[Lexicog] circular definitions

[Translation MALI]

MessageDoes anyone know where the Wall street term "bull market" comes from?

Fritz Goerling



  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

   
    a..  

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