Re: Polysemy

On Fri, Jun 15, 2007 at 02:33:39PM -0700, Sai Emrys wrote:
[...]
> I'd like the more obvious kind of polysemy one gets with a word like
> "spirit" (ghost, alcohol, passion, disappear (trans.), quickly, etc).
>
> I'm not overly concerned with etymologies, though it's better when you
> can (somewhat laboriously) trace a path to a common ancestor-idea -
> again, WF&DT and the other examples in that book come to mind - but
> the "accidental" sort where phonology evolutions collide is of
> interest as well.
You mean like Russian мир (world, peace), which used to be spelt
differently until the 1918 reform got rid of one of the /i/'s? And which
were in fact derived from the same root in the original language?
(Makes me wonder how one works around the horrendous ambiguities when
speaking of world peace in Russian... how do native speakers do it?)


T

--
If a person can't communicate, the very least he could do is to shut up.
-- Tom Lehrer

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