It’s a bit of a weird shower thought but basically I was wondering hypothetical if it would be possible to take data from a social media site like Reddit and map the most commonly used words starting at 1 and use a separate application to translate it back and forth.
So if the word “because” was number 100 it would store the value with three characters instead of seven.
There could also be additions for suffixes so “gardening” could be 5000+1 or a word like “hoped” could be 2000-2 because the “e” is already present.
Would this result in any kind of space savings if you were using larger amounts of text like a book series?
You cannot represent everything using english text, and text in known languages can be extremely compressed just because we know details about its structure. (And anyway, it cannot be compressed that extremely, information theory explains this very well, computational power isn’t the only limit here).
If you cannot represent everything using valid english text, you cannot compress at high rates without losing information. A big part of digital data is actually noise, and noise cannot be compressed by definition.