[Lexicog] salutations and leave-takings

[Mike_Cahill at SIL.ORG]

To follow up on Cami, I'll chip in with my own African greetings
information - and a question. In the morning, the Koma people (N. Ghana)
say "lying down?" Answer: "lying down is good", then go through inquiries
about your wife/husband, children, other relatives, house, farm, and so on.
Question: in a dictionary, would you put "good morning" as a translation
for this? Functionally it is equivalent; lexeme-by-lexeme it surely is not!
The broader question is how much do you "translate" in a bilingual
dictionary, and how much do you explain functional equivalents?

By the way, the answers to inquiries about family in the greeting are
purely formulaic and not supposed to be strictly informational. This was
brought out when someone came to our village house early one morning and
after I asked him how his wife and everyone was, and he said "good,
strong,etc." it turned out the reason for his visit was his wife was
deathly ill and needed medical help! (She recovered) We do something of the
same in America, though maybe (!) not as extreme, when we say "how are you
doing?" but rarely want to stop to listen to a long explanation of the
person's woes and blessings.

Mike Cahill




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