[Lexicog] semantic domains

[Wayne Leman]

--- In lexicographylist at yahoogroups.com, "Peter Kirk"
<peterkirk at q...> wrote:
--- In lexicographylist at yahoogroups.com, "Translation MALI"
<translation_mali at s...> wrote:
> Peter,
>
> From my experience as a translation consultant in West Africa
> I cannot confirm that prejudice that in many non-western languages
> abstract concepts have to be expressed by verbs. Into one language
> in West Africa with which I am familiar, both the Bible and the
Qur'an
> were translated, and a theological and philosophical vocabulary
> exists. Ideas like Thorleif Borman's in "Hebrew Thought Compared
> with Greek", claiming that Hebrew is dynamic and concrete
> as expressed in the verbs as opposed to Greek being abstract
> have long since been debunked. The danger with these generalizations
> is that selected linguistic evidence is used to support preconceived
> theories about the worldviews of other languages and cultures.
> Ths ends in stereotyping and worse.
>
> Thanks for stimulating this discussion,
>
> Fritz Goerling

Fritz, I was not trying to support theories like Borman's, or to say
anything about worldviews. I was simply summarising the position
expounded e.g. in "Translating the Word of God", by Beekman and
Callow. According to them (p.217), "Abstract nouns, then, represent a
mismatch or skewing between the semantic classification and the
grammatical classification... In addition, languages differ
considerably in the extent to which they use abstract nouns."
Elsewhere I have heard suggestions that some languages have almost no
abstract nouns, but I cannot confirm that.

The best way I can clarify this is probably to refer again to the
distinction between grammar and semantics. The point I was making was
a grammatical one, that certain concepts are expressed with different
grammatical forms in different languages. I was not making a semantic
point, I was not suggesting that different semantics are used in
different languages, and certainly not that it is impossible to
express or translate abstract concepts into any language.

As for translation, it is possible to translate complex texts into
languages which don't have abstract nouns, as long as the translation
is not expected to be highly literal. Indeed this has been done into
many languages. The grammatical forms have to be adjusted so that the
abstract concepts are described by verbs rather than nouns (Beekman
and Callow etc give examples of how to do this), but with care the
semantics can be preserved.

Peter Kirk
--- End forwarded message ---