61–70 of 114 posts
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GP is right. If aliens don't know about CP violation, there is no way to communicate rotational direction that preserves the absolute direction without some shared reference. Because CP-violation is actually the only detectable way to discern between right handedness and left handedness. That is, without CPv, we would have no way to know that we aren't in a hypothetical mirror universe with all rotations reversed. Ev…
I don't follow. If we're communicating with aliens that we somehow know are made of matter, we tell them that right is the direction a horizontal wire carrying positive current away from us gets pushed by a vertical magnetic field.
If you like this, you'll definitely enjoy the talk "Growing a Language", by Guy Steele: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ahvzDzKdB0
Has there been any attempts to 'translate' this into other languages? I'm struggling most often with vocabulary first, whereas the grammar is much easier for me to grasp (programming helps?)
The layering beyond the primes isn't consistent though, and wouldn't be so much a translation as new work for each language.
This is very interesting -- a kind of topological sort of the dictionary. It seems like a very natural thing to want to do with subject-specific glossaries as well. Often when I approach a new topic or hobby I want a glossary of all the jargon up front, and I want the words ordered from least to most demanding of in-knowledge.
I am a newbie to topology, so please help me. What is a topological sort and why does it describe this?
You can see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Topological_sorting to see what it actually is. Topological sort is good in dealing with dependency graph. It can turn a dependency graph into a linear ordering of nodes.
GP mentioned topological sort because words depend on other defining words and it's one big directed acyclic graph. Do a topological sort on it and you got a linear list of words ordered by dependency. Group the consecutive words that have no dependency together and you got the word layers. Within each layer all the words don't depend on each other. The words in one layer depend on the words in the lower layers.
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Seconded, I _need_ this for German.
There is a list of semantic primes on the German Wikipedia, though it seems like it's just a translation from the English words: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantisches_Primitivum
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> Left: Face the noon sun. Lift one arm to point at where it was first seen this morning. That...fails to be generally accurate pretty badly.
As a quick example: north vs south hemisphere swaps this.
North and South of the tropics will give either consistently right or consistently wrong answers, but within the tropics you'll get different answers on different days.
I've seen that done for a different language, though in that case the fully connected component had more than 60 works. I think it was more like 120.
Of course it doesn't make sense to do this competitively because it's so unclear what counts as an adequate definition.
I'm not sure this sort of dictionary would help me learn a language: I think probably not much. But it's definitely fun in a philosophical way.
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How would you define left and right based on these words?
From http://learnthesewordsfirst.com/Lesson-12F.html#12-21 12-20. right. [X is on the right side of your body.] = X is on this side of your body: Most people write using the hand they have on this side of their body. [I use my right hand when I draw pictures.] 12-21. left. [X is on the left side of your body.] = X is on this side of your body: Most people do not write using the hand they have on this side of their bo…
"Left is on this side of the sentence, and at the end of it is right."
[ * - as in: they didn't 'get' it until I formulated it this way]
The 60 words: to see, saw, seen. thing, something, what. this, these. the other, another, else, is the same as, be, am, are, being, was, were. one of. two of. person, people. many of, much of. inside. not, do not, does not, did not, some of. all of. there is, there are. more than, live, alive. big. small. very, kind of. if, then. touch. far from. near to, in a place, someplace, where. above. on a side of, hear, heard…
(Why do I mention that? Firstly, perhaps it's a fun puzzle for non-native speakers of American English to identify the word. Secondly, it's surprising that a difference between British and US English is apparent in such a short list of such basic words, considering that sometimes it's possible to write whole paragraphs of English without it being apparent which variety of English is being used.)