A AI etymology deconstructor – can guess fake words(deconstructor.ayush.digital) |
A AI etymology deconstructor – can guess fake words(deconstructor.ayush.digital) |
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 means (as long as you don't misread it), and IMHO it's perfectly fine to derive its etymology by deconstructing it back to "common" words and pulling etymology on those, recursively.
One person inventing a word that they have never heard before doesn't negate the possibility of that word being in common use somewhere.
https://books.google.ca/books/about/Arboreality.html?id=S95Y...
"An expansion of the 2020 Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award winning story. Arboreality is a finalist for the Philip K. Dick Award and the winner of the 2023 Ursula K. Le Guin Prize for Fiction."
I don't even know what a fake word is.
https://deconstructor.ayush.digital/w/flonkers
"Flonkers: A made-up word, likely humorous". Aren't all words made up? Edit: This one, unlike my previous example, is actually in use - flonkers: an animal that looks fat but is actually just fluffy.
At least it did say "slartibartfast" was a fictional character.
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
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.
Maybe I'm coloured by having spent half a decade of my life on a linguistics degree, though.
- phonenose: The ability to detect sounds or voices through the nose
- legpc: Acronym for Laptop Easy Personal Computer
- gitls: A command in Git to list files
- housefreezing: The action of hardening a house with cold
- uncleftish beholding[2]: The act of viewing something that is whole
In any case it's fun to play with and the UI is nice too.
Note, the title looks editorialized, it's currently "A AI etymology deconstructor – can guess fake words", but the website says just "deconstructor.".
https://deconstructor.ayush.digital/w/Deundehydrate
"to reverse the process of reversing the removal of water"
There is clearly no such word, but a human would probably infer such a meaning.
I'm amazed at how unamazed we all seem to have become at such feats. We need more deunnamazing
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.
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.
"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...
In other words, a false etymology constructor, not an etymology deconstructor :)
Words always end up getting broken with speech in a different way to the meaning.
Eg I put in pandemonium which you say as pande-moniun but I just learned is pan-demon-ium which makes a lot more sense!
Very cool. Well done.
Yeah, no. I tried the same word five times to test for inconsistencies. I don’t appreciate you weren’t straightforward with the limits and am not going to give you my email to “continue my language journey”. The fact you’re already using euphemisms like that makes me strongly distrust what you’d do with an email address.
I find the connections it draws amusing. Since I'm not the inventor of the word "refuggle," I can't say that I know its etymology or how it relates to "refugee." But I guess this is one weakness of LLMs: they're bad at admitting they don't have an answer.
Etymology is probably the subfield of the humanities that provides the closest thing we get to testable hypotheses and laws. This is just mashing shit together.
It also seems to have a tendency to just mash semantics together. As though having something resembling "pig" and something resembling "full" means "full AND piggish". But that's not how plain juxtaposition works in Germanic: it's specification, not conjunction. So "pigful" would mean a type of full, full of pigs. (This is language specific, by the way; as I recall in Vietnamese "mother-father" is the normal word for parents - but in Danish it means grandfather, your mother's father.)
I'm sure I could get WhateverGPT to hallucinate something that looks like those drawings chemists make of molecules to most laypeople. That would be about as interesting as this is.
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.
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.
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.
Language is a tool. People will use their language for what they need it for. If there isn't a word they'll make one up or steal it. This is absolutely universal. I know you can dig up any number of texts that say English is special, but they're all wrong.
"Languages differ not in what they can express, but in what they must express" as Roman Jakobson phrased it. (The "must express" refers to grammar - in some languages you need a subject, or to know the time something happened, or in which direction[0] it happened. Other languages don't care, but you can add that information if you need it.)
[0] E.g. Mam, spoken in Guatemala, marks all verbs for direction, even if they're abstract, then you add one based on convention or metaphor or maybe taste.
Still, I want to thank you for the polite and reasoned replies. I wish we were having this conversation in person, I’m confident it would’ve been interesting.
It is my impression that introducing such ad-hoc words in English is something people wouldn't bat an eye on, while in other languages/cultures I'm familiar with, it'd be something Serious that you probably shouldn't do unless absolutely necessary.