[Corpora-List] "Tajweed" in English dictionaries and corpora

[Adam Kilgarriff]

Eric,

I just wrote a book chapter on "How many words are there" which seems
moderately relevant - here's part of the section on imports:



*Restaurant English*

As explained by Douglas Adams in the Hitchhikers’ Guide to the Galaxy, a
distinct form of  mathematics takes over in restaurants.   Likewise, a
distinct form of English.  Let us make a linguistic visit to the grandest
of our  local vegetarian restaurants, ‘Terre a Terre’.  A sample of their
menu:


Red onion, mustard seed, cumin crumpets with coconut curry leaf and lime
sabayon, ginger root chilli jam and a fresh coriander, mint salsa sas.
Served with thakkali rasam of tamarind and tomato, nimbu bhat cardamom
brown onion lemon saffron baked basmati rice with our  confit brinjal
pickle.


The peculiar thing about this form of English is that, while the language
is English, most of the nouns don’t seem to be.  They form a subtext to the
history of the population itself, with:


   - Indigenous: *onion mustard seed crumpet leaf root jam mint pickle*
   - Fully naturalised: c*umin coconut curry lime ginger coriander tamarind
   tomato cardamom saffron rice*
   - Recent (within my lifetime)*: salsa bhat basmati confit brinjal*
   - Novel*: s**abayon sas thakali rasam nimbu*

A restaurant like Terre a Terre is at the leading edge of both culinary and
linguistic multiculturalism.  All sorts of other areas have their
borrowings too: wherever we share artefacts or ideas or practices with
another culture, we import associated vocabulary, for example in music
(*bhangra,
didgeridoo*), clothes (*pashmina, lederhosen) *or religion
*(stupa,muezzin)*.
The question “but is this word English” feels narrow-minded and unhelpful.
To give a number to the words of English, we would need to be narrow-minded
and unhelpful .


Best


Adam

On 28 February 2013 10:03, Eric Atwell <E.S.Atwell at leeds.ac.uk> wrote:

> Can anyone point me at research on vocabulary related to Islam,
> and how it figures in British dictionaries and corpora?
> (other than "Terrorism" of course - well-researched by corpus linguists :-)
>
> We have a UK-EPSRC project on "Natural Language Processing Working
> Together With Arabic And Islamic Studies", focussing on Tajweed.
> I've just discovered a Quite Interesting fact about Tajweed:
>
> It is worth noting that even though "Tajweed" is a term understood by
> most British muslims (2.7 million or 5% of the UK population according
> to UK Census 2011), the word is left out of most British English
> dictionaries: it is not found in the Oxford English Dictionary, the
> Collins English Dictionary, or the Longman Dicitionary of Contemporary
> English. "Tajweed" is also not found in the 100-million-word British
> National Corpus, although Google search for "tajweed" reports "About
> 1,800,000 results".
>
> The only English-language "dictionary definition" I could find for
> "Tajweed" was in Wikipedia:
>
> Tajw.d (Arabic: ...... ta.w.d: IPA: [tæ.wi.d]) is an Arabic word for
> elocution and refers to the rules governing pronunciation during
> recitation of the Qur'an.
>
> I would have thought that, although the word is Arabic by origin, it is
> now a fully-British English loan word, used by many British English
> speakers....
>
>
> Eric Atwell, Associate Professor, Language research group,
>  I-AIBS Institute for Artificial Intelligence and Biological Systems
>  School of Computing, Faculty of Engineering, UNIVERSITY OF LEEDS
>  Leeds LS2 9JT, England.        TEL: 0113-3435430  FAX: 0113-3435468
>  WWW: http://www.comp.leeds.ac.uk/**eric<http://www.comp.leeds.ac.uk/eric>
>       http://www.comp.leeds.ac.uk/**nlp <http://www.comp.leeds.ac.uk/nlp>
>       http://www.comp.leeds.ac.uk/**arabic<http://www.comp.leeds.ac.uk/arabic>
>
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>


-- 
========================================
Adam Kilgarriff <http://www.kilgarriff.co.uk/>
adam at lexmasterclass.com
Director                                    Lexical Computing
Ltd<http://www.sketchengine.co.uk/>

Visiting Research Fellow                 University of
Leeds<http://leeds.ac.uk>

*Corpora for all* with the Sketch Engine <http://www.sketchengine.co.uk>

                        *DANTE: a lexical database for
English<http://www.webdante.com>
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