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Half million 'Words with Spaces' missing from dictionaries

linguabase.org

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

#111

Post by DonHopkins »

>Spanish carves up time with precision English lacks: madrugada for the pre-dawn hours, atardecer for late afternoon waning into evening. The mid-day nap was so compelling we adopted the siesta into English.

"I used to smoke marijuana. But I’ll tell you something: I would only smoke it in the late evening. Oh, occasionally the early evening, but usually the late evening -- or the mid evening. Just the early evening, mid evening and late evening. Occasionally, early afternoon, early midafternoon, or perhaps the late-midafternoon. Oh, sometimes the early-mid-late-early morning... But never at dusk." -Steve Martin

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

#112

Post by DonHopkins »

dec0dedab0de wrote: post #9

There are nearly half a million compound phrases that aren’t in any dictionary—simply because they contain spaces. “Boiling water.” “Saturday night.” “Help me.” I would hope that none of those examples were taking up space in a dictionary.

>"Boiling water" ... I would hope that none of those examples were taking up space in a dictionary.

Yeah, I agree! Fuck ICE!

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

#113

Post by DonHopkins »

Wobbles42 wrote: post #70
dec0dedab0de wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t see how boiling water could ever be a single word. Would that mean we need entries for every other liquid boiling? i guess Saturday night could have some extra details explaining the context around our standard work week. But even that is a stretch.

A single word for boiling water would be like the single word "slush" we have for ice in water. It likely could apply to other liquids in the same mixed state, but would be assumed to refer to water (or solutions or colloidal mixtures primarily consisting of water) in common speech. Water is extremely common, and has anonymously high heats of crystalization and vaporization, so it is the most common example of a mixe…

Inuktitut / Kalaallisut (Greenlandic):

  qanik -- snow falling
  aput -- snow on the ground
  pukak -- crystalline powder snow (like salt)
  aniuk -- snow used to make water
  maujaq -- deep soft snow you sink into
  piqsirpoq (verb) -- drifting snow / blowing snow
Central Alaskan Yup’ik

  qanuk -- falling snow
  aput -- snow on the ground
  nevluk -- wet snow
  aniu -- snow for drinking water

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

#114

Post by jonplackett »

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"

I’m so glad I’m not going insane. I don’t see any examples on that site that I agree are ‘one word’. Sure they’re singular concepts but so what? Are we going to have singular words to describe all adjective noun pairs now?

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

#115

Post by DonHopkins »

agmater wrote: post #46
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

In Dutch we indeed happily do this even for English loanwords like "creditcard" or something more obscure like "lockpick". When in doubt, remove the space.

That happens often with domain names, but then you get expertsexchange.com, penisland.net, whorepresents.com, therapistfinder.com, a Dutch pre-match analysis site voorspel.nl, or a site about the game overspel.nl.

Peter Norvig - The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Data

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yvDCzhbjYWs&t=1477s

Not to mention Tobias Fünke’s analyst + therapist web site, analrapist.com.

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

#116

Post by Shorel »

As far as my limited knowledge of linguistics goes, the technical term is actually "collocations."

To me, any discussion of this topic that doesn't mention collocations signals an amateurish approach.

I also disagree with the premise that "this was not possible before LLM." That's nonsense. Linguists created many dictionaries of collocations for different languages, so that work is precisely what they did!

(Before any LLM zealots attack me, yes, it is now possible to have a more exhaustive list of collocations thanks to LLMs. This doesn't contradict my point.)

Examples of collocation dictionaries:

https://www.freecollocation.com/

https://ozdic.com/.

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

#118

Post by m-schuetz »

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"

Some other words that are sorely missing from dictionaries: "Warm water", "hot water", "cold water", "dirty water"

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

#119

Post by kdheiwns »

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"

Yeah, if "boiling water" is one word, what about boiling sugar? Boiling milk? Boiling volcano? Boiling soup?

Adding two words together creates a new and different concept. The permutations necessary to represent every concept ever formed by combining two or more different words would be endless.

Some of them on the list, like black hole, do make sense. That's a very distinct thing. It's not a hole in the conventional sense and it's not really black. Boiling water, though, is water. And it's boiling.

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

#120

Post by rjh29 »

jakub_g wrote: post #33
dec0dedab0de wrote: post #9

There are nearly half a million compound phrases that aren’t in any dictionary—simply because they contain spaces. “Boiling water.” “Saturday night.” “Help me.” I would hope that none of those examples were taking up space in a dictionary.

It's quite interesting that "boiling water" in many Slavic languages is actually a separate word (and not derived from "water", but from "boiling"; similar how the author mentions "ice" being used instead of "frozen water").

Japan is similar with 熱湯 boiling、お湯 heated、白湯 boiled once then cooled down、水 cold
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