> probably not at all what the reddit poster had in mind
I'm pretty confident the goal is to choose a smallest subset of English so that, if you know this subset of English and are given a dictionary written in it, you can learn the entire vocabulary of full English.
That means you're not allowed to create any new words, so you can't create the magic uber-word w.
> if there was a minimal set of (more than one!) words sufficient to define all other words (meanings) in a language, all natural languages would converge to about that number of words- which I really don't think is the case.
This amounts to saying there is little to no redundancy in language. I'm not convinced. For example, once you've got "one" and "plus", the words "two", "three", "four", etc. are just convenience. Another example might be opposites: if you have "down", you don't absolutely have to have "up". But the thing is, people really like convenient ways of saying things. In fact, the economics probably drive you toward doing this. It makes for shorter sentences think of it like data compression: if a concept occurs often, you want a dedicated word for it so you can just say that word instead of saying the definition.
Of course there are redundancy a lot comes from historical facts where due to conquests and other form of migrations one language has become influenced by several. As such you could say that English is not one but rather consists of 3 or four different languages.
So for English it would be rather easy to find this by looking up synonyms originating from France, Germany and even Scandinavia and of course latin.
>> That means you're not allowed to create any new words, so you can't create the magic uber-word w.
Oh- w can be an English word. And the reddit post didn't say anything about not inventing a new language, with only English words (it would be a new language since it would have completely different grammar and semantics).
But I think you're right that what I propose above is totally cheating :)
I'm pretty confident the goal is to choose a smallest subset of English so that, if you know this subset of English and are given a dictionary written in it, you can learn the entire vocabulary of full English.
That means you're not allowed to create any new words, so you can't create the magic uber-word w.
> if there was a minimal set of (more than one!) words sufficient to define all other words (meanings) in a language, all natural languages would converge to about that number of words- which I really don't think is the case.
This amounts to saying there is little to no redundancy in language. I'm not convinced. For example, once you've got "one" and "plus", the words "two", "three", "four", etc. are just convenience. Another example might be opposites: if you have "down", you don't absolutely have to have "up". But the thing is, people really like convenient ways of saying things. In fact, the economics probably drive you toward doing this. It makes for shorter sentences think of it like data compression: if a concept occurs often, you want a dedicated word for it so you can just say that word instead of saying the definition.