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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

#281

Post by seanhunter »

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…

Agree. “boiling water” is such a staggeringly terrible example for TFA to have opened with.

“Honey, I’ve overheated the fondue! The problem is I can’t describe the liquid because English completely lacks any word that might be apposite in this situation other than the newly-minted ‘boiling water’.”

“It’s a problem. Maybe you could call it ‘boiling water that happens to be quite cheesy’. It’s not great, but it’s the best we can do.”

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

#282

Post by eszed »

boxed wrote: post #273
eszed wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, it's a linguistic reality - all of which are accidents of history - which absolutely isn't to say it reflects anything definitive about reality reality. My point is that English has a straightforward way of dealing with this (admittedly arbitrary) case, which OP either ignores or doesn't understand, and instead adds unnecessary categorical complication.

It's not a linguistic reality in spoken English is what I meant. We Swedish speakers can hear it when English speakers pronounce the space and when they don't, because we're super sensitive to that difference because our language cares. We can easily flip from one state to the other and repeat the word/words back and English speakers will instantly hear that it sounds weird and wrong but often they don't understand w…

Oh! Yeah, I understand what you mean. "Black hole" (the astronomical entity) and "black hole" (a hole that is black) are said differently, but it takes a good ear, and probably some training, for English speakers to notice. How interesting that speakers of (some) other languages detect that so "automatically"! There also are dialectical complications - some speakers tend to run words together more than others, or maybe use tone / stress rather than syllabic modifications to mark the changes - and I'd be interested to know the extent to which you notice those structures as well?

Nevertheless, dictionaries (conventional ones, at least) concern themselves with written rather than spoken English, so I think my point stands. :-)

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

#283

Post by backscratches »

wredcoll wrote: post #267
vunderba wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "'I love you' isn't opaque, but it's tight enough to put on a tile." The problem with introducing phrase/sentences into a word game (let's take Scrabble) is that you'd spend half the night with your friends arguing over what is and is not acceptable with the only litmus test being its... corpus frequency?

> what is and is not acceptable with the only litmus test being its... corpus frequency? How do you suppose we determine acceptability now ?

Not with corpus frequency. Just has to exist a single time in agreed upon dictionary.

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

#284

Post by wredcoll »

backscratches wrote: post #283
wredcoll wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> what is and is not acceptable with the only litmus test being its... corpus frequency? How do you suppose we determine acceptability now ?

Not with corpus frequency. Just has to exist a single time in agreed upon dictionary.

And the dictionary chooses words based on... how often people use them?

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

#285

Post by dirtikiti »

OkayPhysicist wrote: post #268
dirtikiti wrote: post #239

No. This article shows a distinct lack of understanding of the basic building blocks of the English language. "Words" don't have "spaces." Phrases are made of words separated by spaces. "Boiling Water" is not a word. "Water" is a word. A noun, the subject. "Boiling" is a word. An adjective, in this case. Which modifies the subject. I don't know if you're trying to be clever, but you're not.

English has words with spaces. Boiling water isn't one of them, but in general, if you can't insert another adjective between an adjective-noun pair, it's linguistically a compound word that we happen to write with a space. "Fast food" is a good example. It's not simply an adjective-noun pair, as demonstrated by the fact that you sound like a crazy person if you try to insert literally anything between "fast" and "fo…

Except fast is an adjective when describing food...

Just because the phrase is used colloquially to describe a specific group of restaurants doesn't change the fact the phrase "fast food" is comprised of two words, one being a noun; the other an adjective.

Fast greasy food. Fast disgusting food.

Fast food is not a word. It is a phrase.

Words don't have spaces.

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

#286

Post by backscratches »

wredcoll wrote: post #284
backscratches wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not with corpus frequency. Just has to exist a single time in agreed upon dictionary.

And the dictionary chooses words based on... how often people use them?

Dictionaries would be ruined if they could only use popular words. I guess you might be describing very early children's dictionaries, but I dont think that's your argument?
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