Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Half million 'Words with Spaces' missing from dictionaries

linguabase.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 286 posts

Re: Half million 'Words with Spaces' missing from dictionaries

#101

Post by streetfighter64 »

dec0dedab0de wrote: post #75
Wobbles42 wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We have the word slush to mean a mixture of ice and water. A single word for boiling water would occupy a similar conceptual space. While these are not separate states of matter, they ARE special thermodynamic systems, with the particular property that they tend to remain exactly at the phase transition temperature while heat is added or removed from the system. This is a somewhere esoteric technical distinction, but…

but what about boiling milk? or boiling oil? I get your point, I just don't understand why we would have a word for boiling water but then still need boiling-x for everything else that boils. edit: In those other languages is it like how we use ice? where water is the default, but it could mean any frozen liquid?

What do you mean by "why we would have"? Dictionaries aren't prescriptive, they're descriptive. If by "we" you mean English speakers, clearly you don't have a word for that. But if you mean some Slavic languages, they do. Likewise, English has "ice", while other languages simply call it "frozen water". Or take the example from the linked article, "at home", which some languages do have a separate word for. I don't think many languages have a distinct word for "at work" though, or "at the shop". That simply reflects that being at home is a more common and generally important concept, just like boiling water is more important in some sense than boiling milk.

Asking for the "reasons" behind a certain word existing is sort of like asking why the human body looks the way it does. Sure, scientists may have good theories why it was evolutionary advantageous to have five fingers and no tail, but in the end the only answer that's for certain is, "because it evolved that way". So the answer is, "we" have a word for boiling water because people found it useful to have such a word.

Re: Half million 'Words with Spaces' missing from dictionaries

#102

Post by BergAndCo »

AlotOfReading wrote: post #38

A compound word isn't just a phrase. The latter is a group of words that indicate a single concept. The former is a new word that has a distinct meaning from the subwords that compose it. "I love you" is an example of a clausal phrase. The meaning is entirely evident from the words that compose it. In contrast, a "hot dog" is not a particularly warm canine, and has its own OED entry [0] as a compound word. And some o…

[dead]

Re: Half million 'Words with Spaces' missing from dictionaries

#103

Post by voidUpdate »

> “Boiling water” isn’t “water that happens to be boiling.” It’s a hazard, a cooking stage, a state of matter

I guess we'll have to disagree then, because "boiling water" is "water that's boiling" to me. It's not a different state of matter to "water", that would be "steam". It being a hazard doesn't mean it's a singular concept, same as "wet floor"

Re: Half million 'Words with Spaces' missing from dictionaries

#104

Post by nkrisc »

dec0dedab0de wrote: post #75
Wobbles42 wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We have the word slush to mean a mixture of ice and water. A single word for boiling water would occupy a similar conceptual space. While these are not separate states of matter, they ARE special thermodynamic systems, with the particular property that they tend to remain exactly at the phase transition temperature while heat is added or removed from the system. This is a somewhere esoteric technical distinction, but…

but what about boiling milk? or boiling oil? I get your point, I just don't understand why we would have a word for boiling water but then still need boiling-x for everything else that boils. edit: In those other languages is it like how we use ice? where water is the default, but it could mean any frozen liquid?

As you note, we have a specific word for solid water. Additionally, in colloquial speech “water” almost exclusively refers to the liquid state. Finally we have “steam” to refer to the gaseous state.

So English arguably has three unique words for the three common states of H2O.

Re: Half million 'Words with Spaces' missing from dictionaries

#105

Post by WesolyKubeczek »

Examples of "obscure" compound words include "list uids", "beg pos", "sync binlog", "gfp mask", "av fetch", "str idx", "seq ptr", "ai family", "fmt vuln", "ai socktype", "curr tok", "nbits set", "ini get", "s1 s2", "in addr", "num get", "res init", "sess ref", and "ai addrlen".

Well I can't even.

Re: Half million 'Words with Spaces' missing from dictionaries

#106

Post by csmantle »

WesolyKubeczek wrote: post #105

Examples of "obscure" compound words include "list uids", "beg pos", "sync binlog", "gfp mask", "av fetch", "str idx", "seq ptr", "ai family", "fmt vuln", "ai socktype", "curr tok", "nbits set", "ini get", "s1 s2", "in addr", "num get", "res init", "sess ref", and "ai addrlen". Well I can't even.

This is just so hilarious. They'll eventually have to add "man man" to the list.

Re: Half million 'Words with Spaces' missing from dictionaries

#107

Post by tgv »

Wobbles42 wrote: post #79
ticulatedspline wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

but can't you basically make anything a composite noun in German? That it's a single word doesn't really help you decided if it has enough presence unto itself to be defined in the dictionary. Seems like they would have just as much of a problem since the issue is delineating when a "phrase" becomes a "word"

More to the point, how to German dictionaries handle this? Is there a distinction between words that get enumerated and compound nouns that do not? It does seem, though, that German speakers might be more comfortable with the fuzziness that apparently exists at the edges of what the word "word" means.

In general, transparent compounds, i.e. those whose meaning can be derived from the elements, are not in the dictionary. Mushroom soup is transparent; Krankenhaus, which means hospital, but is literally sick-people home, isn't.

Re: Half million 'Words with Spaces' missing from dictionaries

#108

Post by 5o1ecist »

voidUpdate wrote: post #103

> “Boiling water” isn’t “water that happens to be boiling.” It’s a hazard, a cooking stage, a state of matter I guess we'll have to disagree then, because "boiling water" is "water that's boiling" to me. It's not a different state of matter to "water", that would be "steam". It being a hazard doesn't mean it's a singular concept, same as "wet floor"

[flagged]

Re: Half million 'Words with Spaces' missing from dictionaries

#109

Post by simon_void »

ticulatedspline wrote: post #18
ndr42 wrote: post #5

I imagine that languages like german that create composites of nouns have less of a problem with this: English: cream of mushroom soup Spanisch: sopa cremosa de champiñones German: Champignoncremesuppe

but can't you basically make anything a composite noun in German? That it's a single word doesn't really help you decided if it has enough presence unto itself to be defined in the dictionary. Seems like they would have just as much of a problem since the issue is delineating when a "phrase" becomes a "word"

not anything. As a German I see no way to compound "boiling water". It remains two words: "kochendes Wasser".

Re: Half million 'Words with Spaces' missing from dictionaries

#110

Post by jjgreen »

csmantle wrote: post #106
WesolyKubeczek wrote: post #105

Examples of "obscure" compound words include "list uids", "beg pos", "sync binlog", "gfp mask", "av fetch", "str idx", "seq ptr", "ai family", "fmt vuln", "ai socktype", "curr tok", "nbits set", "ini get", "s1 s2", "in addr", "num get", "res init", "sess ref", and "ai addrlen". Well I can't even.

This is just so hilarious. They'll eventually have to add "man man" to the list.

On my first encounter with a Unix machine (an SGI IRC) I had heard that system help was available with the "man" command, so I typed "man"; the resulting "apropro what?" made me laugh out loud, and the other people in the room looked at me like I was some kind of idiot.
Post reply on HN