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

Fri Mar 1 12:09:27 UTC 2013

Hi Adam

#1 Terre a Terre evidently has a very eclectic menu! :)

But I can shed some light on one item:

"Served with thakkali rasam of tamarind and tomato"

#1.1 'thakkali' is a transliteration of the Tamil word for tomato

- there is, and probably never will be, any *commonly accepted*

transliteration system for Indian languages - my own "surname"

(actually my father's given name; so cultural differences are also

involved) has been spelled variously in my lifetime by my own parents

and other family members; so there is cross-linguistic tautology in the

addition of 'and tomato'... :)

#1.2 'rasam' is a thin lentil soup, the 2nd course in a traditional South Indian

vegetarian meal, that has not yet become as well-known as 'sambar' (a thicker

version, served as 1st/main course). Tomato/thakkali rasam is probably the

commonest variety, and tamarind is a frequent component. 'jeera rasam',

strongly spiced with cummin, is often used as an antidote to colds,

flu, coughs, etc

#1.3 As my mum has written, in her (so far only limited family-edition) recipe book:

"Having tasted the Rasam with rice, if a guest asks for Rasam in a cup

to drink as well, it is the highest accolade he can shower on the hostess.

For, in South Indian tradition, a wife's cooking prowess is judged by how

well the Rasam turns out.  Pale yellowy-orange, almost clear, aromatic

with black mustard seeds and fresh curry leaves floating on home-made

ghee - who can resist it?  Fresh ground spices and a sprig of coriander

to on top - one of my aunts could not resist garnishing the dish with fresh

picked fragrant rose petals!  Delicious is the word."

#2 As regards corpus occurrences, 'rasam' has zero occurrences in the BNC

and 12 in COCA...

#3 'Rasam' is included in:

http://oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/rasam

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rasam

#4 If there is a distinction to be made between lexical entries and encyclopaedic entries

in dictionaries, perhaps 'rasam' remains an encyclopedic item?

best

Ramesh

----------------------------------------------

Date: Thu, 28 Feb 2013 11:44:31 +0000
From: Adam Kilgarriff <adam at lexmasterclass.com>
Subject: Re: [Corpora-List] "Tajweed" in English dictionaries and
corpora
To: Eric Atwell <E.S.Atwell at leeds.ac.uk>
Cc: CORPORA discussion forum <corpora at uib.no>

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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