child a name that is already been taken".

 

To calculate this I need the number of births each day and the names which are already assigned (or rather the number of words that exist).

 

This is quite easy to get, but the real problem is the measurement of the existing letter combinations which are pronounceable and therefore usable as names.

So I need to write a little program that checks all combinations of letters from 2 to "supercalifragilisticexpialidocious" of their pronounceability...

 

But this pronounceability-check depends on rules I don't know. And thats were you come in, dear reader.

Are there any kinds of rules that determine weather I (or any other human) can pronounce a word? Let's start with English and then we might find rules for other languages...

 

You could cheat slightly and use an alphabet that consists of syllables rather than one like the roman alphabet (like Japanese hirigana excluding or with special rules for one or two characters).

Also, pronouncable varies from region to region (sometimes even within one language). Some have more trouble with consonant clusters than others. Some can't distinguish between syllables which are distinct in other languages. Some have sounds that are absent, or have meaning carried in tones.

 

But for a very rough lower bound, we can use Hirigana excluding the 'n' sound, leaving us with 44 syllables. Assuming 4 syllables, we get around 3.7 million first names. 0.16 billion for 5.

If you allow another 4 syllables for last (or middle) names, you get 14 or 600 trillion.

I'm including some things which are a bit hard to distinguish here because I'm too lazy to do the combinatorics more accurately, like Aaaaa, but it'll be close enough. (You also get a bit more from shorter names as I only counted x not up to x syllables).

This scheme takes us to 32 syllables before we have the entire mass of the visible universe consisting of humans. It'd be fewer (maybe down to around 20) if we start including things like tone, clicks from african languages, and other syllables that the japanese don't use.

So I think we'd be okay until we reached other constraints, even if it got a bit cumbersome.

[John Cuthber]

Call the first child Ab. Call the second one Abab. Call the third Ababab.

Let me know when you run out of names.

[Schrödinger's hat]

Call the first child Ab. Call the second one Abab. Call the third Ababab.

Let me know when you run out of names.

 

Normal speech is up to 7 syllables a second.

Up to around [math]3.2\times 10^7\times 100[/math] seconds in a lifetime.

Assuming you need to be able to say someone's name before they die, that's around 22 billion names.

A conservative population growth rate of 0.5% gives us about 200 years.

Or if you do not reuse names, people usually reproduce by their 30s, so we have very roughly 60-90 years.

[John Cuthber]

I didn't say it was practical.

 

An obvious improvement would be to call the first one Ab, the second Iz the third Izab, the fourth Iziz followed by

Izabab

Izabiz

Izizab

Iziziz

Izababab

etc.

It would be a bit quicker to write the names if you use 0 for Ab and 1 for Iz

I think that if you used this system you could name everyone on earth with fewer characters than supercal....

 

Three different syllables would be even better.

Even with these few syllables it's clear that very few of the combinations are already in use as words.

[Schrödinger's hat]

I didn't say it was practical.

 

An obvious improvement would be to call the first one Ab, the second Iz the third Izab, the fourth Iziz followed by

Izabab

Izabiz

Izizab

Iziziz

Izababab

etc.

It would be a bit quicker to write the names if you use 0 for Ab and 1 for Iz

I think that if you used this system you could name everyone on earth with fewer characters than supercal....

 

Three different syllables would be even better.

Even with these few syllables it's clear that very few of the combinations are already in use as words.

 

And thus we approach my scheme of using the syllables from hirigana . Although there is a certain appeal to the binary system.

 

Come to think of it, for the ababab system, you could just shorten it to a number, and append a syllable to the front to distinguish it from other uses of numbers.

 

You are Hank-one trillion three hundred and seventy six billion nine hundred and eighty three million fourty two thousand one hundred and eight

 

Or name everyone henry and append a number like the royalty do.

Edited March 12, 2012 by Schrödinger's hat

[CaptainPanic]

What makes a word pronounceable?

Answer: practice.

 

Or in the case of the 'ababababababab' system for names: patience.

[John Cuthber]

Answer: practice.

 

Or in the case of the 'ababababababab' system for names: patience.

And really really big lungs.

[Greg H.]

I want to be (ab)¹⁷³

Edited May 3, 2012 by Greg H.

[John Cuthber]

If you are in the UK this may help

http://www.ukdps.co.uk/

 

But be careful, you might think you are joking: they system doesn't.

[Polednice]

First, you'd have to make sure to differentiate between letter combinations and sounds - the graphemes we use (letters and combos that represent sounds, e.g. 'f', 's', and 'th' etc. etc.) do not map one-for-one onto phonemes (the actual sounds that constitute language). Thus, you would have to use a standardised phonetic alphabet. Even given this, you would further have to recognise that not all languages use the same phonemes, and not all languages have the same number of phonemes. If you were to combine all the phonemes of all languages, you would have a supply that far exceeds that of any one language today. And, lastly, we mustn't forget the tonal languages such as Mandarin Chinese, which use the same fundamental phoneme but alter its inflection to alter its meaning (often imperceptible to Westerners not brought up with the language). Thus, a name like 'Ab' could count as four or five names if you say it in four or five different ways.