Oun: On Tue, May 7, 2013 at 3:31 PM, Oun Kwon <[email protected]> wrote:
> On Mon, May 6, 2013 at 7:00 PM, John Leake <[email protected]> wrote: > > > > Hi John, > > One of the problem I face is about the meaning of 'meaning'. When > there are multitudes listed under a word in a lexicon/dictionary, are > they all what we call 'meaning'? Lot's of them I see as not 'meaning' > as such, but a certain usage. Someone argued one time on a different > list that 'evening' (also) means 'afternoon' or 'late afternoon', I > don't recall clearly. Lo, there is a such in any decent English > dictionary. But, looking carefully, it is a Southern dialect. It's > usage; hardly a meaning of a word. > > Oun Kwon > What you describe is what I call the difference between a translator’s dictionary, which lists a bewildering array of every possible word that can be used to translate a particular word in another language, and a user’s or learner’s dictionary which tries to describe a word’s meaning and possible semantic range of usage. To use your example, a learner’s dictionary would define “night” as “the time between sunset and sunrise when the sun doesn’t shine, also used metaphorically to places where there’s extended darkness because the sun doesn’t shine there, such as a cave.” after which it would list the parts of night, such as twilight, evening, midnight, and dawn. Then when you come to the word “evening”, it would be defined as “the early hours of night usually undefined but before midnight, though some dialectal (non-standard) uses extend it to denote also late afternoon.” I try to make my dictionary a learner’s dictionary, not a translator’s dictionary. But there are two weaknesses in it—because I didn’t set out to write my own dictionary, rather it started as explanatory notes in the margins of other dictionaries, some of my definitions are rather abridged, that in my mind raise whole pictures, but may not explain to another the same ideas. An example is לילה “night” where I assume the user has the total picture as given in the paragraph above so I don’t give a full description. The second weakness I notice is that I didn’t include Bible verses where a word may be found. While I still don’t include the verses for common words, used more than 20 times in Tanakh, for those words used fewer than 20 times I usually list at least a few verses where they are found, and for those words used 5 times or fewer, I usually list all the verses where they are found. But this adding lists of verses is still an unfinished task. So when you look at a term in a dictionary, is it merely a list of words that can be used to translate that word, or is it a description of what the word means. Karl W. Randolph.
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