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

[Jim Fidelholtz]

Hi, All,

On Wed, 6 Mar 2013, Khurshid Ahmad wrote:

What is an Islamic word? An Arabic word? A Persian word? An Urdu word? A
> Berber word? I have not come across words that belong to a religion: Hindu
> word? Christian word? Jewish word? More confoundingly Otto Lassen suggested
> that there are Islamic words?


Eric answered with some data about different *origin language* vocabularies
for the borrowed words used in discussions of the respective Muslim and
Christian religious topics. That's all well and good, as long as we do not
confuse the *origin* of a word with the *language* it is used in and start
going off on tangents about code-switching and the like. A clarifying
example I have mentioned more than once is the pronunciation of 'Bach' in
English, that is, [bax] by most educated speakers of English, including me.
I have seen this phenomenon given as an example of 'code-switching', to
which I have two disconfirmatory comments: (1) first, we need to have and
use the technical term *borrowing*, which is a word originally *from*
another language 'borrowed' for use within (NB) another language (an
American Indian linguist once complained to me that such borrowings are
never returned, but that's a separate issue), almost always in the first
instance by an (at least somewhat) bilingual speaker of the first
language--that is, the word is *in* English, even though initially
temporarily; (2) pretty much whether or not the (English) speaker knows
German, the [x] is a plain velar fricative (NB: not a phoneme of English,
or even a sound in the language (except for a few interjections
(yeccchhh!), apart from this word), not the retracted, almost postvelar
fricative in the German pronunciation [note: this is a very important
point--non-interjection or -marker words in a language only have non-native
phonology temporarily, while on the way to full nativization or,
alternatively, obsolescence--note the limerick below my signature]. These
facts, of course, are totally independent, I think, of the question of
whether they should be in a (specific!) dictionary. Of course, there are
legitimate code switches, but aside from these cases, words borrowed into a
language, however temporarily, *are* IN the language. So, although I've
never used the word before this discussion, 'tajwid' is an English word. At
least for now. Ask me again next year. Meanwhile, it probably does not
belong in most dictonaries, at least not yet.

Jim

[warning: the following is one of the few clean limericks I know, as I'm a
kind of sewer of limericks:]

There once was a fellow named Hatch
Who was fond of the music of Bach.
He said, "It's not fussy
Like Brahms or Debussy.
Sit down and I'll play you a snatch!"

footnote (to a limerick? Who do I think I am, Gershon Legman?):
pronunciation: [braemz]
PS: Now *that's* Anglicization.


On Thu, Mar 7, 2013 at 1:14 PM, Trevor Jenkins <
trevor.jenkins at suneidesis.com> wrote:

> On 7 Mar 2013, at 19:00, Eric Atwell <E.S.Atwell at leeds.ac.uk> wrote:
>
> > British Christians on the other hand use very few Greek or Hebrew words
> in discourse about their religion, since they have English translations to
> use. But does this mean that words like "Tajweed" are foreign whereas
> Christian specialised terms are English?
>
> For completely bogus reasons Christians, whether in Britain or elsewhere
> in world, use Latin terms for basic fundamental tenets of their faith,, for
> example salvation, baptism, sacrifice. I could go on but in the words of
> Strong in his introduction to the Bible concordance that bears his name "I
> would be repeating the entire text."
>
> Should a translator try to use something that is English and therefore
> meaningful to readers their translation is likely to be peppered with
> buckshot and sent back to them with rather menacing notes. (Such happened
> to the RSV team when they tried correctly to use the descriptive phrase
> "nubile young woman" rather than virgin as the translation for ALMAH in a
> verse in a Hebrew Bible book.)
>
> Regards, Trevor.
>
> <>< Re: deemed!
>
>
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-- 
James L. Fidelholtz
Posgrado en Ciencias del Lenguaje
Instituto de Ciencias Sociales y Humanidades
Benemérita Universidad Autónoma de Puebla, MÉXICO
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