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Comment by mjgeddes | Hacker News Reader

The work of Ana Wierzbicka and Cliff Goddard studied 'Semantic Primes', 'the set of semantic concepts that are innately understood but cannot be expressed in simpler terms'.

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

The combination of a set of semantic primes and the rules of combining them forms a 'Natural Semantic Metalanguage' , which is the core from which all the words in a given language would be built up.

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

The current agreed-upon number of semantic primes is 65 (see list at wikipedia links above).

That means that any English word can be defined using a lexicon of about 65 concepts in the English natural semantic metalanguage.

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I've been following this stuff for years, it's fascinating. I'm particularly interested in the recent practical applications like Minimal English and it's equivalent in other languages. For those that don't know, unlike other minimalist English subsets which usually focus on learnability or clarity, Minimal English focuses on maximum translatability.

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

> some core set of cognitive axioms

This and the rest of the comment remind me of the Pirahã language, in which there are purportedly two numerals but researchers can't figure out what they are: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pirah%C3%A3_language#Numerals_...

> Frank et al. (2008) describes two experiments on four Pirahã speakers that were designed to test these two hypotheses. In one, ten spools of thread were placed on a table one at a time and the Pirahã were asked how many were there. All four speakers answered in accordance with the hypothesis that the language has words for 'one' and 'two' in this experiment, uniformly using hói for one spool, hoí for two spools, and a mixture of the second word and 'many' for more than two spools. The second experiment, however, started with ten spools of thread on the table, and spools were subtracted one at a time. In this experiment, one speaker used hói (the word previously supposed to mean 'one') when there were six spools left, and all four speakers used that word consistently when there were as many as three spools left.

Having read only your comment, I'll jump in and solve the puzzle.

    enough

    not enough

I don't think you would ever lose a concept like 'aboveness' - even if that word didn't exist in our language, we would have found away to express the same idea, perhaps in a less abstract way like 'closer to the sky'

I taught myself to recognize five as a distinct quantity. Useful when counting up the "spare change jar".

I assume you see 3 objects on a table as a triangle. It's probably not equilateral, but any three objects on a table describe a triangle.

Make sure you can see 4 as a square, not 2+2. If you're stuck on seeing two pairs (or lines), try seeing 3+1 (a triangle and a point) instead. Then incorporate the point into the triangle...

Next, see pentagons. ... That's it.

I haven't tried to see "six"... Five was hard enough. :P

What proportion of linguists with an interest in semantics regard "semantic primes" as a useful concept? The Wikipedia articles don't seem to have a "Criticism" section, which isn't a good sign.

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.

I think this is the right approach to the problem. It's a question of meaning and bootstrapping a minimal language that's based heavily on metaphor (specifically, the conduit metaphor). The answer from this perspective, based on semantic metalanguage, is 800 words. Minimal english, but also minimal across all languages. It's a core language system that's translatable, because language is based on concepts, and those are consistent across natural languages (Chomsky - Universal Grammar).

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

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

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

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