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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
by skeoh 7y ago
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 7y agoI 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 7y agoTo 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 7y agoMake use of the right-hand rule, which will suffice so long as they're not made of antimatter.
- ISL 7y agoHow will they know we're not made of antimatter?
- benj111 7y agoAren't matter and antimatter a matter of perspective? If so haven't we just reintroduced the left/right problem.
- ISL 7y agoPrecisely.
- raldi 7y agoIf we're not sure both sides of the conversation are made of the same particles, the situation is hopeless.
- FreeFull 7y agoAs far as astronomers can tell, there is very little antimatter in the observable universe (If there was more, we'd see it anihilating with matter more).
- naturlich 7y agoThey didn't explode when we shook hands (/tentacles/general-graspy-bits)
- infogulch 7y agoGP 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. Every other physical interaction behaves identically left or right. So we have a few options to deal with our rotationally-challenged alien friends: 1. Hope they can parse far down enough into the dictionary to understand what CP is and either know it or can test it. 2. Communicate using a shared reference, like pointing out two quasars that rotate relative to each other. (Quasars are pretty good galactic reference points.) 3. As long as it doesn't affect giving directions, just don't worry about it, the physics works out the same. If we ever meet and they try to shake our left hand, well, they get their very own "oops I guess electrons are negative then" situation. "And that, kids, is why you always negate earth-radians before using them in a formula."
- raldi 7y agoI 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.
- yorwba 7y agoThat just shifts the problem to specifying the direction of the magnetic field, and you can't use the concept of left vs. right in that definition without creating a circular dependency.
- pbhjpbhj 7y agoVertically up it's just too a higher local gravitational potential, no? Sure, we flip right-left when we look at things upside down, but that's a nuanced usage.
- 7y ago
- dredmorbius 7y agoThe definition proposed doesn't differ strongly from 1913 Webster: Of or pertaining to that side of the body in man on which the muscular action is usually stronger than on the other side; -- opposed to left when used in reference to a part of the body; as, the right side, hand, arm. Also applied to the corresponding side of the lower animals. http://www.dict.org/bin/Dict?Form=Dict2&Database=*&Query=right http://www.dict.org/bin/Dict?Form=Dict2&Database=*&Query=rig...
- masklinn 7y agoThe actual dictionary definition uses the normal position of the heart instead (though it assumes no situs inversus): https://www.ldoceonline.com/dictionary/left https://www.ldoceonline.com/dictionary/left It links to definitions for some sub-concepts (e.g. containing or heart) but oddly enough not others (e.g. body), I'm guessing because body is part of the core 360 words.
- bladedtoys 7y agoI’d actually like to see a minimum set of _concepts_ necessary to communicate among humans then choose the language that best uses them. Such a list would be great to have for many reasons actually.
- thelazydogsback 7y agoFor a early super-minimal example, see: https://users.cs.cf.ac.uk/Dave.Marshall/AI2/node69.html https://users.cs.cf.ac.uk/Dave.Marshall/AI2/node69.html Later efforts (for attributed grammars, semantic networks, etc.) used many more primitives. Semantic primitive / "Interlingua" based formalisms never quite caught on for the most part, however. the <"X---" == left> and <"---X" == right> example is an example of an analogical representation -- these have sensorimotor/perceptual groundings and mimic how we actually learn some concepts, but although there has been some research in AI in utilizing analogical representations internally, it is not typical.
- fit2rule 7y agoI once had to describe left and right to my kids as they grew up, and the best [ * ] way to do that in my opinion is with this sentence: "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]
- psychoslave 7y agoCan you come with the Arabic translation, please? (-:
- fit2rule 7y agoاليمين على هذا الجانب من الجملة ، وفي نهايته هو اليسار.