5 ms·
This is nonsense. It's like saying "sun" is the most succinct word, meaning "Giant ball of fusing plasma situated approximately 149 million km from earth that a
by hgomersall 4y ago
This is nonsense. It's like saying "sun" is the most succinct word, meaning "Giant ball of fusing plasma situated approximately 149 million km from earth that acts as the centre of the solar system and around which the earth orbits". Of course, if you have no word for a concept, you need to describe it, but all words are like that. Try translating "quantum electrodynamics" into the Yaghan language. In practice what happens is the foreign word gets adopted to represent the concept.
- teddyh 4y ago“Hill. Yes, that was it. But it is a hasty word for a thing that has stood here ever since this part of the world was shaped.” — Treebeard, The Lord of the Rings
- chongli 4y agoUniverse. All other ideas, all concepts, all physical things, all of it is contained within the universe. Clearly universe is the most succinct word.
- teddyh 4y agoMultiverse.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- bmicraft 4y agoI think the point here is that this word can be understood by a speaker of that language who didnt't know it prior to hearing it. It is succinct in that it is a description of itself, in a single word.
- tambourine_man 4y agoIt's the concept that's interesting, more important than its succinctness, IMO.
- some_random 4y agoIt's also quite anglocentric, I'm sure it would be quite difficult to translate the word "sext" into latin or navajo and would also result in a long, complicated explanation.
- BoppreH 4y agoThat's a fun problem, here's a half scientific way to solve it: given a dictionary for every pair of languages, the "most succinct word" is the one with the longest definition in other languages. Technical terms like "quantum electrodynamics" are usually imported with minimal changes, and if you ignore foreign words you'll see a lot of languages more or less disappear (cough english cough). My guess is that the most succinct words by this definition would be very specific to a culture, like "fourth amendment" or "Purim Torah".