[Lexicog] No word for ...

[Kenneth C. Hill]

Rudy's example about languages with singulary terms for 'older brother',
etc. raises the interesting question of how such a language deals with
concepts such as that expressed in English as 'brothers', i.e., the set of
older and/or younger brothers. In Hopi 'older and younger brothers' is
expressed by naatupkom (dual)/naanatupkom (plural). Naatupkom (naa-tupko-m
[REFLEXIVE-younger.sibling-NONSINGULAR]) means (1) siblings of the same
sex, (2) younger brother/older sister pair. Hopi abounds in expressions
referring to various combinations of relatives. One reason this is of
lexicographical significance is that a word like naatupkom should be
accessible under 'brother' in the English-to-Hopi finder list but we
forgot to include it because we weren't thinking of these complexities. We
included only 'older brother' and 'younger brother' (each of which has its
own forms inflected for number) but we forgot to specify how older and
younger brothers are referred to at the same time. One reason for this
lexicography list is to help us all to do lexicography better.

This also brings my attention to the fact that until recently English had
no term for 'brother or sister regardless of sex'. Lately, the term
'sibling' has filled this gap. The OED specifies 'sibling' as 'obsolete',
but the term was resuscitated in the anthropological literature and has
now become fairly widely accepted.

--Ken Hill

--- rtroike at email.arizona.edu 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.
> 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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