wheresrhys

This relates to something I will blog more at length about in the next few days, but I thought I’d ask this question first to see if anyone who reads this might know the answer.

I’m going to try and approximate, using the simplest way possible, an English language sentence. The method I’m going to use is to pick a number, N, and make my selection of words from random strings of at most N letters.

• If N = 2 a sentence would look like this: d fo mh j e l tx df d
• If N = 5 a sentence would look like this: gh e kj jegns tyu dfa o wdu tah ttauo kk

So here’s my question:

If I want to approximate the distribution of word-lengths in the English language, which value of N should I choose?

I know it won’t be a very close approximation, but it’s very quick and easy to generate the words using this set-up.

Oh, for a language
Where reversed words abounded -
Half as much to learn

Was just talking to my Mum on the phone and something I never noticed before occurred to me.

In welsh the word for “always” is the same as the word for “never” (it’s in how you inflect… which reminds me of the Pavement lyric in Blue Hawaiian). Despite being a welsh speaker all my life I’ve never noticed this before. Given that these are words in daily use this is pretty surprising. I wonder what other linguistic oddities have also evaded me. Also, I wonder if in the welsh assembly a transcription of a speech delivered by a stubbornly welsh speaking representative is mistranslated in to English meaning the opposite of what was intended.

Dicey thing, meaning.