If the true name of God were a sequence of four letters, two vowels and two consonants, as we speculated last week based on Arthur C. Clarke's well-known story “The Nine Billion Names of God,” and we have each sequence of four letters accepted If this condition is met, the number of possibilities is not difficult to calculate. There would be names of six types: VVCC, VCVC, VCCV, CVVC, CVCV, CCVV (where V is a vowel and C is a consonant). Since there are 5 vowels and 22 consonants in the Spanish alphabet, in each of these types there are 5 x 5 x 22 x 22 = 12,100 possibilities and a total of 12,100 x 6 = 72,600, an insignificance compared to the nine billion of possible divine names according to Tibetan Monks (an unconvincing number: can you calculate the exact number – or at least its magnitude – based on last week's data?).
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But as José Moya points out, perhaps the morphological and phonetic rules of Spanish should be taken into account, and in this case the number is significantly smaller while the calculation becomes more complicated. For example, Q can only precede the diphthongs UE and UI and in principle only a few consonants allow gemination: la elle), the N (as in “unnamable”) and the R with a strong sound between the vowels (as in “carro “). But the inclusion of foreign words, especially first and last names, in the Spanish vocabulary has actually led to the inclusion of other twins that, on the other hand, do not present difficulties in pronunciation: Abba, Emma, Zappa, Lasso, Down… And the same also applies to other rules, such as the Q rule, which we tend to skip when writing “Quark”. It is therefore necessary to pose the meta-problem of precisely defining the morphological and phonetic conditions of the true name of God before calculating the number of possibilities.
Tongue flavored word soup
As we count and jumble letters in search of real or possible words, we can ask ourselves some interesting, or at least curious, questions:
How many of the approximately 93,000 words in the Spanish language consist of four letters? I suggest looking for a “Fermian” approach.¹
How many new four-letter words could be formed without taxing morphology or phonetics? Here too, no exact calculation is required, just the order of magnitude.
Is there a three-syllable, three-letter word?
Are there two-syllable nine-letter words?
If the Latin saying “in nomen omen” (fate is in the name) were true, what job would an Ecuadorian be predestined for?
And a twist to get from combinatorics to self-referential logic:
How many letters are in the correct answer to this question?
How many letters are in this question if we subtract those from its answer?
1. As regular readers already know, Fermi posed and solved problems about which there was not enough information using sophisticated approximations that, while not providing an exact answer, made it possible to find plausible values. Some of the seemingly crazy questions he asked his students have become famous, such as: “How many piano tuners are there in Chicago?” I invite my attentive readers to calculate the number of tuners in the city in which they live life.
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