Re: Vocabulary concept mismatches

On Thu, Mar 04, 2004 at 07:48:27PM -0600, Herman Miller wrote:
> One of the things that's really interesting about languages, but not
> well documented in dictionaries, is the fact that the meanings of words
> don't match precisely from one language to another.
?  I'd say this is very well-documented, in bilingual dictionaries and
in the literature in general.

>              mizu
> water   <
>               yu
Just considering English vs. Spanish:

        be              ser, estar
        for             para, por
        know            conocer, saber

Of course, this last distinction is also present in German, Esperanto, etc.
English is in the minority there.

Then there are sets of words where one of the meanings of one English
word maps to two Spanish words, at least one of which maps to more than
one English word . . . you quickly have to resort to Venn diagrams to
sort out sets like this:

        have, hold      tener, haber

. . . even if you ignore the use of "haber" as a form of "be" in the sense
of "there is".  Also in the category, but less sprouty in terms of
semantic branches, are sets like this:

        find, meet      encontrar, hallar

[When you meet a person, that's encontrar.  When you happen upon an item
("I found a penny!") that's also encontrar.  But when you find something
that you were searching for ("I finally found my keys!") that's hallar.]

I don't think this is an under-investigated region.  But there are
always all sorts of new ways you can divide things up or combine
together when coming up with a conlang lexicon.  It seems more dividing
up goes on than combining together, though.

-Mark

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