7 ms·
A AI etymology deconstructor – can guess fake words
- tsuru 2y agoIt did not like supercalifragilisticexpialidocious
- InsideOutSanta 2y agoI had the same idea, and it concluded that it meant "fantastic," which seems correct.
- Timwi 2y agoVery cool to use initially, but then completely locks you out with a modal in your face demanding an email address. That is despicable and you should be ashamed.
- fliglr 2y agoI'll no longer misunderestimate AI
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- novemp 2y ago"Can guess fake words"? It told me "shitbutt" was a real word.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- msds 2y agoIt doesn't really detect stringing together latinate nonsense, so all of my coinages got perfectly coherent definitions. On the flip side, I guess if you're erudite and willing to butcher other languages for sport, nothing has ever stopped you from making up perfectly quasiaryiumaryesque words.
- ithkuil 2y agoI tried a nonsensical: https://deconstructor.ayush.digital/w/Deundehydrate https://deconstructor.ayush.digital/w/Deundehydrate "to reverse the process of reversing the removal of water" There is clearly no such word, but a human would probably infer such a meaning. I'm amazed at how unamazed we all seem to have become at such feats. We need more deunnamazing
- Fission 2y agoThis is fun, but what I think would be even more interesting and potentially actually useful would be to generate a word from multiple ideas — to help express complex ideas in one word. Like Frühstücksbrotübersättigung
- fcatalan 2y agoYou can just prompt for it: "KI-Philologenstaunverunsicherung" Breaking it down: KI – (Künstliche Intelligenz, Artificial Intelligence) Philologen – (Philologists, scholars of language and linguistics) Staun – (from staunen, to marvel or be astonished) Verunsicherung – (a sense of uncertainty or unease) https://chatgpt.com/share/67d80661-4bb4-8012-9328-77d56af52b51 https://chatgpt.com/share/67d80661-4bb4-8012-9328-77d56af52b...
- thih9 2y agoWhen I asked it to deconstruct "Babbage"[1] I got "Derived from Babba's place", Some others: - phonenose: The ability to detect sounds or voices through the nose - legpc: Acronym for Laptop Easy Personal Computer - gitls: A command in Git to list files - housefreezing: The action of hardening a house with cold - uncleftish beholding[2]: The act of viewing something that is whole In any case it's fun to play with and the UI is nice too. Note, the title looks editorialized, it's currently "A AI etymology deconstructor – can guess fake words", but the website says just "deconstructor.". [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Babbage https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Babbage [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncleftish_Beholding https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncleftish_Beholding
- rvense 2y agoFyllipig is derived from "fyllan" and "pigge" and means "descriptive of something that is both full/abundant and pig-like." Terryjambled means "mixed up in a confused or disorderly state, and covered with or resembling terry cloth." Refugglemander means to "to manipulate electoral district boundaries in a way that impacts refugees." I'm sorry, OP. This just isn't very good.
- stavros 2y agoWhat etymologies would you have expected instead?
- InsideOutSanta 2y agoIt's funny; I'm looking at your examples and coming to the opposite conclusion. I feel like it is very good because it provides explanations for unusual or novel words that are similar to what a human might conclude.
- rvense 2y agoEtymology is a science. This is random guesswork, and it's not even very precise (deriving refuggle from refugee is definitely objectively wrong). Maybe I'm coloured by having spent half a decade of my life on a linguistics degree, though.
- InsideOutSanta 2y agoWould you expect that it would point out that "refuggle" is not a word with any documented usage rather than drawing a strenuous connection to a slightly similar word? I find the connections it draws amusing. Since I'm not the inventor of the word "refuggle," I can't say that I know its etymology or how it relates to "refugee." But I guess this is one weakness of LLMs: they're bad at admitting they don't have an answer.
- rvense 2y agoWe know alot about how English has evolved. Word forms develop along certain paths, sound changes follow laws that linguists have described, and the "fuuuug" in refugee does not become "fugg". Etymology is probably the subfield of the humanities that provides the closest thing we get to testable hypotheses and laws. This is just mashing shit together. It also seems to have a tendency to just mash semantics together. As though having something resembling "pig" and something resembling "full" means "full AND piggish". But that's not how plain juxtaposition works in Germanic: it's specification, not conjunction. So "pigful" would mean a type of full, full of pigs. (This is language specific, by the way; as I recall in Vietnamese "mother-father" is the normal word for parents - but in Danish it means grandfather, your mother's father.) I'm sure I could get WhateverGPT to hallucinate something that looks like those drawings chemists make of molecules to most laypeople. That would be about as interesting as this is.
- ohlookcake 2y agoI think that by "can guess fake words" in the title OP means that the tool can come up with a plausible guess for the etymology, even for fake words. Unfortunately, the more common reading of that phrase is that it can tell fake words from real ones
- andrelaszlo 2y agoAgree. It does a good job at coming up with a plausible meaning of novel words like "multiarborality" → "the state of relating to many trees" but it doesn't indicate that this is a "fake" word even though I just made it up.
- stavros 2y agoIf you had used that word in a sentence, eg "what I like about this park is its multiarborality", I would have immediately understood what you meant.
- sandworm101 2y ago>> even though I just made it up One person inventing a word that they have never heard before doesn't negate the possibility of that word being in common use somewhere. https://books.google.ca/books/about/Arboreality.html?id=S95YzwEACAAJ&redir_esc=y https://books.google.ca/books/about/Arboreality.html?id=S95Y... "An expansion of the 2020 Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award winning story. Arboreality is a finalist for the Philip K. Dick Award and the winner of the 2023 Ursula K. Le Guin Prize for Fiction."
- TeMPOraL 2y agoDoesn't look fake to me. English is not a closed-world language, as far as I know. Between things like "verbing" and "nouning", and the cultural acceptance of doing them in casual speech, I'd say English is a great language because you get to "invent" new words on the fly, and your interlocutors know what you mean. In this sense, even if no one before ever said or wrote "multiarborality", it's pretty clear what it means (as long as you don't misread it), and IMHO it's perfectly fine to derive its etymology by deconstructing it back to "common" words and pulling etymology on those, recursively.
- jonplackett 2y agoI love this kind of thing. It’s weird how many words we use without having any idea what they mean. Words always end up getting broken with speech in a different way to the meaning. Eg I put in pandemonium which you say as pande-moniun but I just learned is pan-demon-ium which makes a lot more sense! Very cool. Well done.
- youdont 2y agoIt really struggled with Antidisestablishmentarianism
- kleiba 2y agoIt actually knows about "Lisa the Iconoclast". Cool.
- Oarch 2y agoIt's a perfectly cromulent tool
- madcaptenor 2y agoI was hoping it wouldn't. It does seem to give a reasonable etymology for "embiggen", though.
- Oarch 2y agoI'd often casually wondered where the word scaffolding comes from. Its explanation seems sort of plausible.
- latexr 2y ago> You've deconstructed 5 words! Enter your email to continue your language journey and get notified about new features. Yeah, no. I tried the same word five times to test for inconsistencies. I don’t appreciate you weren’t straightforward with the limits and am not going to give you my email to “continue my language journey”. The fact you’re already using euphemisms like that makes me strongly distrust what you’d do with an email address.
- forty 2y agoFor real words, better check Wikipedia. It's much more informative (compare for "dragon" : https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/dragon https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/dragon )
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- dkdbejwi383 2y agowhat is a "fake word"? New terminology is coined all the time. It's one of the fundamentals of how language works.
- moebrowne 2y agoI think they mean never before seen words aka made up words like "antecarburetorism" https://deconstructor.ayush.digital/w/antecarburetorism https://deconstructor.ayush.digital/w/antecarburetorism
- zimpenfish 2y agoI asked it about "ocelot". It said it was "tlatlauelolotl" which comes from the Nahautl for "tlatl" (field), "lauel" (unknown), and "olotl" (jaguar). Except according to [0], "tlatllauelolotl" doesn't exist (and neither does "lauel" - the search results for "tlatl" and "olotl" aren't in English which means I can't judge their validity.) There's "tlacoocelotl"[1] which seems to be the actual word for "ocelot" ("semi-jaguar"). 0/10 for the AI there. [0] https://nahuatl.wired-humanities.org/ https://nahuatl.wired-humanities.org/ [1] https://nahuatl.wired-humanities.org/content/tlacoocelotl https://nahuatl.wired-humanities.org/content/tlacoocelotl
- muzani 2y agoI wish you could pick a language. Bahasa has a ton of dialects + txt, which make it difficult to guess sometimes. Like "gua" in the dictionary means cave but in some dialects it's an informal "I". Sometimes it gets shortened to the phonetic "gue", sometimes "gu" which is similar to "aku" shortened to "ku", which is another form of "I". Really we have like 7 different ways to say informal "I". I think the tool guesses it as Chinese. Malaysian tends to remove affixes when shortened, while Indonesian removes vowels but keeps the affixes, so something like "come here quickly" might be shortened to "come quick" or "here2 qkly". Less etymology, more about encoding.
- renewiltord 2y agoSomething I find interesting on the internet is the number of times an LLM can decode a human’s intent better than other humans. Claude 3.7 Sonnet also makes the common misinterpretation here that “can guess fake words” means “can detect words that don’t have an established meaning” rather than “can guess an etymology for words that don’t have an established meaning” but I gave it the chance to try a word on the tool and interpret the title and it successfully did. This is interesting because it may eventually become the case that we should interpret other human texts through an LLM because it is better at understanding than many of us are. My prompt, in case you are curious: > I came across a HN story titled “AI etymology deconstructor - can guess fake words”. I want you to interpret the title and describe what this does. Then I’ll give you the chance to provide a test word and you will reinterpret the title.
- lxgr 2y agoThe title seems very misleading: It seems to create false and real etymologies for both neologisms and commonly used words. In other words, a false etymology constructor, not an etymology deconstructor :)