Ambiguous words and dictionary hacks (2007) | Hacker News Reader

Ambiguous words and dictionary hacks (2007)

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38 pointstelotortium31 comments

I am not particularly familiar with Spanish, but with German as my primary language I had the opposite impression that English is a language with an excessive amount of words. There were so many words that have different meanings but offer no useful distinction, such as (pig/pork) or (damp/dank/moist/humid).

As such, it would be quite interesting to see some kind of quantitative judgment on the matter of which language has more or (less/fewer) ambiguous words.

A towel is damp it is not humid.

A pig is not a pork.

A rain-forest is humid but not dank, a cellar may be dank.

Food is moist, not damp, etc etc.

These words have reason to exist and have particular usages.

If other languages can exist where pork and pig are the same word, doesn't it prove the opposite?

Those languages usually qualify pork as "pig meat" if necessary. (Schweinefleisch in German, 猪肉 in Chinese)

But only if necessary. In most cases the "meat" either implied ("What kind of meat is that?" "Pig") or replaced by the specific name of the cut (Schweineschnitzel, Putenbrust, Lammkotlett).

The "extra" english words succinctly add context then.

They only exist because nobles wanted to pretend that the food they eat is so much fancier than that of the peasants, so they insisted on using French to describe it.

Assuming that this is true, that also adds a distinct meaning to the word so that saying "pork" as opposed to "pig meat" would have served as an indication of class status in addition to e.g. what you'll be eating for dinner.

I think a better proof would be “chicken” in English. If we get by without the distinction for one animal, it doesn’t make sense that we’d need it for another.

The poster I replied to said there was 'no useful distinction' between the words, which is provably false. They are synonyms, not the same words, despite the fact that their usages might overlap in many contexts, there are contexts where only one is really appropriate.

> A pig is not a pork.

No, but it is pork (while pork is most often used for meat, it can be used for live pigs, especially those destined for meat, and structurally differs from “pig” in such use largely in that it is a mass, rather than countable, noun.)

> A rain-forest is humid but not dank

A rainforest absolutely can be dank, as well as merely humid.

> These words have reason to exist and have particular usages

While that's true, the particular current usages aren't the historical reason they exist in many cases, it's just a result of how overlapping meanings have shaken out to be more (but not completely) distinct over time.

I know what these words mean. Air is humid and sponges are damp, but in either case it means "slightly wet" and there is very little chance of confusion. There are valid reasons to have more words, such as English's seven distinct words for horse as opposed to German's five (depending on sex and age of the animal in question). Those words do make a useful distinction that experts care about, but there are so many English words where the extra information they convey is completely redundant.

I feel the same way about the 16+ ways to say 'the' in German.

(And before you retort with 'but those are grammatically important!' Let me say yes, I agree, they are, and because you live within the language, you implicitly understand why. Let's just say that as an English speaker, I feel the same way about English's tendency to have a million synonyms for everything. Each one has its own, distinct flavor, and such aggressive vocabulary theft* is a fundamental part of English's charm.)

* “The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don't just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary.”

― James D. Nicoll

In Georgian languages we have at least 9 nouns and 64 adjectives for "rain", but each of these denote different kinds of rain (To be honest, most of these words are archaic, belong to regional dialects, or are used by poets only).

The foggy/cloudy distinction is a funny distinction. I still remember how until I went through a cloud in a plane as a kid, I somehow didn't realize that fog and clouds were exactly the same thing.

Sure, you could point out that one touches the ground and the other doesn't, but that feels like a rather nebulous distinction to make.

Incidentally, the same lack of distinction exists in Portuguese.

>nebulous

Delightful.

I think you get right to the reason for the distinction in language. The two things weren't unified in your conception until you were inside a cloud, which until recently was impossible except by climbing to high altitudes. Fogs and clouds are usually experienced in very different ways, so it seems natural to me that people came up with different words for them.

I think that another factor is that they have quite different effects in day-to-day life. If it's cloudy you can still do most of the stuff you would normally do, but you wouldn't want to ride your car/horse/chariot/whatever at full speed in a foggy day (and in general, things that require good visibility). It's a useful distinction.

I'm not familiar with the Portuguese climate, but is fog somewhat common? If not, that might be a reason why you never felt the need for a word expressing the concept.

There can even be two different words for the fog: for one that's low above the fields and the other one that's everywhere.

Related: I've explained the difference between "damp" and "humid" to bemused Italians on a couple of occasions.

I'm not a native English speaker. What's the difference?

Humid is usually related to weather or air. Damp is usually a negative term to use for something that feels wet but it could relate to air inside, as in my basement feels damp or my raincoat is still damp from yesterday.

Humid is usually related to I weather and a lot of the time hot weather but not always. It’s so humid today it feels like a jungle outside.

Thank you. I'm not a native speaker, so I'm usually mixing close enough expression/words

>Incidentally, the same lack of distinction exists in Portuguese.

Depends on the idiom. In Rio Grande Do Sul, where fog is a lot more common, we used to say "tempo cerrado", while "tempo nublado" means cloudy wheater.

A better candidate for an ambiguous term in portuguese is "tempo". It means both "time" and "wheater".

Obrigado.

That's interesting, when I lived in SP I only ever saw nublado for either. But I've only been around SP and Brasilia, so I haven't been to Rio Grande Do Sul at all.

Worth mentioning is the Toki Pona artificial language that has only 120 words. It's essentially designed for ambiguity.

"With such a tiny vocabulary, ambiguity is inevitable but not necessarily bad: The vagueness forces you to focus on very basic, core features instead of lots of tiny, often frivolous details." [1]

[1] http://tokipona.net/tp/janpije/okamasona3.php

Funny how there’s so much text yet he never admits that he’s clearly in the wrong with his claim that Spanish has “just as many ambiguous words“ as English

In fact, the post reads like he thinks he triumphed

> he’s clearly in the wrong with his claim that Spanish has “just as many ambiguous words“ as English

How so? He's not clearly in the right either, but that's because he doesn't compare counts, which might be meaningless anyway due to the poor precision of the method （synonyms in one language look like ambiguous translations for a word in the other).

His initial problem was that he couldn't give any Spanish examples (which could suggest that none exist). But when he used this method to generate examples, it seems like Mr. Manzo changed his mind. Sounds like a triumph.

But he's perfectly right. I don't know if he can arrive to that conclusion from his experiment, nevertheless he's right.

Spanish is full of ambiguous words. Just looking around at my desk, I can find...

papel - paper/role

monitor - monitor/supervisor (in Arg, also the student in charge of class materials)

factura - invoice/a kind of pastry (Arg)

caja - box/till/case/drum/soundbox

revista - magazine/review

And let's not start with the verbs...

sonreír - smirk/grin/smile

arrancar - pull out / pull up / pluck / tear out / rip out / blow off / snatch / wrench / start / start a vehicle or machine / boot / set sail...

Interesting, but most of those exist also in english, many almost exactly.

Paper - A Newspaper Company, Fiberous sheets, Thin covering, to title or register an object, etc.

Monitor - same. Both monitor as in observe/supervise, and the object, also a common title of newspapers.

Drum - Musical drum, storage barrel, to attract attention, to repeat, a fast beat, a stretched diaphram and its effect, throb.

Magazine - Publication, Bullet cartridge recepticle. ____ Review is common magazine title.

Seems roughly equal honestly. All languages borrow abstractions from simple words as complexity grows.

Shouldn't be too hard to verify the claim. Just grab a dictionary file and analyse the proportion of words with more than one definition.

You need to do the inverse as well, ie who many different words mean the 'same' thing.

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