Multi-Layer Dictionary (2016)
learnthesewordsfirst.com
learnthesewordsfirst.com
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.
Also, please reread https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
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).
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.]
Put another way, how can we know that aliens won't reconstruct an electromagnetic message as a mirror image of what we sent?
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."
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...
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...
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.
Such a list would be great to have for many reasons actually.
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.
"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]
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".
It's like if prime numbers were defined as, "The numbers most mathematicians say are prime."
Not as common as left-handedness (one in ten), but still in the order of one in ten thousand people.
Edit: works where I live. YMMV. Adapt as needed (which I thought about saying but decided wasn't needed here.)
That...fails to be generally accurate pretty badly.
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.
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.
(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.)
Sorry that you chose to read my comment as hatred. Yeah, that's not a real apology.
I'm en-gb native.
Google Ngram Viewer lets you compare popularity of words in British vs. American English, so it's useful for investigating this.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
But it's intended as a learning tool and it'll do fine for that.
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?
I meant a sequence of one-hot encoded vectors of length 60 could make a good model of English.
More like 60 x N , since each of those words can appear arbitrary many times.
Yes, we can all look up a few words in the dictionary.
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?
Jour. N. The same meaning as the English word 'day'.
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.
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.
Vide Casually Explained on French: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a69toGGjoO0
The layering beyond the primes isn't consistent though, and wouldn't be so much a translation as new work for each language.
Or perhaps with thorough explanations something like this could help bootstrap understanding by a machine?
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?
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.
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.
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.
When something burns and becomes many very small dry pieces that moving air can cause to move.
Kind of tree.
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...
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.