
Multi-Layer Dictionary (2016) - david_ar
http://learnthesewordsfirst.com/about/what-is-a-multi-layer-dictionary.html
======
Animats
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. say to, said about. word. true.

~~~
raldi
How would you define left and right based on these words?

~~~
skeoh
From
[http://learnthesewordsfirst.com/Lesson-12F.html#12-21](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 body. They
write using their other hand.

[My child held my left hand.]

~~~
raldi
I would think a true minimum set of bootstrapping words would be enough to
teach the language to hypothetical aliens who might not have access to a group
of humans to poll about handedness.

~~~
ISL
To tell an alien about handedness definitively, without an artifact, may
require that both parties are aware of the CP-violation present in the weak
interaction.

Put another way, how can we know that aliens won't reconstruct an
electromagnetic message as a mirror image of what we sent?

~~~
raldi
Make use of the right-hand rule, which will suffice so long as they're not
made of antimatter.

~~~
ISL
How will they know we're not made of antimatter?

~~~
benj111
Aren't matter and antimatter a matter of perspective? If so haven't we just
reintroduced the left/right problem.

~~~
ISL
Precisely.

------
peterkelly
If you like this, you'll definitely enjoy the talk "Growing a Language", by
Guy Steele:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ahvzDzKdB0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ahvzDzKdB0)

~~~
nalzok
I was waiting for him to share thoughts on the failure (?) of Lisp, which I
believe is a decent "shopping mall", but unfortunately he did not :(

------
veridies
I'd like to see research on this. I have an MA in TESOL and teach ESL, so this
is very within my field. While some of what's happening here is basically a
self-guided version of classwork, a lot of it seems to rely on very logically
precise understandings (defining 'flat' as the shape of unmoving water). I can
say from experience that students really struggle with being given a single
example like that, even when they know all the words being used; it's just not
how most people think. Visual aids and/or multiple examples are pretty
essential, and often it requires watching a student to see what's registering
and what isn't.

~~~
kd5bjo
It also falls into the trap of treating the most common definition as the only
one. When you look up left/right in here, you'll find positioning, but nothing
about liberal/conservative opinions or a legal guarantee (the right to X) or
departing (he left the train station).

------
dougb5
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.

~~~
ErotemeObelus
I am a newbie to topology, so please help me. What is a topological sort and
why does it describe this?

~~~
ww520
The "topological" in topological sort is more related to "network topology"
than the mathematical topology (open sets). "Sort" is related to ordering.
Topological sort thus is related to the ordering of a network graph's nodes by
their edges.

You can see
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Topological_sorting](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.

~~~
__MatrixMan__
I don't think mathematical topology and network topology are different
concepts.

The open sets in a network topology are the subsets of nodes that happen to be
connected by the edges. So if you can't get from here to there without using a
node outside your set, then your set isn't an open set in the network
topology.

~~~
dbmueller
Except unions of open sets are required to be open, so the case for topology
here is not what you're describing (assuming standard definitions).

Generally, the topology on a graph will look like what you get if you draw
your graph in the euclidean plane (or space, whatever) without intersections
of edges.

The notion of closeness of vertices in this case isn't really well described
by "point set topology", but you'd rather use the notion of distance between
vertices (length of a shortest path). But even then, the distance stuff
generally assumes non-directed edges, because you generally want the distance
from A to B to be the same as from B to A.

In short, I don't think "point set topology" has much to say here, at least as
usually done.

------
dejawu
These are also known as Semantic Primes:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_primes](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_primes)

------
phonebucket
If true, this is interesting from an academic perspective: word meanings can
be derived from a space of 60 dimensions. But I’m not still not convinced of
the value with respect to language learning.

Learning how language is spoken from the fundamental 60 words sounds like
trying to learn mathematics from its fundamental axioms. It seems like you
might just get caught in a long list of definitions where you might be faster
off trying to internalise some higher level useful concepts first.

~~~
trox
> If true, this is interesting from an academic perspective: word meanings can
> be derived from a space of 60 dimensions. But I’m not still not convinced of
> the value with respect to language learning.

More like 60 x N , since each of those words can appear arbitrary many times.

~~~
dbmueller
Monoid with 60 generators. But is it free?

------
grenoire
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?)

~~~
aserafini
Seconded, I _need_ this for German.

~~~
bananasbandanas
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](https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantisches_Primitivum)

~~~
dragonwriter
The theory of semantic primes is that they are universal, so (aside from using
an older or newer version of the list of primes, like the 14-prime or 65-prime
versions instead of the 60-prime version), you'd expect the list for any other
language to be equivalent to a translation of the list for whichever language
you encountered the list for first.

------
perfunctory
This reminded me of the minimalist constructed language Toki Pona. As the
author herself puts it - " It was my attempt to understand the meaning of life
in 120 words."

[https://tokipona.org/](https://tokipona.org/)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toki_Pona](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toki_Pona)

------
grooomk
Reminds me of the Natural Semantic Metalanguage approach in linguistics by
Anna Wierzbicka, Cliff Goddard and others. Nice to see, that there is actually
quite some overlap both in quantity as well as in the actual words.

~~~
david_ar
It's not a coincidence: [http://learnthesewordsfirst.com/about/research-
behind-the-di...](http://learnthesewordsfirst.com/about/research-behind-the-
dictionary.html)

------
harperlee
Just 60 words plus a huge context shared with the reader through living a
human life (so not a lot of hope of feeding this into an algorithm and having
it do anything resembling understanding).

Or perhaps with thorough explanations something like this could help bootstrap
understanding by a machine?

------
inetsee
This reminds me a little of "English Through Pictures" by Richards and Gibson,
and "English Made Easy" by Crighton and Koster. Both use images to provide
concrete examples for those words that can be illustrated visually.

------
crazygringo
It's conceptually interesting, but it also strikes me as a problem that
doesn't need solving.

Having worked with and taught foreign language, nobody learns the first 1,000
words of a language from a same-language dictionary, nor should they.

Children learn from the world; adults learn from classes or a translating
dictionary. (Only intermediate/advanced level learners start to use a native
dictionary.)

The idea of "bootstrapping" language knowledge from a single dictionary
just... isn't going to be necessary for anyone?

~~~
abecedarius
I didn't start from zero, but this children's dictionary of French in French
was useful to me learning it: [https://www.amazon.com/Mon-premier-
dictionnaire-Roger-Pillet...](https://www.amazon.com/Mon-premier-dictionnaire-
Roger-Pillet/dp/B0007DU07S)

All the words it uses are defined within it -- of course with some
circularity, but it's heavy on examples and pictures. It was intended for
nonnative children taking classes in a style more like native immersion than
is typical in schools. I wish more resources followed this philosophy.

------
kieckerjan
Tangential, I have always wondered why compact or pocket dictionaries (the
single language ones) contain the simplest words. If space if of the essence,
why not skip the words that everybody knows (like "table" or "shoe") and use
the saved space for difficult words? After all, those are the ones you are
likely to look up.

------
mrb
I suppose this answers
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19331307](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19331307)
"What's the minimum number of words you'd need to define all other words?"

------
kazinator
There is nothing wrong with circularity in dictionaries, though. This is a
solution in search of a problem.

It may be the case that the definition A happens to use some word B, in whose
definition we find word C, whose definition uses A. However, that isn't really
a problem, because these definitions are not simply substitutions of exactly
one word for another. The definition of A uses numerous other words other than
B, that of B uses words in addition to C, and C uses words in addition to A.

That is, the existence of cycles in definitions doesn't necessarily make the
definitions irresolvably circular.

------
dvh
ash =

When something burns and becomes many very small dry pieces that moving air
can cause to move.

Kind of tree.

------
taoromera
What about grammar? You need grammar to form the definitions so you need to
teach it at some point.

One approach would be to mix in grammar bits into the word flashcards. Like:

Flashcard 1: word 1 F 2: word 2 F 3: grammar bit 1 F 4: word 3 ...

You could use the grammar bits provided by English Profile based on the CEFR
(Common European Framework of Reference):
[https://www.englishprofile.org/english-grammar-
profile/egp-o...](https://www.englishprofile.org/english-grammar-profile/egp-
online)

------
bloak
Could someone add links to all the words in the definitions, linking to the
definitions of those words?

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.

------
leecarraher
i once solved a similar problem with set theoretic approach using matroid
theory and the greedy method for constructing a matroid basis using a
thesaurus as my independence oracle. This was over a decade ago, so I no
longer recall the results, but it certainly seems similar in the goal of
finding a primal set of words that can in some way define all others.

------
murat124
What a great way to learn a new language. Would pay for another language of
this.

------
waksana
this is great because: 1, I can review words by learning the next level 2, I
can use english immediately no matter which level I am at. because at any
level, I have the ability to explain anything

