And if so, how do they label headphones, contact lenses etc?
I like this question because I haven’t found an AI answer this question correctly yet. They all give wrong answers.
It’s because of the way an LLM works, they’re completely blind to things like what a word starts with. Ask it something like “List 10 words that start and end with the same letter but are not palindromes.” and it completely shits the bed, because it can only process words as unified tokens, it can’t look inside the words to see how they’re structured.
- Accordion
- Antenna
- Banana
- Character
- Deceived
- Elephant
- Greening
- Harbinger
- Insignia
- Knowledge
GPT-4, prompt: “List 10 words that start and end with the same letter but are not palindromes.”
Even without the palindrome condition, it got some of these and a few palindromes.
Not exactly what you’re looking for, but in Esperanto the words for right and left are “Dekstre” and “Maldekstre” which roughly translates to something"right" and “anti-right” so while the first letter is different they both have the same root word, which is something I don’t think a lot of languages do in this case.
As far as labeling headphones and such, it’s not really an issue since I don’t think anyone is making products with Esperantists in mind.
Chinese I think?
- Left - Zuǒbiān
- Right - zhèngquè de
Not sure if that counts, considering it’s using the Latin alphabet and the language is tonal, etc.
EDIT: and Ilocano:
- Left - kannigid
- Right - kusto
EDIT2: and Indonesian:
- Left - kiri
- Right - Kanan
EDIT3: and Irish:
- Left - chlé
- Right - ceart
Going to stop now. I’m literally just choosing languages in google translate.
Ah the dangers of Google translate and synonyms. You got the wrong definition for right when translating to Irish, the one you have means correct, deis is the word for right (direction). Clé is left, the h appears in certain contexts for grammatical reasons.
Sorta the concept behind Twisted Translations, previously known as Google Translate Sings. Though they are intentionally getting a bad result by feeding the Translations through several languages before coming back to English.
Chinese is also not right - 正确的 (zhèngquè de) means “proper”
Left and Right as the sides are 左 (zuǒ) and 右 (yòu) - you can also add 邊 (biān) to each which means “side” to be more explicit, but they are also used separately in many contexts where the left/right meaning is needed.
The Chinese characters for 左 and 右 actually originated as pictograms of the left and right hand in the early forms of Chinese writing, but later forms both contain general “hand” component (𠂇) with components 工 and 口 added for differentiation
I didn’t have to scroll too far in Google translate to find that Arabic for left and right is yasir and yamin (in the Latin alphabet, it’s يسار يمين in Arabic which seems to start with different characters anyway) but my guess is that things would be labeled with S and M.
It’s yasar and yamin and yes, they both start with the same letter but alternatively you can use chamal ( north) for left. It’s archaic and rarely if ever used in modern days but it fix this problem that isn’t one in the first place because you can print the whole word since their shape alone allow for an easy and fast identification, use the left right symbols with a tilted tail or just use L&R for arabic nations with English as the main foreign language and G&D for the ones where it’s french.
Levantine Arabic says shamal شمال but that’s might be too slangy for labelling.
Only Levantine? Al Qur’an seems to prefer شمال for left so I thought that’s what will be in MSA. I have never heard يسار for left before.
“Vänster”, left, and “höger”, right, in Swedish.
I’m hery sure tvey are…
(actually tvis works quite good, I tvink I will use tvis for a hocal quirk for a dnd-npc)
