41–50 of 57 posts
Fyllipig is derived from "fyllan" and "pigge" and means "descriptive of something that is both full/abundant and pig-like." Terryjambled means "mixed up in a confused or disorderly state, and covered with or resembling terry cloth." Refugglemander means to "to manipulate electoral district boundaries in a way that impacts refugees." I'm sorry, OP. This just isn't very good.
There's "tlacoocelotl"[1] which seems to be the actual word for "ocelot" ("semi-jaguar").
0/10 for the AI there.
[0] https://nahuatl.wired-humanities.org/
[1] https://nahuatl.wired-humanities.org/content/tlacoocelotl
Like "gua" in the dictionary means cave but in some dialects it's an informal "I". Sometimes it gets shortened to the phonetic "gue", sometimes "gu" which is similar to "aku" shortened to "ku", which is another form of "I". Really we have like 7 different ways to say informal "I". I think the tool guesses it as Chinese.
Malaysian tends to remove affixes when shortened, while Indonesian removes vowels but keeps the affixes, so something like "come here quickly" might be shortened to "come quick" or "here2 qkly". Less etymology, more about encoding.
This is fun, but what I think would be even more interesting and potentially actually useful would be to generate a word from multiple ideas — to help express complex ideas in one word. Like Frühstücksbrotübersättigung
"KI-Philologenstaunverunsicherung"
Breaking it down:
KI – (Künstliche Intelligenz, Artificial Intelligence) Philologen – (Philologists, scholars of language and linguistics) Staun – (from staunen, to marvel or be astonished) Verunsicherung – (a sense of uncertainty or unease)
https://chatgpt.com/share/67d80661-4bb4-8012-9328-77d56af52b...
This is interesting because it may eventually become the case that we should interpret other human texts through an LLM because it is better at understanding than many of us are.
My prompt, in case you are curious:
> I came across a HN story titled “AI etymology deconstructor - can guess fake words”. I want you to interpret the title and describe what this does. Then I’ll give you the chance to provide a test word and you will reinterpret the title.
Fyllipig is derived from "fyllan" and "pigge" and means "descriptive of something that is both full/abundant and pig-like." Terryjambled means "mixed up in a confused or disorderly state, and covered with or resembling terry cloth." Refugglemander means to "to manipulate electoral district boundaries in a way that impacts refugees." I'm sorry, OP. This just isn't very good.
It's funny; I'm looking at your examples and coming to the opposite conclusion. I feel like it is very good because it provides explanations for unusual or novel words that are similar to what a human might conclude.
Maybe I'm coloured by having spent half a decade of my life on a linguistics degree, though.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Doesn't look fake to me. English is not a closed-world language, as far as I know. Between things like "verbing" and "nouning", and the cultural acceptance of doing them in casual speech, I'd say English is a great language because you get to "invent" new words on the fly, and your interlocutors know what you mean. In this sense, even if no one before ever said or wrote "multiarborality", it's pretty clear what it me…
> I'd say English is a great language because you get to "invent" new words on the fly, and your interlocutors know what you mean. I bet you could do that with most languages. I don’t see why English would be especially great at it.
1. English doesn’t really have an official regulation body, like French does.
2. The lack of cases and complex grammar. Any language with a case system is going to have more complexity when it comes to adding new words, because otherwise you end up with awkward looking constructions.
3. English itself is something of a hybrid between Latin and Germanic languages, which to my knowledge gives it a more diverse ancestry than the typical language. Ergo having a new word of dubious origins is more natural.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I'd say English is a great language because you get to "invent" new words on the fly, and your interlocutors know what you mean. I bet you could do that with most languages. I don’t see why English would be especially great at it.
I can think of three reasons: 1. English doesn’t really have an official regulation body, like French does. 2. The lack of cases and complex grammar. Any language with a case system is going to have more complexity when it comes to adding new words, because otherwise you end up with awkward looking constructions. 3. English itself is something of a hybrid between Latin and Germanic languages, which to my knowledge gi…
1. Doesn’t seem relevant, as we’re discussing making up a word in conversation and not putting it into dictionaries.
3. Especially in this globalised world, English loanwords are everywhere. No one bats an eye at it and plenty of languages distort those words to fit their own language. For example: when referring to an internet post you say you’re “posting”; another language would keep the “post” but replace the “ing” with the modifier appropriate for them.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I'd say English is a great language because you get to "invent" new words on the fly, and your interlocutors know what you mean. I bet you could do that with most languages. I don’t see why English would be especially great at it.
I bet you could, but in the other languages I know, I believe it would be frowned upon. The cultural acceptance of this feature is just as important as the feature itself.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I can think of three reasons: 1. English doesn’t really have an official regulation body, like French does. 2. The lack of cases and complex grammar. Any language with a case system is going to have more complexity when it comes to adding new words, because otherwise you end up with awkward looking constructions. 3. English itself is something of a hybrid between Latin and Germanic languages, which to my knowledge gi…
I won’t comment on the second reason, since that seems like something a linguist should address, but I don’t really buy the first and last reasons: 1. Doesn’t seem relevant, as we’re discussing making up a word in conversation and not putting it into dictionaries. 3. Especially in this globalised world, English loanwords are everywhere. No one bats an eye at it and plenty of languages distort those words to fit their…
3. Loanwords are everywhere but I think they are easier to incorporate into everyday speech in English than in some other languages, especially ones with case endings. A word like taco, for example, has become indistinguishable from other “native” English words. Taco in say, Polish, requires more thinking about how it fits into the case system and what endings should be used. It’s a more complicated process than in English.