[Lexicog] circular definitions

[Benjamin Barrett]

I think at least for the cow/bull entry in English, the dictionary should give examples of what sort of species the words apply to. Many native English speakers are not aware that a male whale is a bull and a female a cow. My American Heritage Dictionary 3 gives:
 
1a. An adult male bovine mammal.
1b. The uncastrated adult male of domestic cattle.
1c. The male of certain other large animals, such as the alligator, elephant, or moose.
 
These three seem good to me. 1a gives the most common reading. 1b tells the reader that once castrated, a bull is not a bull (though 1a would include it). And 1c gives breadth, though I think whale should be included as well because people probably won't think of sea mammals as fitting into 1c.
 
The entry then goes on to give other meanings of bull, such as a large person; an optimist, etc. You couldn't include the word bull in a dictionary and only these latter meanings without the basic 1a-c meanings. That would confuse the reader.
 
As for Japanese, you just put the word for male/female together with the name of the animal (o-ushi for bull, mesu-ushi for cow), and the words do not have additional meanings, so I can imagine in Japanese, inclusion of these in a monolingual dictionary would be for completeness rather than edification of the reader.
 
Thus I guess I can see Phillippe Humblé's point for not including bull/cow in a Japanese monolingual dictionary, but not an English monolingual one.
 
But surely it is not the job of the lexicographer to decide whether to include such basic words. (This is different from selecting words to include based on their frequency of use.) What may seem obvious to one lexicographer may not be so to the public at large. And excluding some such words would cause distress for people who need help with such words, such as those speaking a different dialect, children needing to know whether bull has one l or two, and people wanting other information such as the etymology.
 
Benjamin Barrett
 
 -----Original Message-----
From: cce [mailto:humble at cce.ufsc.br] 
Sent: Tuesday, 09 March 2004 1:22 AM
To: lexicographylist at yahoogroups.com
Subject: RE: [Lexicog] circular definitions


 
Wouldn’t it be that the question underlying this whole issue is that we don’t really know what a monolingual dictionary is for? Apart from the evident answers, I mean. We obviously don’t know all the words in our own language and occasionally we stumble on a word we don’t understand. Personally, I have two mother tongues, Dutch and French, and every once in a while I have to look up a word I don’t know. More in French than in Dutch, because I read more literature in French. But, on the whole, I hardly ever use the Robert or the Van Dale. But in any case, I would never look up a word like ‘cow’ or ‘bull’ in a monolingual dictionary, not in Dutch or French,  for obvious reasons, and not in any other foreign language, because in that case, Japanese for instance, I would not understand a monolingual dictionary and I would only understand it if the learning of words like ‘cow’ and ‘bull’ would be so far away I couldn’t even remember how and when I learned them. So, in Japanese, I use a bilingual dictionary. 
<snipped throughout>
So the definition of what a ‘cow’ and a ‘bull’ is, is an existential question, not first a lexicographical one.  
  
I can’t imagine a concrete dictionary user looking up a word like ‘cow’ in a monolingual dictionary just to know what a ‘cow’ is. A situation like, for instance, someone coming across the word ‘cow’ in a sentence like “Did you know that cows love cereal, just like you?” wondering what a ‘cows’ would be?  
 
Philippe Humblé
  
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