[Lexicog] No word for ...

[Andrew Dalby]

--- In lexicographylist at yahoogroups.com, rtroike at ... wrote:
>
> 
> 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.

That would have to be a very strong Whorfian indeed. It's true that
Whorf said 'Chinese has no word for "word"', but I don't think he ever
said that Chinese speakers would be incapable of expressing the
distinction.

The stronger-than-Whorf Whorfian, if such there be, would (unless very
myopic) also add that the incapacity you describe only applies to
monolingual English speakers. All who were bilingual in the East Asian
language that makes the distinction, would be capable of expressing it.

To take a different example, French has no word for 'clock'. It has
different words approximating to 'alarm clock', 'grandfather clock',
'shelf clock', etc. If you go into a French shop and choose the wrong
word, the average French speaker may not be easily able to understand
what you want. But (a) a French speaker who also knows English will
find your problem easy to solve, and (b) any French speaker, once you
get into a philosophical discussion about it, will easily accept that
there is a possible concept, more specific than 'timepiece' and less
specific than 'reveille-matin', for which another language may have a
simple word, and will then be able to express the concept to another
French speaker.

Andrew

http://perso.wanadoo.fr/dalby/





 
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