Shortest words for complex concepts

[Salmoneus]

Relatedly, of course, glebe, "parcel(s) of land a portion of the revenue of which is reserved by law for the maintenance of the holder of an ecclesiastical post".

And on a religious theme, rood, "barrier within a church preventing the laity from seeing the altar and tabernacle".

But we're getting into "English one-syllable words" territory here...

[Ares Land]

In French there's dol which, in legal vocabulary, is a fairly specific kind of fraud or cheating. Basically, delivering incomplete or incorrect information while selling something. Apparently the English equivalent is 'fraud by deceit'. The meanings include bon dol, which is tolerated dol, or dol to a lesser extent -- basically an overenthusiastic sales pitch.

(That's not a common word by any means, though. If you're not a lawyer, you'll never get a chance to use it.)

Less complex, but amusing: la lose (commonly misspelt la loose) pronounced /luz/, the state of being unlucky.

[Seirios]

生于萨，长于萨，住于加拿大。[Simpl. Chinese]
shēng yú sà, zhǎng yú sà, zhù yú jiānádà
be.born in El.Salvador, grow.up in El.Salvador, live in Canada
'He was born in El Salvador, grew up in El Salvador, and is living in Canada.'

This is admittedly Literary Chinese, as using the preposition 于 yú for location is not normal in speech (normally you'd use the coverb 在 zài), but her choice of abbreviating 萨尔瓦多 sàěrwáduō 'El Salvador' to a simple 萨 sà is astonishing. This is not at all a country people in China often talk about.

I have seen before that Chinese high school textbooks teach country abbreviations, including 萨 sà 'El Salvador', and this being China, students are supposedly expected to memorize them, but I don't know if people in the group could really understand the abbreviation, or if the girl was obscuring the country name for her own amusement or what.

Note that Canada, a country the Chinese do talk about, has no similar one-character abbreviation, probably because all three characters are very common (加 jiā 'to add; plus', 拿 ná 'grab; (colloquial direct object marker)', 大 dà 'big').

加 is freely abbreviated everywhere. Here as a native speaker I feel like the choice is based on rhythm, so it flows better.

Also, speaking of country name abbreviations, one of my favourite is 苏 sū, standing for both the Soviet Union (苏维埃 sūwéi'āi) and Scotland (苏格兰 sūgélán). As a consequence the phrase 英苏关系 yīngsūguānxi can mean either the UK-USSR Relations or England-Scotland Relations, due to the unfortunate choice of give the UK the short name 英国 yīngguó which begins with the same ideosyllable as England 英格兰 yīnggélán.

[Pabappa]

wiktionary defines the Japanese word 塾 (juku) as "cram school". It appears to be a single morpheme, unlike many CVCV words which are made from 2 monosyllabic kanji. Indeed, the cognates of this word in the other languages listed are all monosyllabic, but may not have the same definition.

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E5%A1%BE#Japanese

[zompist]

wiktionary defines the Japanese word 塾 (juku) as "cram school". It appears to be a single morpheme, unlike many CVCV words which are made from 2 monosyllabic kanji. Indeed, the cognates of this word in the other languages listed are all monosyllabic, but may not have the same definition.

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E5%A1%BE#Japanese

It's short because it's a Chinese borrowing— 塾 shú is 'village school'. Cantonese suk6 helps explain the Japanese form. (As final -k is not allowed in Japanese, it added a -u, though my understanding is that it'd be unvoiced.) Wikipedia says the Japanese term is short for 学習塾 gakushūjuku 'study school'— I'm guessing there are few other uses of juku, so the abbreviation caught on.

[zompist]

I just ran into the term zav, Hebrew for a man who has had three abnormal/involuntary emissions of semen.

[mèþru]

That's not what zav means. Zav just means something is flowing; you are probably thinking of a phrase with zav as a component word.

[zompist]

That's not what zav means. Zav just means something is flowing; you are probably thinking of a phrase with zav as a component word.

No, I'm thinking of Talmud, Tohorot, Zavim. Here's a cite giving the definition: "A man with flux is called a zav, and a woman with flux is called a zavah." The Talmudic tractate will give you the precise requirements for a man to be a zav.

[mèþru]

Then it's a truncation of a phrase to just the first word. The rest of the phrase is implied by the context.

[zompist]

One, cite the phrase if you claim that's what it is. I've given you two sources that cite the word and its meaning, and there are more.

Two, if it's derived by some sort of abbreviation, so what. This is how words work. Etymology is not meaning.

[Moose-tache]

I think what methru means is that the point of the game is to find a short word that represents, innately, a complex idea, because that's surprising and unusual. The idea that a sequence of very few syllables represents a longer phrase that itself stands for a complex idea isn't very interesting because it's so common. We could fill the page with abbreviations and acronyms.

One example, the word "chip" means "a flat piece of quartz with grooves carved into it to facilitate the flow of electrical current," which is pretty wild. But it's less impressive when you remember that it's just short for "computer chip," which is itself an analogy. You're right that "chip" still counts as a word in its own right, and someday people may forget that it was ever part of a longer phrase. But it's still not as fun as, say, discovering that a language has an unanalysable word for "feather that sticks halfway out of a mattress" or something.

There's no rule book, I'm just pointing out how I think people like methru expect this game to work.

[zompist]

We're all pedants here to some extent. But this is also supposed to be (I think) a lighthearted thread, where we don't nitpick every submission to death.

I mean, we could. Looking at some recent entries:

rood, "barrier within a church preventing the laity from seeing the altar and tabernacle".

Except that's properly a "rood screen", so called because it has a rood on it-- which is just a cross.

glebe, "parcel(s) of land a portion of the revenue of which is reserved by law for the maintenance of the holder of an ecclesiastical post".

Glebe just means earth or soil (etymologycally, a clod of earth).

Shed: the place where two sets of warp threads are held away from each other so that the weft can be passed between them in weaving.

A metaphorical extension of the normal word "shed".

Sp ñapa lagniappe; complimentary gift awarded to a valued customer

From "added" in Quechua.

manse, the house where the minister of the local parish lives.

Manse just means "dwelling". ("Mansion" is an augmented variant.)

It's maybe more interesting in some Platonic sense if people find a word that's short and has a complex meaning that isn't derived from a longer phrase, or a simpler sense of the same word. That's going to be pretty damn rare, except for mostly-monosyllabic languages (and really it's less exciting if a concept in a mostly-monosyllabic language is expressed with a monosyllable).

In every one of the cases above, a word has been specialized into a complex sense, one of the basic forms of semantic change. Personally I find that interesting in itself, and I assume other people do too, as no one complained about the words above.

[mèþru]

The phrase is "zav tumat"
The difference with chip and zav is that a native speaker of Hebrew would not understand the word zav to refer to the longer phrase.

[Kuchigakatai]

The phrase is "zav tumat"
The difference with chip and zav is that a native speaker of Hebrew would not understand the word zav to refer to the longer phrase.

Yeah, although that's what Zompist referred to when he said that even words that acquire very specific meanings by reference to longer phrases are still interesting, even if less so than words whose primary meaning is the specialized one (like Spanish ñapa).

I mean, a native English speaker normally doesn't understand that "stop" can refer to sounds like [q d m], and yet its use in linguistics is arguably still interesting. In fact, I actually posted a long list of these short linguistics words in the version of this thread in the old forum on incatena.org (including things like the verb "to rank" in Optimality Theory, etc.), and nobody complained. It appears Zompist is saying that "zav" alone by itself can have that meaning in the domain of Talmudic discussion.

[bradrn]

I’m surprised no-one has posted this one yet: grep, to search through one or more files for a specific piece of text.

[sasasha]

The phrase is "zav tumat"
The difference with chip and zav is that a native speaker of Hebrew would not understand the word zav to refer to the longer phrase.

How would a native speaker of English understand 'shed' as a weaving term outside of a weaving context? Context is important for a lot of these words.

Fr serein 'rain that falls from a cloudless sky'.

[Kuchigakatai]

Fr serein 'rain that falls from a cloudless sky'.

Salvadoran Spanish sereno 'atmospheric water at night observed as dew the next morning, widely believed to often give people a cold or the flu'

[Ares Land]

Fr serein 'rain that falls from a cloudless sky'.

Good one! You taught me a new word there. FWIW according to my dictionary the meaning is closer to the definition Ser gives.

[sasasha]

Fr serein 'rain that falls from a cloudless sky'.

Good one! You taught me a new word there. FWIW according to my dictionary the meaning is closer to the definition Ser gives.

Ah, fascinating. Thanks Ser.

I learnt that word on (what I think was essentially) this thread maybe 15 years ago.

[Pabappa]

zav also has a feminine counterpart, dealing with blood: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zavah