reciprocity for bilingual dictionaries?

[Benjamin Barrett]

Although I have seen dictionaries pull multiple word entries into
headwords like get up, I agree they are best dealt with inside other
entries. There is still the problem of trying to weed through the get
entry in English to find get up, etc., though, because a good J to E has
dozens of subentries.

As for the tiramisu, we hope to be open by the 10th of February or so,
across the street from Eva. The store will probably be called Hiroki. We
are confident our fancy tiramisu will live up to even the hardest-core
DiLaurentian fan.

In addition to our regular (fancy) tiramisu, we think our "green tea
tiramisu" will take Seattle by surprise. Although we'd like to take
credit for creating this noun, Google has more than 120 hits. Ours still
might be the first to incorporate sake in the recipe.

Benjamin Barrett
Bringing fancy tiramisu and mont blanc to Seattle

> -----Original Message-----
> From: American Dialect Society
> [mailto:ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU] On Behalf Of Wendalyn Nichols
> Sent: Wednesday, 15 January, 2003 15:15
> To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU
> Subject: Re: reciprocity for bilingual dictionaries?
>
>
> Complete reciprocity isn't truly possible because languages
> don't have one-to-one correspondence of individual terms, let
> alone idioms and collocations. For instance, in Benjamin's
> example below, there would not be a headword for the compound
> "clothes changing day" on the English side of an E-J
> dictionary, because this is not a recognized compound in
> English. However, a good dictionary would show such terms as
> glossed examples at the most relevant entry--usually the
> first or core noun in a compound or phrase. On projects that,
> from the outset, are meant to aid the student in both
> directions--ones that have both an L1-L2 and an L2-L1
> side--it is now possible, and indeed desirable, to use
> electronic sweeps to help you determine if the words used on
> one side are represented on the other. But this only gets you
> so far; there's no substitute for carefully developed
> headword lists that are all but complete before a project
> starts, so that the compilers of each side have both lists to
> refer to.
>
> By the way, Benjamin, DeLaurenti's Deli in the Pike Place
> Market brought the recipe for tiramisu into its newsletter
> for ordinary Seattleites many moons ago--at least by the
> early 80s when I briefly worked there! Of course, since your
> tiramisu is "fancy", maybe we all could use the recipe? ;-)
>
> Wendalyn Nichols
>
> At 02:25 PM 1/15/03 -0800, Benjamin Barrett wrote:
> >This has long been a point of irritation for me, too.
> >
> >Use any Japanese to English dictionary and you'll find all sorts of
> >interesting cultural items. But if you forget the Japanese
> word after
> >you look it up, good luck because E to J dictionaries don't include
> >cultural words like clothes changing day (i.e., summer to winter and
> >vice-versa) and summer kimono (yukata). I assume they aren't
> included
> >because you don't run into those sorts of words in English
> corpora. The
> >problem is that the student needs those words really desperately.
> >
> >The J/E dictionary quality has gotten better over the years (and the
> >new Green Goddess by Kenkyusha in May promises to be better
> yet), and
> >more of those items are being included, but it's still a
> nightmare for
> >the student.
> >
> >Benjamin Barrett
> >Bringing fancy tiramisu and mont blanc to Seattle
> >
> > > -----Original Message-----
> > > From: American Dialect Society [mailto:ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU] On
> > > Behalf Of Peter A. McGraw
> > > Sent: Wednesday, 15 January, 2003 14:08
> > > To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU
> > > Subject: Re: reciprocity for bilingual dictionaries?
> > >
> > >
> > > I would say there's a more interesting definition of
> reciprocity in
> > > reference to bilingual dictionaries than the word-for-word notion
> > > hazarded below.  In fact, the lack of one such reciprocity is the
> > > subject of one of the griping letters that I have been meaning to
> > > write for years.
>