what is the word for the people who hide others? like the people who hid jews in the holocaust? you cannot find one.
It's not infinite, however numbers ARE because you are given a number of "FActors" i think (right word?)..
numbers are infinite, but are the words for numbers infinite? assuming you kiddies think that 10 isn't a word and ten is..... when a number gets so big, it occurs to me that we will just end up representing it using other numbers, eg thirteen trillion trillion billion and 64 million and sixty-four ;D
you're still wrong after 4 yrs of an IT degree ive never heard of a computer "word", cos you actually mean a string.... sorry to be pedantic but the habit's catching
Actually "Word" is sometimes used to mean a binary number, how many bits varies with the system (i think).
am i the only one who agrees with relix? i'm gonna quote that definition of word again "1. A sound or a combination of sounds, or its representation in writing or printing, that symbolizes and communicates a meaning and may consist of a single morpheme or of a combination of morphemes" there's nothing in there that says that it had to be part of an agreed upon language. there may not be infinite sounds we can make, but there is an infinite number of combonations we can make with them, granted they would get to be unspeakable due to time constraints, but they are still potentially possible. as long as a meaning has been applied to that string of sounds, it is a word, and while there may not be an infinite number of meanings, there doesnt have to be. you may run out of new meanings for words, but that's where synonyms come in. more than one word can share the same meaning, and as relix was saying before, a word can have the meaning of a sentence, of which there are an infinite amount.
How dare you!! My mother is NOT a cacti.. Carrying on, yes the languages are infinite, as you could make a language which combined all words in every language, s you could have like 10000 different sayings for..erm.. cake!!, etc.. Hell if we started to use our brains to our full potential (never going to happen really) we would possibly be able to understand and catagorise all the words and be able to convert between hundreds of languages... so the words we know would increase massively.. - M@
Bottom line is, as our world expands and diversifies etc, new words will be created to fill in the gaps and holes for that which is new. You know there are still things at the bottom of the oceans that are *undiscovered* and unclassified. So how does a new word get created? 1) Experts in a given field all (or a majority) agree upon its use. 2) The general public agree upon the use of a slang word. And by the way, computers only see binary. Zeros and Ones. They can string together multiple binary digits to form more complex numbers, etc.
What rubbish, frankly. If you don't know what a word means then you can work it out from the context, i.e "Relix is a twazzock for making silly posts" Now, you might not be familiar with the word twazzock but I'm sure you can work out what it means from the rest of the sentence. Alternately, there is an extremely valid case for arguing that anything that is not in a dictionary is not a word. And, given that dictionaries have a finite length then there cannot be an infinite number of words As for large numbers, some guy actually invented a new number system to deal with them- he was some kind of number theorist. Sam
yes, a "word" that consists of 5 billion symbols that means "yes" could exist. but no one would use it. There is also the fact that a human mind could not remember it, or distinguish between it and the "word" that was identical but for the 4 millionth letter being Q instead of F, and changing the meaning to "relix is a twazzock". A human mind could not even read it, because it would forget the beginning before it got to the end. Thus, a Word that long cannot be part of language.... Thus there is a finite length to a word. Thus there is a finite number of combinations of letters that are under this length. yes its a very big number but it is still finite. When reading this thread it seems that quite a few posts don't actually aprreciate the difference between finite and infinite. ps. -:: M@ ::- , cacti? wtf, my advice is steer clear of crack in future
Whether a language is almost dead or not, there is still a number of words used in that language meaning it can't be infinate.
Was having a convo with a mate who was going on about them at the time.... ...Honest On the other hand, did you expect a random number to make a perfect sentance.. -M@
fathazza, argh, for the second time, I'm not talking about human qualities, I'm talking about words. Who cares if a human can't remember it, theoretically, if I invent a word that a human can't remember, and give it a meaning, it's a word! Your arguments just don't make any sense. I'm not talking about languages or words that do exist yet, (also for the nth time already this thread), I'm talking about words that do not exist yet (or we do not know yet/anymore). The argument of "every word that is not in a dictionairy is not a word" is also complete rubbish. There are words invented on daily basis. I don't think "pwnage" is in any of the standard dictionaries, but it is a word, no? Or what else would you call it, a series of symbols representing a meaning? Well, if you look at that, that's exactly the definition of a word...
No, that is not a word. The whole point of a word is to convey meaning ffs. How can you do that if no human can remember what the "word" is? It seems to me that you're having to resort to this sort of nonsense 'cos you know you're talking rubbish Sam
