Fw: [Lexicog] semantic domains

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----- Original Message -----
From: "Peter Kirk" <peterkirk at qaya.org>
To: <lexicographylist at yahoogroups.com>
Sent: Sunday, January 11, 2004 2:58 PM
Subject: RE: [Lexicog] semantic domains


> I am interested by the discussion about the ratio of nouns to verbs in a
> dictionary. But from my experience one might expect to see a wide
> variation in the proportions.
>
> English has quite a lot of abstract nouns corresponding to event words,
> and in my SIL training as a translator it was often stressed that in
> many non-western languages such concepts have to be expressed by verbs
> rather than nouns. That would suggest that these languages would have a
> significantly higher proportion of verbs in their lexicon.
>
> But not all non-western languages work like this. In Azerbaijani and
> Persian (also in Turkish, but more so in Ottoman than modern Turkish) a
> large number of verbal concepts are expressed by means of a "compound
> verb" consisting of a noun (or sometimes an adjective) and one of a
> small number of simple verbs such as "be", "do", "give". The nouns and
> adjectives are typically borrowed from Arabic, and are often Arabic
> verbal nouns, but take noun morphology in the host language; most but
> not all of these words can also be used independently. As a result,
> these languages are rich in nouns, but have very few verbs if these
> compound verbs are not taken as lexical units.
>
> So, although from a semantic viewpoint we might expect to see similar
> ratios of event and thing concepts across languages, we should not
> assume that the proportion of nouns and verbs, according to
> morphological and syntactic categories, is similarly stable across
> languages.
>
> --
> Peter Kirk
> peter at qaya.org (personal)
> peterkirk at qaya.org (work)
> http://www.qaya.org/
>
>
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