George Boeree | Re: [LinguaFrancaNova] Re: Missing word in the multi language dictionaries.

• Autor: George Boeree (“cgboeree”)
• Tema: Re: [LinguaFrancaNova] Re: Missing word in the multi language dictionaries.
• Data: 2002-10-17 17:27
• Mesaje: 346 (a supra, presedente, seguente)

Welcome to the group, Oliver!

Multiple meanings are a problem, you are quite right, and whenever you
find serious ones, please let us know.  My languages are English, Dutch,
and French, and I read some Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, and Catalan.
But only the first three enable me to easily spot these problems.

The only excuse (!) I can offer is that, at this point, we have other,
more pressing concerns, such as the basic dictionaries, just to get
people started in LFN.  A textbook is our next project.  Generally
speaking, I envisioned LFN as being less precise than natural languages,
allowing different speakers to use words with a broad discretion as to
specific meanings.  In other words, generally speaking, if there are
languages with nuances concerning a word like excuse, the nuances will
tend to be lost in LFN.  I am hoping that they can be recovered by using
adjectives and other constructions to specify which nuance is intended.
I suspect that an IAL will be a "work" language more than an "art"
language -- that being a domain that (perhaps) should remain to the
natural languages.

Again, welcome to the group, and thank you for your contributions!

George

ocromm wrote:

>  --- 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
>