If God’s true name were a sequence of four letters, two vowels and two consonants, as we speculated last week based on the well-known story by Arthur C. Clarke The nine billion names of God, and we accepted any sequence of four letters that met that condition, 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 a consonant). As in the Spanish alphabet there are 5 vowels and 22 consonants, in each of these types there will be 5 x 5 x 22 x 22 = 12,100 possibilities, and in total 12,100 x 6 = 72,600, an insignificance compared to the nine billion possible divine names according to Tibetan monks (an unconvincing number: can you calculate the exact number – or at least its order of magnitude – from the indications given last week?).
But, as José Moya points out, perhaps the morphological and phonetic rules of Spanish should be taken into account, and in that case the number is significantly smaller, while the calculation becomes complicated. For example, the Q can only come before the diphthongs UE and UI and, in principle, few consonants allow gemination: the C with a first strong and then weak sound (as in “action”), the L to give rise to a different phoneme (la elle), the N (as in “unnameable”) and the R with a strong sound between vowels (as in “car”). But the inclusion in the Spanish vocabulary of foreign words, especially names and surnames, has in fact led to the incorporation of other geminations, which, on the other hand, do not offer any difficulty in pronunciation: Abba, Emma, Zappa, Lasso, Botto… And the same goes for other rules, like the Q rule, which we happily 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.
Word soup flavored with tongue
As we count and scramble letters in search of real or possible words, we can ask ourselves some interesting, or at least curious, questions:
Of the approximately 93,000 words in the Spanish language, how many are four letters? I suggest looking for a “Fermian” approach.¹
How many new four-letter words could be formed without straining morphology or phonetics? Again, an exact calculation is not asked for, just the order of magnitude.
Are there any three-letter trisyllabic words?
Are there any nine-letter disyllabic words?
If the Latin adage were true in nomen omen (Destiny is in the name), what job would an Ecuadorian be predestined for?
And a twist to go from combinatorics to self-referential logic:
How many letters are in the correct answer to this question?
How many letters does this question have if we subtract those from its answer?
1. As regular readers already know, Fermi used to pose – and solve – problems about which there was not enough information using ingenious approximate methods that, although they did not give the 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 sagacious readers to calculate the number of tuners in the city in which they live.
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