[Lexicog] semantic domains

[Wayne Leman]

--- 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

I am interested by the discussion about the ratio of nouns to verbs
in a
dictionary. But from my experience one might expect to see a wide
variation in the proportions.

English has quite a lot of abstract nouns corresponding to event
words,
and in my SIL training as a translator it was often stressed that in
many non-western languages such concepts have to be expressed by
verbs
rather than nouns. That would suggest that these languages would have
a
significantly higher proportion of verbs in their lexicon.

But not all non-western languages work like this. In Azerbaijani and
Persian (also in Turkish, but more so in Ottoman than modern Turkish)
a
large number of verbal concepts are expressed by means of a "compound
verb" consisting of a noun (or sometimes an adjective) and one of a
small number of simple verbs such as "be", "do", "give". The nouns
and
adjectives are typically borrowed from Arabic, and are often Arabic
verbal nouns, but take noun morphology in the host language; most but
not all of these words can also be used independently. As a result,
these languages are rich in nouns, but have very few verbs if these
compound verbs are not taken as lexical units.

So, although from a semantic viewpoint we might expect to see similar
ratios of event and thing concepts across languages, we should not
assume that the proportion of nouns and verbs, according to
morphological and syntactic categories, is similarly stable across
languages.

--
Peter Kirk
peter at q... (personal)
peterkirk at q... (work)
http://www.qaya.org/





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