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

Sat Mar 2 14:40:15 UTC 2013

Hi

I don't think Eric was making any ideological implications, but just

asking genuine questions.

I doubt that BNC deliberately excluded any texts for ideological reasons

as such, although some of the selections may have been biased by

both availability and compiler judgments. However, the texts in the BNC are

from >1993, and therefore clearly cannot possibly reflect changes that have

taken place in the UK population and culture since then.

As an inhabitant of UK, and having a fairly well-trained eye and ear for words,

from being a corpus linguist and lexicographer, I had not become conscious of

'tajweed' (in any spelling form) until this discussion. Whereas halal, sharia, hajj,

burka, jihad, sheesha, and other 'arabic/islamic culture' words have entered my

discourse community, and I would regard them as "English words".

Every dictionary has different criteria for inclusion/exclusion, and it is important

that these criteria should be made public, so users and linguists can discuss their

validity, and their accurate implementation in a specific dictionary. The OED gives

some information about their criteria at:

http://public.oed.com/the-oed-today/rewriting-the-oed/sorting-of-quotations/

However, no dictionary can be totally comprehensive, especially in the

case of English, in its current status as a global language. Therefore,

some degree of editorial judgment will be involved, and is especially likely

to be biased at the peripheries (temporal and cultural) of the language.

I am waiting to access a freely (no money) available reference corpus of UK

English which is at least > 2010, as I have many queries stored up, but no

adequate resource for several years.

best wishes

Ramesh

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

Date: Sat, 2 Mar 2013 02:11:00 +0100
From: "Otto Lassen" <otto at lassen.mail.dk>
Subject: Re: [Corpora-List] "Tajweed" in English dictionaries and
corpora
To: "Patrick Juola" <juola at mathcs.duq.edu>
Cc: CORPORA discussion forum <corpora at uib.no>

Hi Patrick Juola
I think you hit the nail on the head. Eric Atwell want to study if
Tajweed has been left out from BNC by "systematic bias on
the part of the BNC" and the same with regard to the
dictionaries: the possibility of a "deliberate exclusion
of 'tajweed' ".
Call it a study in lingvistic racism against muslims!
But the arguments for his suspicion are halting.
Oxford English Dictionary has not tajweed but is has
e.g. fiqh, sharia, zakat.
Encyclopædia Britannica has 'tajweed' but it is spelled ?tajwid?.
He writes that " it is now a fully-British English loan word,
used by many British English speakers". But the "many British
English speakers" are at most 5% muslims and not and never
the 95% because it is limited to the religion of the 5%.
And his suspicion is build on only one word without any
qualified analysis.
At best - mush ado about nothing!
Regards
Otto Lassen

-----Oprindelig meddelelse-----
From: Patrick Juola
Sent: Friday, March 01, 2013 10:01 PM
Cc: CORPORA discussion forum
Subject: Re: [Corpora-List] "Tajweed" in English dictionaries and corpora

Well, it's apparent to me that, just as "haemodialysis" is a medical
word, "tyranosaurus" a biological one, and "ontological" a
philosophical one, "tajweed" is an Islamic one. Almost all words that
have meanings have domains associated with them.

I would consider a dictionary or corpus that made a point of excluding
"ontological" to be a poor one. I would equally consider the
deliberate exclusion of "tajweed" to be a poor decision. Now, if
you're simply saying that "tajweed" isn't common enough to fit into a
limited-scope print dictionary that has to confine itself to the top
100,000 or so vocabulary words, that's one thing, but not especially
relevant to corpus linguistics.

If you're suggesting that it's not common enough to appear in English
discourse or corpora at all, ... well, I think that's what Eric is
disagreeing with, and he's suggesting that it's a lot more common than
the BNC suggests (which may be systematic bias on the part of the
BNC). That's an interesting research topic.

If you're suggesting that "Islamic" is somehow incompatible with
English, then I specifically reject that suggestion.

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

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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