LL-L "Lexicon" 2011.04.25 (03) [EN]

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L O W L A N D S - L - 25 April 2011 - Volume 03
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From: Pat Barrett <pbarrett at cox.net>
Subject: LL-L "Lexicon" 2011.04.25 (01) [AF-EN]

Then one more step would be if you were in The Netherlands and said
'veehouderij', what image would that bring up? IOW, is the image brought up
dependent on the social context? If I understand the word rightly, 'vee' =
cattle and 'houd' = hold (erij = holding). Is it that in Northern Europe the
image brought up might be of a small stock-raising operation but in Texas of
the sprawling cowboy ranch?

I am imagining a different word for 'enchilada', like 'rolled cheese' that
would conjure up the image of an enchilada only in the US SW versus
something quite different in Scotland, say. So we might argue that simply
borrowing the Spanish word gives us more precision independent of the
cultural context, Arizona vs Scotland.



The reason I'm going into such detail on this is that I think of my
Pakistani friends who use English in a way, esp vocabulary, that can be
quite misleading e.g. "rush" meaning 'a crowd'. "There was quite a rush at
the airport" would make me think of people running for planes whereas they
would simply mean a lot of people.



How do we "control" (impossible) the proliferation of meanings? Maybe it is
to specify the cultural-geographical context. I think only English and
Spanish and French, due to colonial empires, have this problem.

Pat Barrett
http://ideas.lang-learn.us/barrett.php



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