Closed on himself

Scientists at the Weizmann Institute examined whether a dictionary (which explains words using other words) might teach something about universal laws underlying language

Polonius: What do you read, prince?
Hamlet: Words, words, words.
Polonius: And what is the matter, prince?
Hamlet: Between whom and whom?
Polonius: I mean to ask, what is the matter of the book the prince is reading?

William Shakespeare, "Hamlet"
Translation: Avraham Shlonsky

Human beings, according to Noam Chomsky, are born with an "internal", generative and universal grammar inherent in them, which allows them to conduct verbal communication with other people. This concept, which was and still is controversial, is strengthened by the results of genetic studies, according to which certain mutations in the FOXP2 gene significantly impair the ability to construct linguistically correct sentences. If indeed the language arises from basic laws of nature (genetic sequences, the structure of the brain, etc.), then knowledge allows that its roots can be explored with the tools of the natural sciences and the exact sciences.

One of the questions that arises in this context is, whether a dictionary (which explains words using other words) might teach something about universal laws underlying language. Prof. Elisha Mozes and Dr. Zvi Telusti, from the Department of Physics of Complex Systems at the Weizmann Institute of Science, set out to investigate this question. Together with Jean-Pierre Ekman from the University of Geneva, and summer student David Lev-Ari, they began to draw the map of connections Between the words in the dictionary, that is, from each word a line is drawn connecting it to each of the words included in the sentence (or paragraph) which explain its meaning, and demonstrate the use of that word.

For example, in the Ibn-Shoshan dictionary, the word "love" is described (or explained) as follows: "intense affection, a feeling of great attraction or desire for someone or something". Here comes a relatively large number of quotations of verses and proverbs, from the choir, through the Song of Songs, to the morning prayer. Therefore, a line must be drawn from the word "love" to the words "affection", "passion", "feeling", "attraction", "desire", and so on. The same process must then be applied to all the words that the lines have reached. This creates a network that describes the interrelationship between the words in the dictionary. The length of the line between the words describes the strength of the connection between them (a short line describes a strong connection; the longer the line, the weaker the connection).

At some point, the full network of all the words in a complete dictionary is filled and perfected. Because even if the dictionary is very large, relatively speaking, it still has a finite size, and therefore, at some point, the network between the words contained in it is filled. The large, full network is divided into sub-networks, which connect words that belong, to one degree or another, to the same topic, or to the same world of content.

closing a circle

In some cases, a network that started from a certain word, after several "steps", returns to the word of origin. In other words (if it is permissible to use this phrase in this context), the network "closes on itself", and an explanation of the meaning of the word repeats and uses the same word itself - "a man is a man". This is strictly a tautology, except that in this case it arises from the depth of the natural roots of the language. It turns out that in a dictionary that includes about 100,000 words there are about 6,000 words that go back to the point where the explanation began. Prof. Mozes and Dr. Telesti checked and found that a significant part of these words, which are "closed on themselves" (and sometimes most of them), are included in the core of the language - a relatively small group of words (the 850 words of Ogden in English, or the 2,136 "essential" words in Japanese ), those who know them and master their use can communicate in this language effectively.

Circles that return to their starting point are at the basis of the phenomenon of life. DNA, which encodes the information needed to build proteins, is itself affected by proteins that activate it and control its action.

Kurt Gadel's famous theorem (which can be seen as an elaborate version of Epimenides' paradox: "This sentence is not true") says that within a formal system there can exist a sentence that cannot be proven within the system. If this claim is not true, the system crashes. If it is true, this means that not everything that is true can be proven. This circular argument is reminiscent of the Ouroboros symbol - a snake biting its tail - which was apparently created in ancient Egypt. The Ouroboros represented cycle, union with the primordial, basic, deep nature.

If nature runs in circles, and if language is a natural phenomenon in the full sense of the word, it is only natural to expect that connections and connections will be discovered in language that create loops, or closed circles, that explain a certain concept using the same concept itself.

The scientists say that the phenomenon of the network in the dictionary is so basic that, in fact, every time you want to add a new word to the dictionary, sooner or later this involves creating a network, or a new loop, that defines it. When words are linked together in the same loop, it usually turns out that they were invented, and incorporated into the dictionary at that time. The network, in this sense, creates a "connection network" between the words that were "born" in the same cycle.

The word: dictionary

In June 1857, three gentlemen met in London, Richard Trench, Herbert Coleridge and Frederic Fornoyle, who established the "Unrecorded Words Committee", and decided to write ("finally") a complete English dictionary worthy of its name. The work plan that was prepared was supposed to last 10 years, but in the end it turned out that the work was more than they thought. Only after upheavals and changes of editors was the "Oxford Dictionary" completed after 72 years of hard work, with the participation of many hundreds of volunteers who sent quotations and examples of the uses and meanings of many words. In the end, a network of about 1,800,000 citations was created that described how to use about 400,000 words and phrases.

Later it was discovered that the famous contributor of quotations to the Oxford dictionary, William Minor, was a crazed murderer. Minor, American colonel, military doctor, suffered from battle shock in the American Civil War. He moved to live in London, and there, in one of his fits of madness, he murdered a man, and as a result was thrown into prison. As part of his long restoration process, he sent many quotations to the editor of the dictionary at the time, James Murray. The surprising and complex system of relationships between the editor and the unusual contributor is described in the book "The Professor and the Madman" by Simon Winchester.