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by enderm 1646 days ago
I can see how this could work in English. I’m not sure if there are other languages in which 3/4 of a word carries more meaning. (I’m a primary English speaker, so this concern could be unfounded.)
2 comments

In many languages you have literally 3/4 of the word carry the meaning of the actual word and the remaining 1/4 sounds or letters devoted to grammatical markers for the gender/case/number/etc.

Using a classic Latin example from Monty Python, Romani ite domum / Romanes eunt domus;

the "Roman" part of of Romanes/Romani actually carries very much meaning and the -es/-i has information that's largely orthogonal to that.

All languages have something analogous to words in this way, although it can be hard to know where to draw the boundaries sometimes.

Technically the smallest indivisible unit that bears meaning is the morpheme, not the word. For example the word “cats” in English consists of two morphemes, cat+s. The first morpheme can stand on its own as a word, but the second can’t.

I agree, but I think the trickier part is that the semantics of words are even blurrier/more ambiguous than the syntax.
Yeah, hence the turn away from dictionary definitions and things like WordNet towards continuous distributional vector representations in NLP.

I don’t think you could really give an uncontroversial symbolic definition for any natural word.