Translating the article Entropy, and Short Codes, there is a part where Eliezer writes about how words for categories are created, and (if I understand that correctly) the most frequently used categories are likely to get the shortest words.
The specific examples are: “furniture”, “chair”, “recliner”. The shortest one is “chair”, because that one is most frequently used in speech. Word “recliner” is too specific, it refers to a rare set of objects, so people will use it rarely. On the other hand, “furniture” is too general; people will usually want to be more specific than that, so people will use this word also rarely.
Unfortunately, this example does not work completely well in Slovak translation. I am curious about other languages. Please give me examples, and also the number of syllables (which is sometimes not completely obvious for those who don’t speak the language). Use the same order of words (from most general to most narrow) as in the English example. Here are the data I already have:
Furniture is countable in Danish, so the word I wrote means “piece of furniture”.
It’s actually really weird that furniture is uncountable in English. Most other uncountable nouns make sense—you can’t really count how many milks you have. I wonder how it came to be that something so tangible is uncountable in English?
Translating the article Entropy, and Short Codes, there is a part where Eliezer writes about how words for categories are created, and (if I understand that correctly) the most frequently used categories are likely to get the shortest words.
The specific examples are: “furniture”, “chair”, “recliner”. The shortest one is “chair”, because that one is most frequently used in speech. Word “recliner” is too specific, it refers to a rare set of objects, so people will use it rarely. On the other hand, “furniture” is too general; people will usually want to be more specific than that, so people will use this word also rarely.
Unfortunately, this example does not work completely well in Slovak translation. I am curious about other languages. Please give me examples, and also the number of syllables (which is sometimes not completely obvious for those who don’t speak the language). Use the same order of words (from most general to most narrow) as in the English example. Here are the data I already have:
English: furniture (3), chair (1), recliner (3)
Slovak: nábytok (3), stolička (3), sklápacie kreslo (5)
Danish: møbel (2), stol (1), lænestol (3)
Furniture is countable in Danish, so the word I wrote means “piece of furniture”.
It’s actually really weird that furniture is uncountable in English. Most other uncountable nouns make sense—you can’t really count how many milks you have. I wonder how it came to be that something so tangible is uncountable in English?
It’s not unusual for category nouns to be uncountable precisely because they are category nouns. For example, “clothing”, “food”, “cutlery”, etc.
It’s probably uncountable in English because the original meaning was the “act of furnishing.”
and yet the closely related word “furnishings” is always plural.
Hebrew: רהיט s(2), כסא s(2), כורסה s(2 - closer to “armchair”)
Russian: мебель (2), стул (1), кресло (2 - closer to “armchair”)
Notes:
Modern Hebrew was strongly affected by its artificial revival due to Eliezer Ben-Yehuda so it might violate “evolutionary” laws.
The Hebrew word for “furniture” I wrote is singular i.e. corresponds to “a piece of furniture” in English. Plural is רהיטים which has 3 syllables.
In both languages I don’t know a word for “recliner” as opposed to “armchair”. It is probably possible to use some 2 word combination like in Slovak.
German: Möbel (2) Stuhl (1) Liege (2)
Spanish: mobiliario (4), silla (2), silla reclinable (6)