[Lexicog] (unknown)

[rtroike at EMAIL.ARIZONA.EDU]

One point that often gets overlooked in such discussions, but which
lexicographers should be especially sensitive to, is the correspondence
between "words" in Language X and "phrases" in Language Y.

In this category, for example, is the encoding of age relative to speaker
for male and female siblings in Chinese (and many other languages):

                  Chinese                       English
             Male       Female             Male        Female

Older       gege        jiejie
                                          brother      sister
Younger     didi        meimei

(I like to use this in class to illustrate Pike's notion of "emic" vs
"etic".)

Emically, English distinguishes only two categories by sex. Korean actually
goes Chinese one better by emically encoding sex-reflexivity of speaker in
different terms (for older siblings at least), thus increasing the number
of potential cells in the etic grid.

Looking at this, one could conclude that English is woefully impoverished
in this obviously (from an East Asian point of view) extremely culturally
important distinction of relative age, and a "strong Whorfian" looking
myopically at this would simply conclude that "English has no term for
'older brother' or 'younger brother', etc." So while it would indeed be
true that there would be no entry in the dictionary, this does not mean
that English speakers are somehow incapable of expressing this distinction.
It simply means that they are not _required_ by the pre-packaged lexical
item to express this. But if asked, "Is X your older brother or your
younger brother" any English speaker can respond. However, it is unlikely
that most dictionaries would include entries for "older brother" or
"younger brother", etc. And thus a Whorfian, using a dictionary to find
out whether a particular linguistic group "has a term" for X, could quickly
come to erroneous conclusions regarding the existence or absence of a
conceptual category. Therefore, to echo Ken Hill's warning, one must
always be very cautious in making assertions about this issue.

      Rudy Troike





 
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