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Half million 'Words with Spaces' missing from dictionaries

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

#201

Post by michaeld123 »

vidarh wrote: post #196
michaeld123 wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Added a German/Norwegian section — but vidarh corrected me below: German doesn't 'remove the space,' the compound never had one. Adding a space changes the meaning or breaks the grammar. The article now reflects that.

The issue with German as well as Norwegian is that a space creates a semantically distinct structure , so it's not that they remove the space, but that one wasn't there in the first place, and some of those compounds then become important enough for the dictionary. Absolutely not all - there's a near unbounded set of possible compounds. In Norwegian, we in fact have a compound for the incorrect separation of compound…

I just adapted your comments into the paragraph starting with "German". Hopefully accurately.

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

#203

Post by vidarh »

krisoft wrote: post #197
vidarh wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If people assume it's "just a type of sausage" it suggests a dictionary entry is needed to explain otherwise. It's a term referring to a small set of types of sausages served in a specific small set of ways . In some places , a hot dog can be used as a synonym for the predominant type of sausage most common in hot dogs in that place, but the term is still more commonly referring to the assembly of a wiener or frankfu…

> the term is still more commonly referring to the assembly of a wiener or frankfurter wrapped in a bread of some sort I had that disagreement in an alpine resort once. A seller was vending some sort of sausage stuffed in a bread, i was hungry so I walked up to them with money in hand and said "A hot dog please" while pointing at the only thing they were selling. The lady was mortified by my utterance, and was not wi…

Personally think a bratwurst is borderline, in that it is "close enough" that I can see someone calling a bratwurst in a bread a hot dog, and I wouldn't react if a shop listed them as a type of hot dog on a menu.

But, yeah, some places "hot dog" also carries a connotation of potentially using lower quality sausages, so I can also totally see a bratwurst vendor taking offense...

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

#204

Post by michaeld123 »

vidarh wrote: post #144
kdheiwns wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

[To be clear, the below is me agreeing with you] Norwegian is almost as compound-happy as German, and we could've filled many volumes with compounds. But what generally happens for one of the compunds to enter the dictionary is that the compound needs to have a meaning that is non-obvious from the individual parts, at least to some people, and typically that the compound has a non-obvious meaning if interpreted as tw…

And I attempted to add your 'svart hull' note.

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

#206

Post by 5o1ecist »

globular-toast wrote: post #130
5o1ecist wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Yeah, but the nice thing about natural language is, it doesn't matter what you think. People talk because they want to communicate something. You can try to talk your pet language at other people, but you will fail at communicating. So things have a happy way of sorting themselves out.

[flagged]

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

#207

Post by medalblue »

michaeld123 wrote: post #169
harperlee wrote: post #127

Surprised that no comment mentioned that there is a standard term (not a word :P) for the set of words that denominates a particular concept: nominal syntagm. Such as "boiling water" and also "that green parrot we saw yesterday over the left branch". Also the slider examples are abysmal. "I love you", "Go home" and "How are you" are not words by any stretch of imagination. For someone who makes word games, I don't se…

Added a note: "'I love you' isn't opaque, but it's tight enough to put on a tile." The familiar end of the spectrum picks up collocations that are transparent but loaded — I'm not claiming they're words in the traditional sense, but they're useful vocabulary for word games, which is where I'm coming from.

I thought that sentence seemed out of place when I read it. Didn't realize this was all AI slop. It all makes sense now.

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

#208

Post by Beijinger »

kdheiwns wrote: post #119
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…

Boiling water is not a word. The phrase contains two words. While German has no word for "boiling water", it uses two words too, an adjective and a noun, the German language has the principle of composite words. As a consequence, there is an infinite amount of German words.

"Hackernewsleser" would be a word I just made up but every German can understand. A reader of Hackernews. Obviously this makes a dictionary tricky. And it has been a big problem for spell corrections in early MS Word Software.

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

#209

Post by Izkata »

gcanyon wrote: post #150
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 would have agreed with you before they pointed out that "frozen water" gets a word: ice. Honestly, I think it's reasonable: people deal with frozen water far more than they do boiling water, but it changes it from a case of "what are they talking about?" to "okay, where do we draw the line?" for me.

Ice, slush, sleet, snow, graupel, hail... And within there is a subtype "black ice", a compound noun that isn't really just a description (it's not black, it's nearly invisible - a similar sense as another one, "black hole", which you'd never figure out from the components alone).

We have a lot of words for "frozen water" because it takes a lot of forms. As far as I know "boiling water" is only one thing so we've never needed additional words to distinguish it.

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

#210

Post by eszed »

yifanl wrote: post #202

Off the top of my head, peanut butter, black hole, and amusement park are concepts that can't be easily intuited by just combining the two singular terms, but I also wouldn't consider them as phrases.

"Peanut butter" would be dealt with by including a reference under the "butter" entry. Something like:

'N, culinary. A paste made of ground up nuts, sometimes with additional oils and other ingredients. E.g. "peanut butter", "almond butter".'

"Amusement park", same. Falls very much under the "place of recreation" definition of "park".

"Black hole" is maybe a bit different, because it's a scientific term - and certainly in a science dictionary would be included as a two-word item - but, for consistency, in a regular dictionary should be handled identically to the above, with a note on the word "hole".

While including noun phrases as singular entities in a word game is entirely appropriate, I don't think the OP has formed a rigorous definition of the concept that they are trying to describe. I agree with the other comment which suggests that they need some instruction / practice using a dictionary.

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