Multi-Layer Dictionary (2016)
learnthesewordsfirst.comThe 60 words:
to see, saw, seen. thing, something, what. this, these. the other, another, else, is the same as, be, am, are, being, was, were. one of. two of. person, people. many of, much of. inside. not, do not, does not, did not, some of. all of. there is, there are. more than, live, alive. big. small. very, kind of. if, then. touch. far from. near to, in a place, someplace, where. above. on a side of, hear, heard. say to, said about. word. true.
How would you define left and right based on these words?
From http://learnthesewordsfirst.com/Lesson-12F.html#12-21
12-20. right.
[X is on the right side of your body.] = X is on this side of your body: Most people write using the hand they have on this side of their body.
[I use my right hand when I draw pictures.]
12-21. left.
[X is on the left side of your body.] = X is on this side of your body: Most people do not write using the hand they have on this side of their body. They write using their other hand.
[My child held my left hand.]
I would think a true minimum set of bootstrapping words would be enough to teach the language to hypothetical aliens who might not have access to a group of humans to poll about handedness.
To tell an alien about handedness definitively, without an artifact, may require that both parties are aware of the CP-violation present in the weak interaction.
Put another way, how can we know that aliens won't reconstruct an electromagnetic message as a mirror image of what we sent?
Make use of the right-hand rule, which will suffice so long as they're not made of antimatter.
GP is right. If aliens don't know about CP violation, there is no way to communicate rotational direction that preserves the absolute direction without some shared reference.
Because CP-violation is actually the only detectable way to discern between right handedness and left handedness. That is, without CPv, we would have no way to know that we aren't in a hypothetical mirror universe with all rotations reversed. Every other physical interaction behaves identically left or right.
So we have a few options to deal with our rotationally-challenged alien friends:
1. Hope they can parse far down enough into the dictionary to understand what CP is and either know it or can test it.
2. Communicate using a shared reference, like pointing out two quasars that rotate relative to each other. (Quasars are pretty good galactic reference points.)
3. As long as it doesn't affect giving directions, just don't worry about it, the physics works out the same. If we ever meet and they try to shake our left hand, well, they get their very own "oops I guess electrons are negative then" situation. "And that, kids, is why you always negate earth-radians before using them in a formula."
Feynman suggested shining polarized light through a solution of glucose and water. This will rotate the plane of the polarization clockwise. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glucose#History
Cool, I didn't know that! The glucose molecule has a handedness though, which means it has a rotationally symmetric twin L-Glucose [1] with the same properties. The relative abundance of glucose over l-glucose is purely a property of which one life on earth happened to choose (they're not biologically compatible). So if you communicated blueprints for life on earth including glucose without an absolute rotation reference, the aliens could reconstruct everything two ways: biology with our glucose, or biology with l-glucose, and there's no way to differentiate between them since they would both work the same.
Veritasium makes a great video about symmetries that's very relevant here [2], and might suggest a slightly more practical way to correctly communicate handedness to aliens. The full CP violation experiment isn't necessary, as long as we assume that the aliens live in a universe made of mostly matter (as opposed to antimatter) like ours, and we can communicate the parity violation experiment (~measuring the preferential atomic decay direction of cobalt atoms near 0K in a magnetic field [3]), they should be able to reconstruct an absolute reference for rotation.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L-Glucose
[2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yArprk0q9eE
[3]: http://www.physics.utah.edu/~belz/phys5110/PhysRev.104.254.p...
I don't follow. If we're communicating with aliens that we somehow know are made of matter, we tell them that right is the direction a horizontal wire carrying positive current away from us gets pushed by a vertical magnetic field.
That just shifts the problem to specifying the direction of the magnetic field, and you can't use the concept of left vs. right in that definition without creating a circular dependency.
Vertically up it's just too a higher local gravitational potential, no? Sure, we flip right-left when we look at things upside down, but that's a nuanced usage.
How do you determine whether your magnetic field is pointing up and not down?
Closer and farther can be used to explain up and down.
How do you use closer and farther to determine whether a magnetic field is pointing up or down? It's not like there are little arrows on magnetic field lines you can just look at.
How will they know we're not made of antimatter?
As far as astronomers can tell, there is very little antimatter in the observable universe (If there was more, we'd see it anihilating with matter more).
If we're not sure both sides of the conversation are made of the same particles, the situation is hopeless.
Aren't matter and antimatter a matter of perspective? If so haven't we just reintroduced the left/right problem.
Precisely.
They didn't explode when we shook hands (/tentacles/general-graspy-bits)
The definition proposed doesn't differ strongly from 1913 Webster:
Of or pertaining to that side of the body in man on which the muscular action is usually stronger than on the other side; -- opposed to left when used in reference to a part of the body; as, the right side, hand, arm. Also applied to the corresponding side of the lower animals.
http://www.dict.org/bin/Dict?Form=Dict2&Database=*&Query=rig...
I’d actually like to see a minimum set of _concepts_ necessary to communicate among humans then choose the language that best uses them.
Such a list would be great to have for many reasons actually.
For a early super-minimal example, see: https://users.cs.cf.ac.uk/Dave.Marshall/AI2/node69.html
Later efforts (for attributed grammars, semantic networks, etc.) used many more primitives. Semantic primitive / "Interlingua" based formalisms never quite caught on for the most part, however.
the <"X---" == left> and <"---X" == right> example is an example of an analogical representation -- these have sensorimotor/perceptual groundings and mimic how we actually learn some concepts, but although there has been some research in AI in utilizing analogical representations internally, it is not typical.
The actual dictionary definition uses the normal position of the heart instead (though it assumes no situs inversus): https://www.ldoceonline.com/dictionary/left
It links to definitions for some sub-concepts (e.g. containing or heart) but oddly enough not others (e.g. body), I'm guessing because body is part of the core 360 words.
I once had to describe left and right to my kids as they grew up, and the best [ * ] way to do that in my opinion is with this sentence:
"Left is on this side of the sentence, and at the end of it is right."
[ * - as in: they didn't 'get' it until I formulated it this way]
Can you come with the Arabic translation, please? (-:
اليمين على هذا الجانب من الجملة ، وفي نهايته هو اليسار.
The dictionary starts with those 60 words, like axioms in mathematics. Then it builds up a vocabulary on top of them.
Left is defined this way: [X is on the right side of your body.] = X is on this side of your body: Most people write using the hand they have on this side of their body.
So "on a side of", "people", "be/is", are included in those first 60 words. "body", "write", "hand", etc. are defined after the first 60 words, but before "right" and "left".
Sure, but "go ask a bunch of people which hand they write with" seems like a huge copout to me.
It's like if prime numbers were defined as, "The numbers most mathematicians say are prime."
The main point for me is that you don't only need a good definition of left (/right), but you also need to keep your audience in mind.
If you ask me "what type of person doesn't know what 'left' means", my answer would be "either a child or a foreigner who just started learning the language". For that audience, even saying "the side where your heart is" (like some other comment suggests) would require knowing what "heart" means, which might not be a good assumption for this specific audience.
So how would you propose to explain which side is which?
Use an asymmetry of the human body. Left is on the same side as your heart.
Which is again, only most of time (cf: dextrocardia).
Not as common as left-handedness (one in ten), but still in the order of one in ten thousand people.
Your heart is squarely in the middle. You feel the heart beat on the left because the ventricle is larger.
Left: Face the noon sun. Lift one arm to point at where it was first seen this morning.
Edit: works where I live. YMMV. Adapt as needed (which I thought about saying but decided wasn't needed here.)
> Left: Face the noon sun. Lift one arm to point at where it was first seen this morning.
That...fails to be generally accurate pretty badly.
As a quick example: north vs south hemisphere swaps this.
That's approximately correct, though It think it's most actually “north or south of the subsolar point at noon on the day in question”.
North and South of the tropics will give either consistently right or consistently wrong answers, but within the tropics you'll get different answers on different days.
lesson 12 covers left/right (360 words).
Why don't you follow the link and find out?
I asked because I followed the link and couldn't figure it out. I couldn't even find the list of 60 words, and clearly I'm not alone as evidenced by the fact that the top of this thread is the top-ranked comment.
Also, please reread https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
That’s an about page. If you go to the home page then you can see those words:
http://learnthesewordsfirst.com/
The site isn’t the prettiest nor most logically laid out but the link to the words themselves was pretty clearly labelled (in my opinion).
One of those words is not a word in British English.
(Why do I mention that? Firstly, perhaps it's a fun puzzle for non-native speakers of American English to identify the word. Secondly, it's surprising that a difference between British and US English is apparent in such a short list of such basic words, considering that sometimes it's possible to write whole paragraphs of English without it being apparent which variety of English is being used.)
That word is informal even in American English. It's less common in British English, but it's growing in popularity in both versions, and I wouldn't call it "not a word" even in British English. But I disagree with its inclusion in a first lesson, because its main use over the more common standard alternative (rot13: "fbzrjurer") is signaling casual speech.
Google Ngram Viewer lets you compare popularity of words in British vs. American English, so it's useful for investigating this.
British English speaker here - I'm having difficulty identifying the word you're referring to here. Or are you referring more to definition and statistical presence in common usage?
Since "gotten" isn't in the list, I'm going with "someplace". It even seems unusual to me as an American, as I would write either "some place" or "somewhere". If the phrase is also unusual in British English, that's definitely something I had never noticed.
Is "gotten" the only word that exists in American English but not British English (apart from "someplace")? Your comment strikes me as trying to bring up a pet hate in an unrelated conversation.
I'm sure it's not the only one, but it's the one that immediately came to mind. I thought it might be in the list because it's close to a foundational word in American English.
Sorry that you chose to read my comment as hatred. Yeah, that's not a real apology.
Thank you. Appreciated.
I know the word you mean (no spoiler tag, so I won't say it, just 'it could almost be German' {to use a linguistic stereotype}) but I wouldn't recognise it as _not_ en-gb, just unusual.
I'm en-gb native.
I would say 'much of'. I haven't seen it until I visited Americas.
I'd love to see if there's an interesting relationship between these words and the PIE language (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proto-Indo-European_language)
I guess not, as this is optimized for defining words, not communicating
If you like this, you'll definitely enjoy the talk "Growing a Language", by Guy Steele:
I was waiting for him to share thoughts on the failure (?) of Lisp, which I believe is a decent "shopping mall", but unfortunately he did not :(
This is very interesting -- a kind of topological sort of the dictionary.
It seems like a very natural thing to want to do with subject-specific glossaries as well. Often when I approach a new topic or hobby I want a glossary of all the jargon up front, and I want the words ordered from least to most demanding of in-knowledge.
I am a newbie to topology, so please help me. What is a topological sort and why does it describe this?
The "topological" in topological sort is more related to "network topology" than the mathematical topology (open sets). "Sort" is related to ordering. Topological sort thus is related to the ordering of a network graph's nodes by their edges.
You can see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Topological_sorting to see what it actually is. Topological sort is good in dealing with dependency graph. It can turn a dependency graph into a linear ordering of nodes.
GP mentioned topological sort because words depend on other defining words and it's one big directed acyclic graph. Do a topological sort on it and you got a linear list of words ordered by dependency. Group the consecutive words that have no dependency together and you got the word layers. Within each layer all the words don't depend on each other. The words in one layer depend on the words in the lower layers.
I don't think mathematical topology and network topology are different concepts.
The open sets in a network topology are the subsets of nodes that happen to be connected by the edges. So if you can't get from here to there without using a node outside your set, then your set isn't an open set in the network topology.
Except unions of open sets are required to be open, so the case for topology here is not what you're describing (assuming standard definitions).
Generally, the topology on a graph will look like what you get if you draw your graph in the euclidean plane (or space, whatever) without intersections of edges.
The notion of closeness of vertices in this case isn't really well described by "point set topology", but you'd rather use the notion of distance between vertices (length of a shortest path). But even then, the distance stuff generally assumes non-directed edges, because you generally want the distance from A to B to be the same as from B to A.
In short, I don't think "point set topology" has much to say here, at least as usually done.
You're right. You can use the more general mathematical topology to describe a network topology. It's just mathematical topology speaks in sets, compactness, closeness that people not visualize well. The simpler and more specific network topology or network graph can be visualized very well.
Not sure why it's called topological sort or what it had to do with topology, but it's a graph traversal where predecessors are visited before their successors. Such a sort only exists if there are no cycles in the graph.
It's been a while since I took a Topology class, but I left it with the understanding that Topology is all about taking a set (nodes, say) and applying some notion of closeness (how many hops?).
Once you've done that, you have a topological space. The sets that you've defined as "close together" are your open sets. Loosely speaking, smaller open sets are considered closer together than larger ones.
This might seem boring in the case of directed graphs, which have an obvious notion of closeness, but there are more exotic spaces where you might not usually think to use "spacial" reasoning, but where it can be applied anyhow thanks to the formalism.
In a topological sort, you end up arranging the elements based on nearness to each other (as much as is possible for a list), so that elements in a given open set in the typical topological space over directed graphs are likely to be next to each other in the list. It's a pretty topological way to do things, which probably explains the name.
I'd like to see research on this. I have an MA in TESOL and teach ESL, so this is very within my field. While some of what's happening here is basically a self-guided version of classwork, a lot of it seems to rely on very logically precise understandings (defining 'flat' as the shape of unmoving water). I can say from experience that students really struggle with being given a single example like that, even when they know all the words being used; it's just not how most people think. Visual aids and/or multiple examples are pretty essential, and often it requires watching a student to see what's registering and what isn't.
It also falls into the trap of treating the most common definition as the only one. When you look up left/right in here, you'll find positioning, but nothing about liberal/conservative opinions or a legal guarantee (the right to X) or departing (he left the train station).
These are also known as Semantic Primes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_primes
If true, this is interesting from an academic perspective: word meanings can be derived from a space of 60 dimensions. But I’m not still not convinced of the value with respect to language learning.
Learning how language is spoken from the fundamental 60 words sounds like trying to learn mathematics from its fundamental axioms. It seems like you might just get caught in a long list of definitions where you might be faster off trying to internalise some higher level useful concepts first.
It pushes some things out of the language and into the environment. If humanity went extinct and we had only this dictionary it is unlikely that word meanings would be interpreted to be the same as they are today.
But it's intended as a learning tool and it'll do fine for that.
> If true, this is interesting from an academic perspective: word meanings can be derived from a space of 60 dimensions. But I’m not still not convinced of the value with respect to language learning.
More like 60 x N , since each of those words can appear arbitrary many times.
Monoid with 60 generators. But is it free?
> a space of 60 dimensions
I don't think that's true. How would a 60-dimensional vector capture all the syntactic relationships between the words in a complex sentence?
Yeah, I was sloppy and wrong with my wording. Thanks for pointing it out.
I meant a sequence of one-hot encoded vectors of length 60 could make a good model of English.
Has there been any attempts to 'translate' this into other languages? I'm struggling most often with vocabulary first, whereas the grammar is much easier for me to grasp (programming helps?)
Well, the base layer of primes references the term “NSM” (which stands for “natural semantic metalanguage”, Wierzbicka and Goddard’s theory which holds, among other things, that there is a universal core of base concepts across languages; the count of 60 such primes coincides with the 2002 iteration; there's also a 14 prime version from 1972 and a 65 prime version from ~2014.)
The layering beyond the primes isn't consistent though, and wouldn't be so much a translation as new work for each language.
Would pay for a Japanese version of this.
Learning words in Japanese could mean:
1. learning the sounds and the meaning (using a phonetic script, such as hiragana or romaji - the Latin alphabet) or
2. Learning sound, meaning and kanji (the ideograms)
Learning the kanji is a topic in itself and there are dozens of methods and approaches, but if you like the "start with the most valuable first then build on top of that one bit of knowledge at a time" approach, you might be interested in a project I worked on a while ago: https://prezi.com/m/ihobq38emnq3/env3/
I have flashcards with example sentences up to the first 300 items or so, contact me if you're interested.
It's nothing like it but as a beginner, among the best books I've read about vocabulary are the "Madrigal Magic key to X" series of books by Margarita Madrigal. In it, she breaks down how to convert English words into French, German, etc. If I can recall correctly, here are a few simple examples on French:
1) Words ending with -or: replace the -or with -eur
professor –> professeur, aggressor –> aggreseur
2) Words ending with -ist: just add an e at the end
specialist –> specialiste, artist –> artiste
3) Words ending with -ic: replace it with -ique
romantic –> romantique, fantastic –> fantastique
4) Words ending with -ary: change -ary to -aire
extraordinary –> extraordinaire, solitary –> solitaire
5) Most words ending with -a: replace -a with -e
encyclopedia –> encyclopedie, spatula –> spatule
6) Words that end with, -ine, -ble, -ance, and -ion are also spelled the same way in French.
I was told that there are many English-French false friends.
Vide Casually Explained on French: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a69toGGjoO0
Seconded, I _need_ this for German.
There is a list of semantic primes on the German Wikipedia, though it seems like it's just a translation from the English words: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantisches_Primitivum
The theory of semantic primes is that they are universal, so (aside from using an older or newer version of the list of primes, like the 14-prime or 65-prime versions instead of the 60-prime version), you'd expect the list for any other language to be equivalent to a translation of the list for whichever language you encountered the list for first.
The objects in the pictures would need to be built to higher mechanical specifications first. ;)
It's at most the same as this dictionary surely but once you've defined a word and "English", you just say:
Jour. N. The same meaning as the English word 'day'.
I could swear I've seen something alike for Spanish.
I would love this in Spanish and French.
Want for French badly. Would pay.
Several people are writing this. May I ask why? I just don't understand the use case. If you want a list of basic words, take the 60 basic English words and look them up in a French dictionary. But more generally, can't you just look up anything you want in a dictionary?
The use case would be for the teaching and learning of French. Just as this website is for the learning of English.
Yes, we can all look up a few words in the dictionary.
To be honest, I think this website is more about the intellectual challenge of constructing the layered dictionary than about actually providing a learning resource. But that is again because I don't see the point of using this for learning. I'd be interested in someone's concrete thoughts about how/why to use this.
To take an example from elsewhere in this thread, if I encounter the word "gauche" in a French text, I could just look it up in a normal dictionary, or I could look it up in a French multi-layered one and invest some effort into deciphering a French paragraph saying the equivalent of "X is on this side of your body: Most people do not write using the hand they have on this side of their body. They write using their other hand."
Sure you can learn such basic terms this way. But why would it be better?
I think the idea is that you would actually study this as a set of lessons to build up the initial vocabulary in a new language for describing things, rather than use it as a word reference.
Reminds me of the Natural Semantic Metalanguage approach in linguistics by Anna Wierzbicka, Cliff Goddard and others. Nice to see, that there is actually quite some overlap both in quantity as well as in the actual words.
It's not a coincidence: http://learnthesewordsfirst.com/about/research-behind-the-di...
This reminded me of the minimalist constructed language Toki Pona. As the author herself puts it - " It was my attempt to understand the meaning of life in 120 words."
Just 60 words plus a huge context shared with the reader through living a human life (so not a lot of hope of feeding this into an algorithm and having it do anything resembling understanding).
Or perhaps with thorough explanations something like this could help bootstrap understanding by a machine?
This reminds me a little of "English Through Pictures" by Richards and Gibson, and "English Made Easy" by Crighton and Koster. Both use images to provide concrete examples for those words that can be illustrated visually.
It's conceptually interesting, but it also strikes me as a problem that doesn't need solving.
Having worked with and taught foreign language, nobody learns the first 1,000 words of a language from a same-language dictionary, nor should they.
Children learn from the world; adults learn from classes or a translating dictionary. (Only intermediate/advanced level learners start to use a native dictionary.)
The idea of "bootstrapping" language knowledge from a single dictionary just... isn't going to be necessary for anyone?
I didn't start from zero, but this children's dictionary of French in French was useful to me learning it: https://www.amazon.com/Mon-premier-dictionnaire-Roger-Pillet...
All the words it uses are defined within it -- of course with some circularity, but it's heavy on examples and pictures. It was intended for nonnative children taking classes in a style more like native immersion than is typical in schools. I wish more resources followed this philosophy.
My first French class did dive into French long before we were at 1,000 words, and we were strictly not allowed to use anything but a same-language dictionary.
We of course did have the benefit of a teacher who would translate if absolutely necessary, but she also insisted on sticking to French in the lessons wherever possible from the very first day. It was far more immersive in my first year of French than e.g. my fourth year of German.
It seemed to work quite well.
Tangential, I have always wondered why compact or pocket dictionaries (the single language ones) contain the simplest words. If space if of the essence, why not skip the words that everybody knows (like "table" or "shoe") and use the saved space for difficult words? After all, those are the ones you are likely to look up.
I suppose this answers https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19331307 "What's the minimum number of words you'd need to define all other words?"
There is nothing wrong with circularity in dictionaries, though. This is a solution in search of a problem.
It may be the case that the definition A happens to use some word B, in whose definition we find word C, whose definition uses A. However, that isn't really a problem, because these definitions are not simply substitutions of exactly one word for another. The definition of A uses numerous other words other than B, that of B uses words in addition to C, and C uses words in addition to A.
That is, the existence of cycles in definitions doesn't necessarily make the definitions irresolvably circular.
ash =
When something burns and becomes many very small dry pieces that moving air can cause to move.
Kind of tree.
What about grammar? You need grammar to form the definitions so you need to teach it at some point.
One approach would be to mix in grammar bits into the word flashcards. Like:
Flashcard 1: word 1 F 2: word 2 F 3: grammar bit 1 F 4: word 3 ...
You could use the grammar bits provided by English Profile based on the CEFR (Common European Framework of Reference): https://www.englishprofile.org/english-grammar-profile/egp-o...
Could someone add links to all the words in the definitions, linking to the definitions of those words?
I've seen that done for a different language, though in that case the fully connected component had more than 60 works. I think it was more like 120.
Of course it doesn't make sense to do this competitively because it's so unclear what counts as an adequate definition.
I'm not sure this sort of dictionary would help me learn a language: I think probably not much. But it's definitely fun in a philosophical way.
i once solved a similar problem with set theoretic approach using matroid theory and the greedy method for constructing a matroid basis using a thesaurus as my independence oracle. This was over a decade ago, so I no longer recall the results, but it certainly seems similar in the goal of finding a primal set of words that can in some way define all others.
What a great way to learn a new language. Would pay for another language of this.
this is great because: 1, I can review words by learning the next level 2, I can use english immediately no matter which level I am at. because at any level, I have the ability to explain anything