ocromm | Re: Missing word in the multi language dictionaries.

• Autor: ocromm
• Tema: Re: Missing word in the multi language dictionaries.
• Data: 2002-10-17 16:43
• Mesaje: 342 (a supra, presedente, seguente)

--- In LinguaFrancaNova@y..., "P Bjorn Madsen" <europidgin@y...> wrote:
> I think I now have found the most needed of the missing words for our multi language dictionaries. I ended up with around 120 entries in English.
>
> It would be very nice if some of our members would translate from English to all the other languages. A file, "missing.wrd", is uploaded to the Files Section.
>
> Bjorn

I'll post the translations into German, but here are a few comments.

About the wordlist:

Many of the words are quite ambiguous, or can be noun and verb or adjective. As this is meant to be a very basic dictionary, I tried to leave out as many less frequent senses as possible, also consulting George's list as to which senses are present on the LFN side of the dictionary. Sometimes I don't know, still. I was wondering before, how George managed to have so many one-to-one entries in the English-LFN wordlist.

E.g., to me "office" is a very obviously ambiguous word; I found that besides English, only Italian can use the same word (ufficio) for both senses, but not French or Spanish.

The most difficult word in the list was "off", though, because it is mainly grammatical, and in most sentences interacts with other words to give a composite meaning.

I went to some length to explain these difficulties because I see one of the greatest pitfalls of IAL here: people will automatically tend to translate words from their mother tongue or some other language one-to-one into LFN, especially since there is no norm set by native speakers. I wonder how to avoid misunderstandings caused by that.

I think I am quite sensitive to ambiguities and the infinite nuances in language, but many people are less aware of it. i am sure George is sensitive to this, but still he has given only one translation for "office", "property", and "excuse", among others.

How many native speakers of English notice that there are at least three major uses of "excuse": apology, justification, and pretext? The English language let's you think these words are the same, but you need at least two different translations even for English's sister language, German. Translating this list into Japanese, there would be few entries for which one translations can do.

I don't want to nag, I appeal to great care. Apples are easy to translate, but excuses aren't...

Oliver