alt Hacker NewsThat requires you to decide what a "word" is, which is not trivial (if you think that ignoring punctuation gets you to a clean "letters surrounded by spaces" you will get lots of issues with various Asian languages)
Also some languages have a lot of prefixes and suffixes on their verbs or even nouns, which dilutes your list of 1000 words by just adding the same common words over and over again with different suffixes designating grammatical tense, grammatical gender, etc.
The gzip version sounds more general and more obviously correct
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Even German has issues with "letters surrounded by spaces". They love to smash words together to get one giant word.
Byte Pair Encoding [1] will be different for different languages. Application of the per-language BPEs to the input text will produce encodings with different lengths.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byte-pair_encoding
It naturally takes care of common prefixes and suffixes.
It is easy and fast to apply using radix tree or with finite automata. Even without radix tree, it is possible to have processing speed in the range of hundredths of thousands of bytes per second.
You can just use 2-grams of Unicode code points.
Instead of deciding on words, maybe you can break them up into smaller, subword parts – let's call them "quantums". And these quantums can be the units the quantumizer works on to operate on inputs and outputs. We can then use them to build Expansive Dictionary Models, or EDMs. I suppose we'd need a software library to mak working on this easier, think something speedy, fast, hot, like fire: we can call it PHPFlame...