Firstly, apologies for neglecting the forum. I've had one or two other things to concentrate on, but hopefully the Lyn has been able to maintain order.

In a previous thread (which for the life of me I can't find) someone stated that any new words created for a new language should be able to be described using "irreducible" words. I don't know if that's the correct technical word, but it basically means that a word should be able to be described by words that themselves don't need any further explanation. Any "reducible" word should be able to be broken down into irreducible words.

For example:
milkman = person who delivers milk
deliver = to carry and give (something)
milk = white liquid

person . carry . give . white . liquid

As you can see, the exact meaning of any given word can be difficult to realise. Therefore, I'm proposing a kind of game:

Give a word, any English word, and try to break it down into it's component meanings, ending up with a list of irreducible words. Lay it out as above, with non-defining words in size=9 and a list of the resulting irreducible words beneath.

In fact, for the fun-factor... Prepare the layout as above but only give the irreducible words, then we have to try and guess the original word! Yes, that's more fun.

It doesn't have to be done in any order or anything. You don't need to guess one before you can post one. Just everyone go nuts!

Hopefully, we should be able to develop a kind of dictionary of irreducible words.

And.... GO!!

OK, let's try.

human . move (stuff . make grow . descendant . cattle) to (building . live . human)

Or for disciples of E-o: bovid-egigaĵ-alloĝej-movulo




I have no idea if this is grammatically correct or even understandable, but I hope you were able to guess that this is our milkman again.
The problem is that you are able to split every term into (or let's better say "describe every term with") an unlimited number of other words. You won't find any elementary/irreducible words. For example, the word "liquid" could be described as "runny matter" and "runny" in turn as "liquid-like". This would lead to "liquid-like matter", "liquid-like matter-like matter" and so on (I'm not sure if a construct like this is possible in English, but I hope you get my point). The best you can hope for are simple words, not irreducible ones, in my opinion. But this definition of "simple" is totally arbitrary of course.

But anyway, let's have some fun .

plant . descendant . container . piece . mixture

(I'm not quite sure that it's sensible to present the words without logical connection, but it should work fine in this case )

Fruit salad?

Strangely, a few different things came to mind from those words, including pot pourri, mixed nuts and birdseed Looking closely at the words, though, I'm pretty sure that's what it is.

I appreciate your point, and you're right of course. Simple words is what I meant, but at some point they can't get any simpler, so in a sense they're irreducible. If you try to 'reduce' them too much you end up with an overly-complicated explanation. Part of the challenge is to get the perfect 'simple words' to accurately describe the word in the simplest terms possible.

Words like 'human/person', 'move', 'container', 'piece', 'mixture', 'liquid', and even 'stuff' are very useful building blocks which are common to lots of different words and concepts. It's difficult to explain what I mean, but if you can see what kind of conceptual 'blocks' make up a word, you can better understand the word itself, and perhaps find new ways of representing it in text.

I say 'word' because we're working with words, but I actually mean the concept behind the word. Again, this is difficult to explain, but consider our milkman. If we were to agree that milkman = person + deliver + milk (for argument's sake), then that can be translated directly to the Spanish lechero = persona + entregar + leche The literal words aren't the point, it's the meaning that matters. That's partly why I grouped human and person together above, because, in this context, they have the same meaning.

*sighs* I have no idea whether I'm even explaining it very well. Hopefully, you understand.

The good thing about this is that it should get us thinking about what the words actually mean. For example, I put milk as white liquid because I couldn't think of anything else, but Steli included concepts of cows and offspring. Which of these is contained in the concept of milk is, I guess, up for debate. But that's the fun of it.

By the way, feel free to 'update' others' words

Yes, fruit salad is what I had in mind.

I think I understand what you mean. It's indeed really hard to find a suitable term. I think both of us have a more or less clear image of what is meant, but to actually define what characterizes such a "building block" and what "simple" really means is difficult.

A good indicator for simplicity is perhaps the number of words you need to explain the concept thoroughly. The more words you use the simpler is the term.

A milkman can be easily described as "a person who delivers milk".
To explain the term "person" you would need a lot more words and people would probably be arguing if they are the right ones to describe the essence of "person" properly. The same is true for "milk". Describing milk as "white liquid" is not really sufficient. A white liquid could be a lot of things, not only the secretion mammals ( or cattle in this case) use to nourish their offspring.
As a rule of thumb we should consider a word irreducible (for practical purposes) if an attempt to explain it, either leads to a Leonard-of-Quirm-term or a loss of information.

PS tooth . heal . person . help . person