me: computer, please read this text file and count how many times each letter appears as the first letter in a word

computer: no problem. like five lines of python and a few seconds to execute on huge documents.

me: computer, please do the same thing but split the words into syllables and count the letters at the beginning of those instead

computer: I'll need several hundred megabytes of language-specific database files and machine learning models, and the process will get OOM'd by the kernel before it outputs anything

#linguistics