Talk:Natural semantic metalanguage

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Primitives
Anna Wierzbicka structured the list of semantic primitives in groups

The 61 Semantic Primitives (addition of LONG is proposed)

ABOVE, AFTER, ALL, BAD, BECAUSE, BEFORE, BELOW, BIG, BODY, CAN, DIE, DO, FAR, FEEL, FOR SOME TIME, GOOD, HAPPEN, HAVE, HEAR, HERE, I, IF, INSIDE, KIND OF, KNOW, LIKE, LIVE, A LONG TIME, MANY/MUCH, MAYBE, MOMENT, MORE, MOVE, (LONG), NEAR, NOT, NOW, ONE, OTHER, PART OF, PEOPLE/PERSON, THE SAME, SAY, SEE, A SHORT TIME, SIDE, SMALL, SOME, SOMEONE, SOMETHING/THING, THERE IS, THINK, THIS, TOUCH, TRUE, TWO, VERY, WANT, WHEN/TIME, WHERE/PLACE, WORD, YOU

Where is the reference to the most recent structuring?


 * It's easy to find from the NSM homepage. Here's the direct link: http://www.une.edu.au/arts/LCL/nsm/index.htm --Crag 21:54, 2004 Jun 8 (UTC)

Chinese radicals
Hi, You guys should include chinese radical characters as part of your study. They are words by themselves, and the combinations of these radicals form mroe complex concepts. An interesting place to start would be the formalized Han dynasty script, and the oracle bone scripts. - KevinSim

Bias
This article presents the theory as if it were universally accepted. As with any theory in modern linguistics there are reasonable arguments for and against. How about some coverage of the opposing viewpoint (beyond a link to an article titled "bad arguments against...")? --rkharrison
 * Noted. Started. Though the "bad arguments against ...." paper is a pretty good starting point for a survey of criticisms. Yakushima (talk) 15:45, 6 June 2008 (UTC)

Notice
Edit in progress. I'm planning to give the article more structure by adding sections & headlines; after that I'll be adding some references, text (history/background information, central assumptions, some criticism), and links.

I'm not a native speaker of English, so don't hesitate to point out problems in my style, vocabulary or grammar.

strangeloop 18:46, 13 Aug 2004 (UTC)

Pointless ramble about 'Atomic'
At the moment the article says that 'the semantic primes are believed to be atomic, primitive meanings present in all human languages.'

There is some subtle neatness in the analogy of calling them atomic. For a long time, the things we call atoms were thought to be indivisible- hence their name comes from Greek meaning 'non-divisible'. Of course we now believe they are divisible, made up of protons and electrons. In essence, atoms are not 'atomic'. These semantic primes are also not really 'atomic', they are not indivisible. The words in this list really only have a lesser, related property: None of them can be fully defined in terms of the others. Infact, many of their meanings overlap. For example, I, YOU, and SOMEONE all define categories of things which all contain at least what the category SOMEONE contains. The fact that they can even be usefully categorized themselves implies that concepts within a category share some meaning. For anyone reading this that is reasonably fluent in math, what I am saying is that they form a vector basis of some set of meaning but they are still not orthogonal.

Anyways, I'm not saying all this to suggest that this endeavor has failed nor even to suggest that the article's choice of word needs to be revised. I just want to show how really neat this is. Atoms failed to be 'atomic' in almost exactly the same way! Carbon, Lead, and Hydrogen turned out to all contain at least what Hydrogen contains. Of course, none of this implies that Carbon and Lead aren't in some sense elementary or primitives, and while they aren't truely indivisible they are atomic in a different sense. Anyways, the whole neatness is that Atoms were named after an old Greek idea about the world, and this turned out to be a misnomer. The adjective 'atomic' now either refers directly to these new atoms or to the old greek idea- related, but distinct concepts. These semantic primes, on the other hand, are atomic in a new sense, a generalization over the atomicity of the physical atoms. The idea being generalized is that atoms are now thought of as the smallest division of something(element) which retains some property(chemistry). In perfect analogy, the semantic primes are the smallest division of meaning which retains the property of being a word in these natural languages. Neat. Anyways, good work, sorry for babbling, nothing is wrong with the article.

-P.S. The analogy to be drawn between the primes and the nucleons is even better. --Intangir 01:32, 31 December 2005 (UTC)

Perfect!!!!!! Backslash-it (talk) 02:40, 12 October 2017 (UTC)

This article should include at least one link that explains what is actually meant by each semantic primitive
Since English is a very ambiguous language, and only one meaning intended by each semantic primitive, there should at least be one link to something that specifies "the intended meaning" of each one (especially since this is an encyclopedia). Can anyone find where they specify which meaning is intended, and link to it somewhere (or incorporate this explanation into the article)? I was unable to find this. - Doubleg 20:12, 8 June 2006 (UTC)


 * The problem inherent to this issue is that these primes are claimed to be atomic, undivisible meanings. Therefore, the primes of this metalanguage, 'carved out of natural language', are by definition undefinable.
 * I don't think there is an online source detailing the relation between the set of semantic primes and the corresponding words in English. I believe Goddard (1998) discusses this issue, and I'm sure you can find relevant information in the 2002 volume edited by Goddard & Wierzbicka, too. &mdash; mark &#9998; 20:10, 11 September 2006 (UTC)


 * Still the original sources may provide enough explanation of the primes to understand which usages of the English words that are taken as exponents of the primes represent the primes, and which are not, that could allow for a description (rather than definition) of the form “X, as used in Sentence Y, but not as in Sentence Z”, or some other clarification of the relation of the English words to the universal primes that is not a definition per se.--Cmdicely 02:33, 6 November 2006 (UTC)
 * I think original objection is valid -- NSM researchers are using restricted senses of the English words used to code the primitives. For example, YOU is never the plural sense, nor the vague I/we sense seen when people say things like "you try as hard as you can and what does it get you".  Maybe the article should at least outline the senses of the primitives, point out where they were introduced, what (if any problems) were encounted with them, and in the case of those deprecated (e.g., "IF ... WOULD ...") explain why they were cut and what explications were found to substitute for them. Yakushima (talk) 15:50, 6 June 2008 (UTC)

Pirahã language and numbers
"The semantic primes (below) are believed to be atomic, primitive meanings present in all human languages." -- According to Wikipedia itself Pirahã language has no numbers, no words for "one" or "two." But this doesn't mean I doesn't believe these words to be "atomic" in a sense, they just don't exist in all languages. Thus "It is said that after eight months of enthusiastic but fruitless daily study ... not a single Pirahã had learned to count up to ten or to add 1 + 1" according to Pirahã and the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. Maybe some words about this?

Second, aUI has another set of "primes" (aUI, The Language of Space). But this language use metaphorical compounds and so on. But the point is, I think even the "litteraly" meaning differs among languages, and they combinating different primes to archive a certain meaning.

This is actualy my first edit on Wikipedia ever [except a minor in user area], so it's a test also :P -- Veoler 18:38, 11 September 2006 (UTC)


 * Welcome to Wikipedia! Wikipedia being a tertiary source, we can only report on Pirahã and its possible implications for NSM if this issue has been discussed before in a reliable source. I have not yet come across such a discussion in the linguistic literature. Judging from what I read, the NSM researchers would probably investigate whether the Pirahã words for 'few' and 'some' would be susceptible to a polysemy/heterosemy analysis, i.e., whether these words in some contexts can be taken to signify the meanings of the allegedly nonexistent primes. If they aren't (and this issue is much less easy to determine than the wording of the Pirahã language article suggests), then NSM's hypothesis about ONE and TWO being conceptual primes probably would have to be adjusted. &mdash; mark &#9998; 20:01, 11 September 2006 (UTC)
 * A quick skim of a paper by the main linguist studying the Pirahã language suggests to me that Mark is probably right. With almost wearying regularity, NSM researchers are shown a language seems not to have one primitive or another, only to discover that there is a way to say it after all.  My favorite so far: a language with the same word for "see" and "hear".  They can express the distinction when they need to, with something like "I could @@@ the bird's voice, but I couldn't @@@ the bird." Yakushima (talk) 16:10, 6 June 2008 (UTC)

I thought that since there apparently are reliable sources enough to mention that on Wikipedia in the Pirahã article then it should probably also suffice for this. My intention was to leave speculations about possible implications to the reader. I also used to be more agnostic about "one" and "two" in Pirahã, but this suggest otherwise (the counting-backwards and the no-memory examples). The thing is, I don't find it inherently controversial given the context to begin with, so I disagree with the stance to not tentatively accept it as probable, but I'm no expert.

Why can't it be "perceive"? "I could perceive the bird's voice, but I couldn't perceive the bird." Is there some grammatical reason or something that indicates polysemy? (Maybe someone thinks "If you perceive the bird's voice, you can't say that you don't perceive the bird", but why should the bird's voice be considered a part of the bird itself?) -- Veoler 21:39, 27 August 2008 (UTC)

UNE Broken Links
The links to material from the University of New England are broken, it looks like there's been some reorganization on their site. &mdash;Cmdicely 01:36, 6 November 2006 (UTC)

Puzzling punctuation and an apparent inconsistency between lists
This is my first post, so please forgive me if I say anything senseless or annoying.

I was building a table of semantic primitives in order to map them onto other short lists of basic words. In the process I noticed some unexplained use of punctuation, and an apparent inconsistency between the list on wikipedia and the list on the NSM website.

The wikipedia page states there are 61 semantic primitives. The NSM homepage states that same number. However, there originally appeared to be 65 semantic primitives on the wikipedia page.

I finally noticed under the category of "space" that the pair of primitives "far, near" and the next pair "side, inside" are separated from their neighbors by semi-colons. That same punctuation is used on the NSM website. I don't know what that means, but one explanation could be that the English words in each pair represent different aspects of the same semantic primitive. From a neophyte's point of view, the semi-colons are very difficult to pick out, (nigh on invisible,) and now that I've noticed them I'm uncertain as to what they actually indicate. I wonder if it might be helpful to add a note that clarifies the situation, as was done with the proposed primitive (long.)

Assuming that each of those two pairs really do represent the same primitive, that still leaves 63 primitives on the wikipedia list. I finally discovered that the list at NSM under the category of "actions, events and movement" shows the semantic primitive "touch" where the wikipedia page shows two semantic primitives "go" and "put". Substituting "touch" for "go" and "put" brings the count to 61 plus 1 for "long". I've read much of the NSM website, plus a couple of other articles that are cited. So far I have not discovered an explanation.

I would not be surpised to learn that one web site is more up-to-date than the other. I thought it might be helpful to mention this in the interest of clarity. If at some point in the near future I stumble upon an explantion, I will post a follow up suggesting a posible change. Even if I think I've discovered an answer, as a non-expert I would not presume to edit the page.

Peace be with you,

{Gdeclute 21:54, 5 March 2007 (UTC))


 * I've seen the list being changed while the number stayed the same, so the second occurrence of the number is with high probability wrong. I remove it. I'll keep the first occurrence that has "As of 2002". It's a guess, but I think the semi-colons only mean they are related, but still different primitives. I know it's the case for some of them. -- Veoler 13:09, 8 July 2008 (UTC)

NSM: biblio and links replaced wholesale?! (along with Criticisms section?)
The recent rewrites seem to be improvements in most ways. I did some work on the article a while back, then realized I wasn't really up to speed on the subject, and was not even in a position to say what was wrong with some of the edits of others. I have since read a few books on the subject and acquired more books for reference, and I now feel ready to take the NSM article up again, while further informing myself as needed.

I wasn't surprised to see that the article had changed in the meantime. However, somebody has gone and thrown out the (admittedly messy and overlong) bibliography I'd assembled, together with its links to papers available online. Also out with the bathwater: the ISBN links I found for some books. These links help people interested in reading more about NSM to look up those books, to read passages available online at Google Books and Amazon.com, and perhaps to order those books for more complete study of the subject. A good article should aim to be a good starting point, among other things. I doubt that my own interest in the subject would have been stoked to the point of buying a few pricey John Benjamins titles had it not been for online reading.

The bibliography needed pruning and other work. I knew this, but left it as-is for the benefit of other editors, so that they'd have an easier time finding relaible sources. Replacing the linked bibliography with an unlinked one made the article significantly less of a resource for those who want to learn more from authoritative sources. WITH THE COOPERATION OF OTHER EDITORS, I'd like to restore and improve the bibliography with its links and ISBN numbers.

I'd also like to restore and eventually expand the "criticisms" section (or, better: blend known criticisms in with other discussion of issues in NSM, which is I believe the more-recommended practice on Wikipedia.) NSM has been criticized (mostly incorrectly) from a number of perspectives. Wikipedia articles are supposed to be written from a Neutral Point of View (NPOV), so dissenting views -- even those shown to be false -- can have a place in a well-rounded Wikipedia article. Indeed, if a subject is significantly controversial (i.e., if mentioning a controversy isn't giving undue weight to some fringe theory), summarily deleting mention of the controversy is suppressing information, a big no-no on Wikipedia. In this case, I believe even an NPOV discussion of controversies about NSM would lead the reader to more accurate conclusions than they would otherwise very likely jump to, especially since many past controversies appear to have been rooted in hasty conclusions by other researchers in semantics.

Some of you may be (as one editor claims) experts on NSM. However, Wikipedia works (when it does) not because everybody is an expert, but because people are trying to improve articles, while building on the work of others wherever that work is legitimate. Expertise PLUS cooperation earns unusual respect on Wikipedia. Wholesale replacement or deletion of sections, dispensing with the useful work of others, does not earn respect at all. Quite the contrary. Yakushima (talk) 04:48, 18 May 2009 (UTC)

Title
It seems that the correct title of the article is "Natural Semantic Metalanguage" (with capitals). Should the article be Natural Semantic Metalanguage? It was moved from there, and I'm wondering why — in the first paragraph, it is capitalized as such.  Ecw.Technoid.Dweeb  | contributions | talk | ☮✌☮ 12:33, 4 January 2010 (UTC)

Error in table?
The list of English primitives and the table do not agree on the Substantives / Relational Substantives

Which is correct? — Preceding unsigned comment added by Cveres (talk • contribs) 16:39, 16 July 2011 (UTC)

Non-science
Shouldn't that heading be "Proposed And Experimentally Verified Semantic Primitives". It kind of presupposes that we know what is semantically primitive. The table is right. Proposed and experimentally verified semantic primitives. Also, I can cite an example of a word that Wierzbicka claims is specific to English and cannot be reduced. I'm thinking of the word 'Evidence', in the book "English: Meaning and Culture". Ouch. At least I don't see the Alphabet of Thought anywhere anymore, so we're getting somewhere. Also, the "practical, meaning-based" sounds silly, like a "practical, hands-on" guide to surgery.

Ultraquix (talk) 03:23, 7 January 2012 (UTC)

Explication
Why does the Explication use the words "of" and "to"? They're not listed as Semantic Primes. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Jamiestroud69 (talk • contribs) 06:31, 17 October 2017 (UTC)


 * English syntax renders the semantic prime BECAUSE as "because of" in some constructions - just as it renders the semantic prime I as "me" when using it as a direct object. NSM refers to this multiple syntactic renderings of a single semantic prime as "allolexy", a parallel to the established linguistic phenomenon of allophony, and lists this to some degree in its table of primes - BECAUSE could be listed as BECAUSE~BECAUSE OF.
 * I hazard a guess that the same is occuring with "to" - e.g. "did...to" being a syntactic-dependent exponent of DO - although it seems less clear cut.
 * 86.130.55.66 (talk) 17:09, 29 February 2020 (UTC)

"English makes use of propositions like ‘to’ and ‘about’, but other languages may use other kinds of grammatical words, or case endings, or more exotic devices such as serial verb constructions, to get the same effect. It doesn’t matter so long as the meanings expressed are the same."
 * 2A00:23C5:EF89:6800:4459:F4F8:1075:51BA (talk) 19:17, 24 May 2020 (UTC)

Restructure Underway
I am planning a major reworking of this page as part of WikiProject Linguistics. Please feel free to give me suggestions and feedback. I am taking the earlier listed suggestions as a starting point. Ashyanya (talk) 18:47, 6 November 2017 (UTC)

Someone said something
Shouldn't the example be "someone said words" ? Since clearly we don't include the possibility that they said, say, a table. I doubt that in every language in the world, the primitive corresponding to "thing" includes an utterence.

Or maybe it does, but than maybe words should be in the Substantives category and are not primitive.

Another possibility is that "something" is just used a variable for the words that someone said, and is unreleted to the primitive of the same name. Nngnna (talk) 17:13, 13 December 2023 (UTC)


 * The "something" in "someone said something" would be the content of the utterance (the meaning of the words), not the utterance itself (the words). 2A00:23C8:6285:D301:5DF5:6436:57FB:494D (talk) 17:32, 19 December 2023 (UTC)

Primes are incomplete
'While not semantic primes, they can be defined exclusively using primes.' <- It's a short list, let's see the decompositions for these molecules, put your money where your mouth is. I'm asserting that it is literally impossible to decompose a concept such as 'woman' into the semantic primes that are listed, someone prove me wrong, please. I want this to be valid, but I think it's just a bunch of hand-waving. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 73.197.199.89 (talk) 17:33, 29 March 2024 (UTC)


 * https://nsm-approach.net/archives/tag/e-woman
 * https://nsm-approach.net/archives/tag/e-women
 * In practice, 'woman' is defined using 'child', which is defined explictly using primes - semantic molecules nest hierarchically:
 * https://nsm-approach.net/archives/1484 2A00:23C8:6286:C201:756E:C12B:DB77:9D92 (talk) 10:38, 13 April 2024 (UTC)