[Animats]

The 60 words:

to see, saw, seen. thing, something, what. this, these. the other, another, else, is the same as, be, am, are, being, was, were. one of. two of. person, people. many of, much of. inside. not, do not, does not, did not, some of. all of. there is, there are. more than, live, alive. big. small. very, kind of. if, then. touch. far from. near to, in a place, someplace, where. above. on a side of, hear, heard. say to, said about. word. true.

[raldi]

How would you define left and right based on these words?

[skeoh]

From 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]

I 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]

To 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]

Make use of the right-hand rule, which will suffice so long as they're not made of antimatter.

[infogulch]

GP 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."

[ISL]

How will they know we're not made of antimatter?

[dredmorbius]

The 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=rig...

[bladedtoys]

I’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]

For a early super-minimal example, see: 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.

[masklinn]

The actual dictionary definition uses the normal position of the heart instead (though it assumes no situs inversus): 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.

[fit2rule]

I 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]

Can you come with the Arabic translation, please? (-:

[fit2rule]

اليمين على هذا الجانب من الجملة ، وفي نهايته هو اليسار.

[freyr]

The dictionary starts with those 60 words, like axioms in mathematics. Then it builds up a vocabulary on top of them.

Left is defined this way: [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.

So "on a side of", "people", "be/is", are included in those first 60 words. "body", "write", "hand", etc. are defined after the first 60 words, but before "right" and "left".

[raldi]

Sure, but "go ask a bunch of people which hand they write with" seems like a huge copout to me.

It's like if prime numbers were defined as, "The numbers most mathematicians say are prime."

[probably_wrong]

The main point for me is that you don't only need a good definition of left (/right), but you also need to keep your audience in mind.

If you ask me "what type of person doesn't know what 'left' means", my answer would be "either a child or a foreigner who just started learning the language". For that audience, even saying "the side where your heart is" (like some other comment suggests) would require knowing what "heart" means, which might not be a good assumption for this specific audience.

[underyx]

So how would you propose to explain which side is which?

[tftplayer]

Use an asymmetry of the human body. Left is on the same side as your heart.

[Freak_NL]

Which is again, only most of time (cf: dextrocardia).

Not as common as left-handedness (one in ten), but still in the order of one in ten thousand people.

[pmalynin]

Your heart is squarely in the middle. You feel the heart beat on the left because the ventricle is larger.

[8bitsrule]

Left: Face the noon sun. Lift one arm to point at where it was first seen this morning.

Edit: works where I live. YMMV. Adapt as needed (which I thought about saying but decided wasn't needed here.)

[dragonwriter]

> Left: Face the noon sun. Lift one arm to point at where it was first seen this morning.

That...fails to be generally accurate pretty badly.

[mirekrusin]

lesson 12 covers left/right (360 words).

[naikrovek]

Why don't you follow the link and find out?

[raldi]

I asked because I followed the link and couldn't figure it out. I couldn't even find the list of 60 words, and clearly I'm not alone as evidenced by the fact that the top of this thread is the top-ranked comment.

Also, please reread https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

[pushpop]

That’s an about page. If you go to the home page then you can see those words:

http://learnthesewordsfirst.com/

The site isn’t the prettiest nor most logically laid out but the link to the words themselves was pretty clearly labelled (in my opinion).

[bloak]

One of those words is not a word in British English.

(Why do I mention that? Firstly, perhaps it's a fun puzzle for non-native speakers of American English to identify the word. Secondly, it's surprising that a difference between British and US English is apparent in such a short list of such basic words, considering that sometimes it's possible to write whole paragraphs of English without it being apparent which variety of English is being used.)

[mrob]

That word is informal even in American English. It's less common in British English, but it's growing in popularity in both versions, and I wouldn't call it "not a word" even in British English. But I disagree with its inclusion in a first lesson, because its main use over the more common standard alternative (rot13: "fbzrjurer") is signaling casual speech.

Google Ngram Viewer lets you compare popularity of words in British vs. American English, so it's useful for investigating this.

https://books.google.com/ngrams

[spicerguy]

British English speaker here - I'm having difficulty identifying the word you're referring to here. Or are you referring more to definition and statistical presence in common usage?

[mcbits]

Since "gotten" isn't in the list, I'm going with "someplace". It even seems unusual to me as an American, as I would write either "some place" or "somewhere". If the phrase is also unusual in British English, that's definitely something I had never noticed.

[bmn__]

https://www.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/definition/englis...

[quietbritishjim]

Is "gotten" the only word that exists in American English but not British English (apart from "someplace")? Your comment strikes me as trying to bring up a pet hate in an unrelated conversation.

[mcbits]

I'm sure it's not the only one, but it's the one that immediately came to mind. I thought it might be in the list because it's close to a foundational word in American English.

Sorry that you chose to read my comment as hatred. Yeah, that's not a real apology.

[spicerguy]

Thank you. Appreciated.

[pbhjpbhj]

I know the word you mean (no spoiler tag, so I won't say it, just 'it could almost be German' {to use a linguistic stereotype}) but I wouldn't recognise it as _not_ en-gb, just unusual.

I'm en-gb native.

[vivekf]

I would say 'much of'. I haven't seen it until I visited Americas.

[flukus]

I'd love to see if there's an interesting relationship between these words and the PIE language (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proto-Indo-European_language)

[dspig]

I guess not, as this is optimized for defining words, not communicating