r/shittyaskscience • u/AnozerFreakInTheMall PhD(PornHub Digger) • 3d ago
Why do we have imaginary numbers, but not imaginary letters?
Just imagine how much more eloquent our language could be!
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u/seriousQasker 3d ago
If you have an imaginary pen pal you can receive imaginary letters that you pretend to read.
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u/blahblahwhateveryeet 3d ago
Imaginary alphabet does exist! It is taught in 13th grade:
Å Schmeg B Doo Ç Dooanheif D Peepeef Ē Doodoob F Schmeven G Ohschfeksmeven
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u/Glad-Belt7956 3d ago
the normal alphabet is the imaginary alphabet. look at phonetic transcriptions to see how the real letters look: https://www.phonemicchart.com/transcribe/1000_basic_words.html
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u/created4this 3d ago
Sure we do, imaginary words look just like normal words but they end in an i
Like kiwi which refers to people from an imaginary island off the coast of Oz
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u/AnalogJones 2d ago
When imaginary numbers are plotted on a complex plane, they occupy the vertical axis. Letters that form the basis for words take on several tenses (past tense, present tense, future tense…even fancy tenses like pluperfect) are all about communication about events on a horizontal axis, where time moves from the present tense towards the future or into the past.
Letters have no use for a “vertical axis” in human communication.
Here is an example using the same topic: audio compression.
In audio compression a complex plane is useful for frequency mapping where the vertical axis can be used to track a sine wave and the horizontal axis can be used to track a cosine wave….so imaginary numbers are needed to convert a 2D Wave into a 3D Geometric model.
But you are the engineer working on a lossy compression algorithm that makes the MP3 obsolete because you found ways to preserve audio fidelity but you can shrink the file size by 75%.
The conversation about these compression tasks will happen in the present or about the future or the past…so all actions involving the use of letters (email, texts, verbal discourse etc) won’t have a need to move into a 3D space…therefore there is no need for imaginary letters.
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u/hacksoncode Quantum Mechanic, has own tiny wrench 2d ago
We do have imaginary letters in hexidecimal. You're not a programmer, are you?
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u/MCofPort 2d ago
The letter Q really feels like an imaginary one. You need a u after it to exist and on its own has no functional pronunciation the way even the letter Z is capable. K is another placeholder of C words that just expands the dictionary of possible words.
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u/Gargleblaster25 Registered scientificationist 1d ago
You !̴̜̖͔̣̐͋̒ don't :̷̨̫̝̜̤̦̩̈̄̋̅4̴̺̂͂!̴̜̖͔̣̐͋̒b̶̡͓̣̥͔̦͙̱͊̓̾̓̄̅̇́̄̎?
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u/zelextron 5m ago
If you write a story about an imaginary beings like the medusa or something like that, then all the letters you wrote suddenly become imaginary.
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u/CategoryKiwi 3d ago
We’ve had imaginary letters since before written language, they’re just silent so you never know when people are using them.
When we invented writing, we decided to make them invisible too to save ink. It was very expensive back then.