I wonder how one would need to modify this principle to take into account risk-benefit analysis. What if quickly identifying wiggins meant incurring great benefit or avoiding great harm, then you would still need a nice short word for them. This seems obvious, the question is only how much shorter would the word need to be.
Labels that are both short and phonetically consistent with a given language are in short supply, therefore we would predict that sometimes even unrelated things shared labels—if they occupied sufficiently different contexts s.t. there was no risk of confusing them. This what we see in case of professional jargon, for example. I also wonder whether one could actually quantify such prediction.
If labels that are both short and phonetically consistent with a given language are really in such short supply, why aren’t they all already occupied? Why were you able to come up with a word like ‘wiggin’, that seems to be consistent with English phonetics, that doesn’t already mean something? -- This introduces the concept of phonetic redundancy in languages. It would actually be impractical to occupy all shortest syllable combinations, because it would make it impossible or require too much effort to correct errors. People in radiocommunications recognized this phenomenon and devised a number of spelling alphabets, the most commonly known being the NATO phonetic alphabet.
Fascinating subject indeed!
I wonder how one would need to modify this principle to take into account risk-benefit analysis. What if quickly identifying wiggins meant incurring great benefit or avoiding great harm, then you would still need a nice short word for them. This seems obvious, the question is only how much shorter would the word need to be.
Labels that are both short and phonetically consistent with a given language are in short supply, therefore we would predict that sometimes even unrelated things shared labels—if they occupied sufficiently different contexts s.t. there was no risk of confusing them. This what we see in case of professional jargon, for example. I also wonder whether one could actually quantify such prediction.
If labels that are both short and phonetically consistent with a given language are really in such short supply, why aren’t they all already occupied? Why were you able to come up with a word like ‘wiggin’, that seems to be consistent with English phonetics, that doesn’t already mean something? -- This introduces the concept of phonetic redundancy in languages. It would actually be impractical to occupy all shortest syllable combinations, because it would make it impossible or require too much effort to correct errors. People in radiocommunications recognized this phenomenon and devised a number of spelling alphabets, the most commonly known being the NATO phonetic alphabet.