[Lexicog] Almost

[Benjamin J Barrett]

In Japanese, there are three concepts for this. One is adverbial such as
almost dry (hotondo), another for the adjective such as almost $1000 (ni
chikai, gurai), and then one for "almost happened but didn't" (tokoro,
sou, etc.) I think you could make an argument to collapse the adverb and
adjective classifications; you might even catch a native Japanese
speaker using the wrong one in a performance error. These are in the
near category (chikai means near). I can't think of any word that covers
both of them at the moment,though.

The almost but didn't seems clearly different, though there are some
cases that might cross such as "almost full" and "almost done".

Benjamin Barrett
Baking the World a Better Place
www.hiroki.us

-----Original Message-----
From: Ron Moe [mailto:ron_moe at sil.org]
Sent: Thursday, August 05, 2004 5:01 PM
To: lexicographylist at yahoogroups.com
Subject: [Lexicog] Almost


I've been analyzing the domain 'Almost'. Longman's Language Activator
gives
the primary meaning of the English word 'almost' as 'almost a particular
number, amount, time, age etc.':

'almost $1000' 'almost full' 'almost an hour' 'almost 50 years old'

If this is true, then the other meanings would be secondary:

someone has almost reached some place: 'almost there'
something has almost reached some state: 'almost dry'
something is almost finished: 'almost done'
someone almost did something: 'almost fell'
something almost happened: 'almost overflowed'
something is almost the best/worst (the most extreme example of some
quality): almost the best
something is so similar that it is almost the same: almost human
something is almost some quality: almost perfectly round

This is a nice example of semantic chaining, and one can readily
recognize
the semantic links. However does this concept occur in other, especially
non-Indo-European, languages? Does the concept include the range that
the
English word has? Would speakers recognize a semantic link between the
translation equivalents of 'almost' in the examples above?

English has a nice set of words in this domain:

nearly, close to, close on, approaching, nearing, getting on for, not
quite,
be pushing, just about, practically, virtually, all but, as good as, to
all
intents and purposes, verging on, bordering on, more or less, pretty
well,
pretty much

Many of these are secondary meanings of movement verbs or words in the
domain 'Near'. It would appear that in English we conceptualize 'almost'
via
the metaphor 'move near' or 'be near'. Is this also true in other
languages?
In this case is the primary sense the one in 'to almost reach a place'?
At
least it seems that this is conceptually the more salient sense.

Ron Moe



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