I think the disparity in number of words is proportionally so large that this method won’t work. The (small) hypothetical set of dolphin words wouldn’t match to a small subset of English words, because what’s being matched is really the (embedded) structure of the relationship between the words, and any sufficiently small subset of English words loses most of its interesting structure because its ‘real’ structure relates it to many words outside that subset.
Support that dolphins (hypothetically! counterfactually! not realistically!) use only 10 words to talk about fish, but humans use 100 words to do the same. I expect you can’t match the relationship structure of the 10 dolphin words to the much more complex structure of the 100 human words. But no subset of ~10 English words out of the 100 is a meaningful subset that humans could use to talk about fish.
I think the disparity in number of words is proportionally so large that this method won’t work. The (small) hypothetical set of dolphin words wouldn’t match to a small subset of English words, because what’s being matched is really the (embedded) structure of the relationship between the words, and any sufficiently small subset of English words loses most of its interesting structure because its ‘real’ structure relates it to many words outside that subset.
Support that dolphins (hypothetically! counterfactually! not realistically!) use only 10 words to talk about fish, but humans use 100 words to do the same. I expect you can’t match the relationship structure of the 10 dolphin words to the much more complex structure of the 100 human words. But no subset of ~10 English words out of the 100 is a meaningful subset that humans could use to talk about fish.
Thanks, I found that explanation very helpful.