What's the minimum number of words you'd need to define all other words? (2012)

I didn't go searching, big was literally the first word on the list I read after going down a few pages, and I wondered about large, so I searched for it. I just looked a bit more, and there's "child", "childhood", and "grandchild", which while not the same problem, does illustrate that they are fairly liberal with their inclusions because they appear to want to use the minimum vocabulary to define something idiomatically, which is a slightly different question than what's the minimum required.

This problem actually seems to share a lot in common with database normalization.[1]

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Database_normalization

That's where 1984's "Newspeak" came from. See "Orwell, the Lost Writings".

[1] https://www.smartcom.vn/the_oxford_3000.pdf

(Though again I'm unsure if the endless English phrasal verbs are counted as distinct in these estimates, not doing which would probably be cheating.)

It's impossible. An English dictionary defined using English words has to have cycles.

I'm going to get silly now, but I can't help but think the semantic primes - if you can avoid thinking of them as words or even conscious experience - represent some core set of cognitive axioms, like the primitive elements for constructing mental models. As you go to simpler life forms the "word list" would get smaller. If there is any truth to that, I wonder what potential primitives we are missing that would allow us to think more complex thoughts and whether you could measure species intelligence by their "vocabulary" and working out what concepts can't be expressed when one of the primitives is missing. What would happen if you lost the concept of above'ness?

The other thing I find interesting and it might be no more than a coincidence, is how there is only the numbers one and two and then you have to use many or more. This in some way matches up with the ideas of the Parallel individuation system[1] whereby young children can only precisely recognize quantities up to 3, or 1 + 2 and an adult can only precisely recognize quantities up to 4, or 2 + 2. After that, the brain uses the Approximate number system[2]. So it's like there are only 2 slots to place a quantity.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_individuation_system [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Approximate_number_system

It looks interesting, certainly, but rather arbitrary. There are several pairs of opposites, which in a minimal language could be handled with the concept of "opposite", and I have no idea how you'd express some fundamental concepts of human experience such as hunger, cold, pain or surprise, while "live, die" do not seem to me to be such fundamental concepts: they seem more like concepts that need to be defined, for example by a philosopher or medical specialist, rather than experienced directly.

--- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conduit_metaphor

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_semantic_metalanguage

https://intranet.secure.griffith.edu.au/…/natural-semantic-…

> "A friend!" Shouted back the man. He ran toward Zaphod.

> "Oh yeah?" said Zaphod. "Anyone's friend in particular, or just generally well-disposed to people?"

Adams, Douglas. The Restaurant at the End of the Universe.

https://wordnet.princeton.edu/

That is actually a really interesting challenge: to have a completely self-contained dictionary. Especially in 1963, before modern automation, the proofreading required must have been a Herculean task.

Perhaps this could be some kind of measure for answering this question in and of itself: what is the smallest useful self-contained natural language dictionary that one can write?

EDIT: Oh, fginionio came up with an intuitive approach to do this automatically below: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19332041

I'm pretty confident the goal is to choose a smallest subset of English so that, if you know this subset of English and are given a dictionary written in it, you can learn the entire vocabulary of full English.

That means you're not allowed to create any new words, so you can't create the magic uber-word w.

> if there was a minimal set of (more than one!) words sufficient to define all other words (meanings) in a language, all natural languages would converge to about that number of words- which I really don't think is the case.

This amounts to saying there is little to no redundancy in language. I'm not convinced. For example, once you've got "one" and "plus", the words "two", "three", "four", etc. are just convenience. Another example might be opposites: if you have "down", you don't absolutely have to have "up". But the thing is, people really like convenient ways of saying things. In fact, the economics probably drive you toward doing this. It makes for shorter sentences think of it like data compression: if a concept occurs often, you want a dedicated word for it so you can just say that word instead of saying the definition.

Often the reason we have a word for a concept is precisely because no other combination of words would do. I'd suggest that the article's attempt to "define" one word with another is an oversimplification. It is not enough to sufficiently define a word, to convey its most common understanding. To declare a word superfluous, replaceable, one must define it absolutely. For many words I'd expect such a definition to fill an entire volume, not a short sentence.

The author also forgets that words have layers beyond literal meanings. Their tone, their length, and even their spelling can convey different meanings depending on context.

Finally, here you are. At the delcot of tondam, where doshes deave. But the doshery lutt is crenned with glauds.

Glauds! How rorm it would be to pell back to the bewl and distunk them, distunk the whole delcot, let the drokes uncren them.

But you are the gostak. The gostak distims the doshes. And no glaud will vorl them from you.

It has been on my to-play list for some time but I haven't got around to it yet.

https://ifdb.tads.org/viewgame?id=w5s3sv43s3p98v45

You can read some of her books online, such as "Robinson Crusoe In Words Of One Syllable" [2].

[1] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Category:English_1-syllable_w...

[2] https://manybooks.net/book/189660/read#epubcfi(/6/2[item4]!/...)

Duck is the common name for a large number of species in the waterfowl family Anatidae which also includes swans and geese. Ducks are divided among several subfamilies in the family Anatidae; they do not represent a monophyletic group (the group of all descendants of a single common ancestral species) but a form taxon, since swans and geese are not considered ducks. Ducks are mostly aquatic birds, mostly smaller than the swans and geese, and may be found in both fresh water and sea water. Ducks are sometimes confused with several types of unrelated water birds with similar forms, such as loons or divers, grebes, gallinules, and coots.

But you could also describe a duck in two simple words: "water bird". Apparently that's a real term: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_bird

See Genesis 2:19-20 (and its placement/context). God shows Adam forms to be named.

It's just a thought experiment about how much you could optimize one dimension (number of words) if you didn't care at all about optimization anywhere else in language.

Not all synonyms amount to useless equivalents.

Occasionally it's useful to use a different word simply because one can; sometimes the facilitous utility of alternate mots juste serves its own purpose.

No such thing as a synonym. On the face of it yes many words share meanings. But a mutt is not the same as a dog despite what thesaurus.com says

What is the minimum number of words needed to define everything else?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_primes

mentioned by mjgeddes in this very thread

What effect this really had can be observed with the introduction of mechanical printing presses which reduced spatial and temporal distances of information flow significantly.

The internet might yet be another of those things..

One thing is that toki pona has no built-in comparatives at all. A usual thing is to say something like

mi sona e ijo mute ala. jan pi pali sama li sona e ijo mute.

'I know not many things. My colleague knows many things.'

ona li suli taso mi suli mute.

'She is big, but I am very big.'

jan ni li jo e mani mute. taso jan ante li jo e mani mute mute.

'This person has a lot of money. But the other person has lots and lots of money.'

Another thing is that there's no built-in way to make a relative clause at all.

mi sona e toki. mama meli mi li sona e toki sama.

'I know a language. My mother knows the same language.' (As opposed to 'My mother knows a/the language that I know'!)

mi sona e toki. mama meli mi li sona ala e toki ni.

'I know a language. My mother does not know this language.' (As opposed to 'I know a language that my mother doesn't (know)'!)

ona li pali e ijo. mi sona e jan ante. jan ni li pali kin e ijo ni.

'She does something. I know another person. This person also does this thing.' (As opposed to 'I know another person who does what she does'.)

moku mute li kama tan soweli. mi moku ala e moku ni.

'Many foods come from animals. I don't eat these foods.' (As opposed to 'I don't eat foods that come from animals'.)

It's also extremely tricky to construct specific tenses and specific logical conditions. The particle "la" can mean "when", "because", "also", or "if", and is only supposed to be used once per sentence. This is especially challenging when trying to contrast things that have happened with hypothetical conditions. For example

jan olin ona mije li moli la mi mute li pilin ike.

I intend this to mean 'we feel bad because his romantic partner died' but we can't really disambiguate, for example, 'we will feel bad when his romantic partner dies' or 'if his romantic partner dies, we will feel bad'.

You can qualify things with "tenpo pini/ni/kama la" ('in past/this/future time'), but you're not supposed to use more than one "la" in the same sentence, so it's discouraged to write things like

?tenpo pini la mi moku e ni la insa mi li pilin ike.

'Because, in the past, I ate this, my belly feels bad.'

You can try to break these up into multiple sentences.

tenpo pini la mi moku e moku jaki. mi pali e ni la mi kama pilin ike.

'In the past, I ate gross food. Since I did this, I started feeling bad.'

This gets really challenging if you have to refer to several different things of the same sort, which perhaps have conditional relations to one another that apply at different times or in different circumstances. For example, if you wanted to say "when my mother arrived, the plane that she was on was very warm because it had a broken air conditioning unit which the crew didn't know how to fix", you might end up making a long series of sentences that tell a story.

tenpo pini la mama mi li kama kepeken ilo tawa kon. ona li kama la kon lon ilo li seli mute. ni li kama tan ni: ilo lete li pakala. jan pali li sona ala pona e ilo lete.

In the past, my mother came using an air travel tool. When she/it arrived, the air in the tool was very hot. This happened because of this: the cooling tool broke. Workers did not know how to improve the cooling tool.

But some kinds of conditions don't necessarily lend themselves well to this form, like if I wanted to say "if she had known that this would happen, she wouldn't have taken this airplane", or quantifiers like "every Singaporean who goes to school in Singapore learns English and whatever the government defines as his or her family's language" or "everyone who was inside the building when the earthquake happened got injured by some object"...

I don't feel confident about my ability to describe the truth conditions of the latter two examples in toki pona in a way that's faithful to the English original.

It's also unclear to what extent we're allowed to stack "e ni:" and "tan ni:" in order to embed indirect discourse and chained reasons.

?ona li pilin pona tan ni: toki pona li pona tawa ona tan ni: ona li toki lili li jo ala e nimi mute.

'She was happy because of this: she liked toki pona because of this: it's a small language and doesn't have many words.'

Edit: also, NSM explications assume that you're deliberately defining new vocabulary in order to expand your language, which isn't really customary in toki pona. Even if we figure out how to express a concept or situation in toki pona, we don't then acquire a single word that we can use for that concept or situation in the future.

fixed it for you.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unary_numeral_system

binary codes can be prefix-free thus self terminating.

I'm not saying that new words aren't created, just that in a practical sense, unless you're creating new words to mess with someone trying to do this, it doesn't apply.

You have my most enthusiastic contrafribularities.

With math a circular definition is unacceptable, and that when the theorem comes into play.