Mapping the Earth with words
Notes on a proposal to map every location on Earth with a short, memorable sequence of words.
This is a complex socio-technical problem at the intersection of many domains (cartography, human and physical geography, linguistics, culture, mathematics, engineering).
The final output of the project is to be a methodology for:
- Dividing the surface of the Earth into locations
- Producing a very large number of phrases composed of short sequences of words for a given language in a way that allows for relatively simple cross-linguistic translation of phrases
- Bijectively mapping the set of phrases to the set of locations
The specifics for the definitions of the italicised words are to be determined as part of the project.
Considerations:
- Geographical considerations
- The movement of land/sea boundaries (tectonic motion, land reclamation)
- Precision of coordinate and positioning systems, notably due to State restrictions
- Evolution of population density
- Linguistic-cultural factors
- The need for clearly distinguishable phrases, both phonetically and orthographically, across complicated linguistic and cultural contexts
- Meaning of "word"
- Cross-dialectal phonology
- Word pronunciation distances will have to be bespoke to each language system
- Accessibility
- The need for clearly distinguishable phrases, both phonetically and orthographically, across complicated linguistic and cultural contexts
- Engineering factors
- Trade-off between phrase length and wordlist length
- Fewer words in list -> lower probability of collision
- Change management
- Once set, the algorithm cannot change significantly (there can never be a "version 2")
- Mechanism for notifying affected users of minor changes
- Collision detection
- Distribution of phrases -- should phrases be scattered to minimise the probability of proximal confusion (context will typically allow one to distinguish between distant but similar phrases), or should phrases be telescopic to increase memorability (i.e.: I know my neighbourhood starts with A-B-...)?
- Can we use whole sentences instead of phrases? Likely to be far more memorable, but more complex to generate esp. cross-linguistically.
- Trade-off between phrase length and wordlist length
Preliminary work required:
- Generation of a wordlist and systematic phonological apparatus for English
- Exploratory phonological work -- how many distinct words are really totally mutually distinguishable in a given language?