[Lexicog] News time

[Ruth Msauki]

hie, l am a student at the univesity and l am doing my dissertation on the revision of dictionaries and l was wondering if you could help me with information regarding the following : 
  factor sthat motivate revising a dictionary
  the focus of the exercise 
  issue sthat emanate from the revision exercise 
  Your contributions will be of great considerations 
  

"Kenneth C. Hill" <kennethchill at yahoo.com> wrote:
          One thing that strikes me about this list is the fact that these English-language favorite categories are often used to make judgments about other languages (and their speakers, of course). I work on Hopi, a language once thought to have no word for "time" -- which it does have, though time probably ranks quite low on the list of Hopi preferred conversational topics. People have made all sorts of strange judgments about a culture believed to lack our sense of time.

Regarding the second-place noun in the list: in my work on modern Mexicano (otherwise known as Aztec, Nahuatl) I found no native word for "person", instead the language uses the Spanish loan "cristiano". I don't know how this lexical caregory was treated in pre-European-conquest times. But note that the English word "person" is also a loan, though it has been used in English in the sense of "human being" since 1225 (according to the OED).

--Ken

"David K. Barnhart" <dvdbrnhrt at yahoo.com> wrote:      --- In lexicographylist at yahoogroups.com, "John Roberts"
<dr_john_roberts at ...> wrote:
>
> It is not often that lexicographers feature on the BBC news website but 
> there is a posting there today where they do. The OUP have
researched what 
> are the most common nouns in the English language. The most common is 
> "time". This is partly because of the scores of expressions in English 
> featuring time. But it is mainly because English speakers like to
talk about 
> time a lot.
> 
> TOP 10 NOUNS
> 1 Time
> 2 Person
> 3 Year
> 4 Way
> 5 Day
> 6 Thing
> 7 Man
> 8 World
> 9 Life
> 10 Hand
> 
> But I found the most interesting comment was this:
> 
> "The thing that struck me when I put together this list was that 90%
of the 
> top 100 words were one syllable, and that a large proportion were
actually 
> from Old English, meaning the 

basic words we use all the time in basic 
> sentences are from before the Norman Conquest," he said. "We always
put the 
> focus on new words, changing language and words from other
countries, but in 
> reality the basic language we use has been the same for hundreds and 
> hundreds of years."
> 
> This means that at a fundamental level the English language hasn't
changed 
> much for over 2000 years.
> 
> John Roberts
>

It seems interesting to me that _time_ is also the first noun in The
American Heritage Word Frequency Book (1971) and in The Brown Count
(1967). 

Regards,
David K. Barnhart

Lexik at highlands.com



 
    
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