[Lexicog] Re: Greetings & leave-takings

[Rudolph C Troike]

I was surprised to see a statement in a sociolinguistics textbook recently
that greetings were assumed to be universal (and presumably one just had
to look to see what expressions were used, so they could be included in a
dictionary or a language lesson). This is a good case where lexicographers
have to look beyond urban extended-Western oriented sociolinguistics to
the ethnography of communication.

Navajo and Apache have been well-known and documented for years not to
engage in verbal exchange on encounter, and similar observations occur in
the ethnographic literature from other areas, but the facts of
interpersonal behavior are often not mentioned in ordinary ethnographic
studies which focus more traditionally on high-visibility activities like
ceremonies or on economically and socially important areas.

	The Navajo have confected a greeting form, which one even sees on
signs on entering the reservation, spelled "Yah-ta-hay" in keeping with
English orthography (and 19th-century ways of writing Indian languages).
But the usual behavior on encounter is silence. One is reminded of
Coleridge's poem (though referring to a different context) "Silence after
long absence, it is best".

	Some years ago a friend of mine, who had spent some time on the
faculty at a university in Iran, and had learned to use the long scripts
for greetings and leave-takings which were prescribed in Persian, shortly
after went to a university in Sri Lanka, and found, after his initial
introduction to the faculty of the department, that when he encountered
any of them in crossing the campus, they said nothing to him. He was so
shaken by this culture shock that he went to the department chairman to
ask if there was some reason people in the department did not like him, or
if he had somehow unwittingly caused offense. The chairman just laughed
and reassured him that if they had something to say to him, they would
certainly stop and talk, but otherwise if there was no reason to say
anything, they wouldn't. Perhaps there needs to be a way to include
information in a bilingual dictionary on what expected correspondences in
the other language do NOT occur. One often hears that "Language X does not
have a word for Z", but the lack of an entry in a dictionary does not
guide the user to discover this.

	Rudy

P.S. This does not mean that the other language does not have resouces to
express the concept, but the lexical gap may be due to lack of a reason to
lexicalize something. Navajo has no established word for "triangle", for
example (pace Plato), though it can be descriptively expressed for nonce
purposes. Should a dictionary entry for English->Navajo explain this?
Would it give a false impression that the descriptive expression was a
fixed lexical item in Navajo?



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