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Hacker News Hacker NewsI guess we'll have to disagree then, because "boiling water" is "water that's boiling" to me. It's not a different state of matter to "water", that would be "steam". It being a hazard doesn't mean it's a singular concept, same as "wet floor"
Also the slider examples are abysmal. "I love you", "Go home" and "How are you" are not words by any stretch of imagination. For someone who makes word games, I don't see a particularly deep love of words here.
Edit: Obligatory reference to Borges's Tlön: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tl%C3%B6n,_Uqbar,_Orbis_Tertiu...
And some of the entries on this list are wrong. "Good night" exists in OED as "goodnight" [1] because there are multiple ways it's used. One is the clausal phrase "I hope you have a good night", which can be modified by changing the adjective, e.g. "great night" or "terrible night". "Goodnight" the bedtime ritual can't be modified the same way, so OED chooses to write it as a compound word without spaces.
I would hope that none of those examples were taking up space in a dictionary.
On languages other than English: in general, different languages do word division very differently. At least in German and Dutch, many of those phrasal verbs are separable, meaning that they are one word in the infinitive but are multiple words in the present tense. So for example, where in English you would say "I log in to the website", in Dutch it would be "Ik log in op de website". "Log in" is two words in both cases, but in Dutch it's the separated form of the single-word separable verb inloggen ("I must log in now" = "Ik moet nu inloggen"). The verb is indeed separable in that the two words often don't end up next to each other: "I log in quickly" = "Ik log snel in".
Dutch, like German, has lots of compounds. But there are also agglutinative languages, which have even more complex compound words, perhaps comprising a whole sentence in another language. Eg (from Wikipedia) Turkish "evlerinizdenmiş" = "(he/she/it) was (apparently/said to be) from your houses" or Plains Cree "paehtāwāēwesew" = "he is heard by higher powers"; and these aren't corner cases, that's how the language works.
(1) Who counted those? Whence those numbers?
(2) The examples are normal two-word phrases with one word modifying the other, often categorised as an adjective. The examples are counter-examples to the very claim made in that article.
(3) Using Clause to brainstorm s.t. is a weird thing to say...
(4) I would say the use of 'lexicalized' is wrong or at least uncommon. It usually refers to specialised semantics of something that could be interpreted generically, too. Like 'sleeping bag'. Or indeed 'cold feet'. Lexicalisation may involve deleting spaces, like 'hotdog'. And I am pretty sure lexicalised phrasal words are usually intensionally listed in dictionaries. And so 'ice' is not lexicalised 'frozen water', but it is not overtly a phrase but is a separate atomic word.
=> I don't get the point.
Collocation dictionaries are lists of collocations. The reason they're absent from single word dictionaries is because there's about 25x more collocations than single words.
My favorite adjective he's coördinated is "burntwing", used to describe moths spiraling downwards after passing through candleflames. If I had crafted such a descriptive contraction, my former styling would've been "burnt-wing", had I even been capable of generating such concise imagery [1].
McCarthy's stylings have helped me to reduce hyphenations in my own writings — reducing their usage mainly to contractedwords which might be all-too-confusing without them.
[0] pg104 has ten words that I do not know their definitions, yet through context they work to advance the storyline of character racists (book is set in 1950s).
[1] decades ago, during college burnout, I was searching for the essense of "burntwing" — reduced to writing a professor about "feeling like a burning airplane in tailspin." My trajectory back then was definitely burntwing.
Wiktionary doesn't need to make that distinction between MWEs and Idioms and tends to conflate MWEs and Idioms as there is no separate "Wikidiom". Arguably, that multi-book confusion runs deep on the internet because Urban Dictionary should probably be fully titled the Urban Dictionary of Idioms and Slang.
It's not just page limits but also categorical limits and classic lexicographers would build multiple books/volumes, not just settle on one "dictionary". Classic scholars would often have a "reference shelf" with multiple dictionaries, books of idioms, thesauri, and more. The CD-ROM and then the internet has kind of tunnel visioned that this entire shelf can be merely "one app".
We act as if some languages have "compound words" that can encompass entire sentences (subject & object attaching to the verb as prefixes or suffixes) while others don't form compounds, and most are somewhere in between. But these are all statements about lexicographic conventions and say nothing about the languages. In reality all languages are muddles sprawling across a multidimensional continuum, and they abso-frigging-lutely do n't sit neatly in such pigeonholes.
I think maybe the word the author is looking for is 'phrase'
[1] I wonder how many here have ever been told something like "Prithee, husband, bring back a dozen canned goods from the market, for in the meanwhile I shall do my household chores".
To me, any discussion of this topic that doesn't mention collocations signals an amateurish approach.
I also disagree with the premise that "this was not possible before LLM." That's nonsense. Linguists created many dictionaries of collocations for different languages, so that work is precisely what they did!
(Before any LLM zealots attack me, yes, it is now possible to have a more exhaustive list of collocations thanks to LLMs. This doesn't contradict my point.)
Examples of collocation dictionaries:
It's pretty obvious "boiling water" shouldn't be in the dictionary to be begin with but "boiling" and "water" should be.
Unless I'm just not understanding it
Fiskemat Fiskmat
The latter means food made from fish, the former means food for fish. Standard varieties of Norwegian only use the former to mean both, to the annoyance of many old fishermen.
This maybe illustrates why the author's examples such as boiling water aren't so weird. Yes, in English it means water that's boiling, but you have to know that. It could for instance have meant water for boiling, like "cooling water" means water for cooling say in a nuclear reactor, not water which is in the process of getting cool.
English: cream of mushroom soup
Spanisch: sopa cremosa de champiñones
German: Champignoncremesuppe
I could, however be convinced these could be documented/defined in a separate document, especially from the perspective you are coming from (word games).
"Words" don't have "spaces."
Phrases are made of words separated by spaces.
"Boiling Water" is not a word.
"Water" is a word. A noun, the subject.
"Boiling" is a word. An adjective, in this case. Which modifies the subject.
I don't know if you're trying to be clever, but you're not.
Entschädigungsleistungen - compensation benefits
Wiederbeschaffungskosten - replacement value
Kraftfahrzeughaftpflichtversicherung - motor vehicle liability insurance
Donaudampfschifffahrtsgesellschaftskapitän - Danube steamboat captain
Rindfleischetikettierungsüberwachungsaufgabenübertragungsgesetz - beef labeling regulation law
Well I can't even.
Roovleisslaghuisinspekteur =
Rooi = red
Vleis = meat
Slag = butcher
Huis = house
Inspekteur = inspector
"Inspector who controls the quality of red meat in butcheries"
> Got a word Didn’t
> frozen water → ice boiling water
It's just part of how language works that when there isn't a single word carrying the meaning you want, you put multiple words together and they can mean the thing together.
Even though there isn't a specific word for that, I wouldn't say "It's just part of how language works that when there isn't a single word carrying the meaning you want, you put multiple words together and they can mean the thing together" actually is one big word with spaces in it.
It's a bunch of words together that carry a more specific meaning when put together in that order.
Water: transparent, odorless, tasteless liquid
Boiling: having reached the boiling point
Boiling Water: transparent, odorless, tasteless liquid which has reached the boiling point
If Boiling Water had some other completely different meaning that has nothing to do with the individual words then sure, maybe, otherwise this is completely redundant and opinionated.
> “If you speak slowly, you pause very briefly after each word. Thatʼs why we leave a space in those places when we write. Like this: How. Many. Years. Old. Are. You?” He wrote on his paper as he spoke, leaving a space every time he paused: Anyom a ou kuma a me?
> “But you speak slowly because youʼre a foreigner. Iʼm Tiv, so I donʼt pause when I speak. Shouldnʼt my writing be the same?”
"I used to smoke marijuana. But I’ll tell you something: I would only smoke it in the late evening. Oh, occasionally the early evening, but usually the late evening -- or the mid evening. Just the early evening, mid evening and late evening. Occasionally, early afternoon, early midafternoon, or perhaps the late-midafternoon. Oh, sometimes the early-mid-late-early morning... But never at dusk." -Steve Martin