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Assume an alien has landed on Earth and wants to learn English with the help of an English Dictionary.

He looks up the meaning of "the".

Meaning of "the":

"denoting one or more people or things already mentioned or assumed to be common knowledge"

Now he searches the individual meaning of each and every word of the above sentence.

If he continues to do this infinitely, he will land on many words. The words uncovered may be referred to by visiting the dictionary manually 1 by 1.

Obviously, in this exercise, there would be nothing but circular references of word meanings. To resolve this issue, we may declare few words as "axioms".

What would those sets of words which would be axioms be?

Using these set of words only(or predominantly), one could understand every other word in the English dictionary.

curiousdannii
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  • How would it lemmatise or do sense disambiguation? Somehow denoting would go to the entry denote, but would the adj strapping go to strap? – Adam Bittlingmayer Aug 27 '18 at 14:04
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    If he knows the is the most common word, presumably he has observed a bit and built a list of common words or even words ranked by frequency. In that case it would make more sense to just learn the next most common words (a, an, it, in, be...) in the list. For function words especially, some of the words in the definition are really far down the list. It's totally possible to be fluent or even native-level in English with knowing the word denoting. – Adam Bittlingmayer Aug 27 '18 at 14:06

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