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I 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/

[1] https://nahuatl.wired-humanities.org/content/tlacoocelotl

I 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.

I 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

Yeah I just filled in "inbreathiate", which should be a fake / made up word but this tool generates a meaning anyway... which is also neat, but the "can guess fake words" description isn't accurate.

At least it did say "slartibartfast" was a fictional character.

I think OP means that it can make a guess at what a nonexistent word means, something Wiktionary and urban dic doesn't do as well.

Agree. 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.

Doesn'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.

> 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.

I bet you could do that with most languages. I don’t see why English would be especially great at it.

I bet you could, but in the other languages I know, I believe it would be frowned upon. The cultural acceptance of this feature is just as important as the feature itself.

I agree with both comments, I just wanted to find a word that an AI wouldn't have heard before, not a word that is "fake".

I don't even know what a fake word is.

https://deconstructor.ayush.digital/w/flonkers

"Flonkers: A made-up word, likely humorous". Aren't all words made up? Edit: This one, unlike my previous example, is actually in use - flonkers: an animal that looks fat but is actually just fluffy.

turboencabulation, hydrocoptic. I bet you could look up a bunch of sci-fi for other examples of completely made up words

If 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.

>> 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=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."

Which it should since it knows all the words.

Fyllipig 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.

Cool, on my end it said "refugglemander" means "One who repeatedly flees and wanders" (re- fugere -ler mandros)

It'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.

What etymologies would you have expected instead?

For real words, better check Wikipedia. It's much more informative (compare for "dragon" : https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/dragon )

When 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

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncleftish_Beholding

It 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.

I tried a nonsensical:

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

> 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.

Something 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.

It actually knows about "Lisa the Iconoclast". Cool.

It's a perfectly cromulent tool

what is a "fake word"? New terminology is coined all the time. It's one of the fundamentals of how language works.

I think they mean never before seen words aka made up words like "antecarburetorism"

https://deconstructor.ayush.digital/w/antecarburetorism

I'd often casually wondered where the word scaffolding comes from. Its explanation seems sort of plausible.

This 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

You 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/67d80661-4bb4-8012-9328-77d56af52b...

I 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.

Try “helicopter” for a real mind-blow.

I hate how everyone always breaks it up as "heli" and "copter" when it's "helico" and "pter".

It did not like supercalifragilisticexpialidocious

I had the same idea, and it concluded that it meant "fantastic," which seems correct.

I'll no longer misunderestimate AI

It really struggled with Antidisestablishmentarianism

"Can guess fake words"? It told me "shitbutt" was a real word.

Very 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.