Model Languages

The newsletter discussing newly imagined words for newly imagined worlds

Volume I, Issue 6 (1/2) -- October/November 1, 1995

Table of contents

• Meaning
  • The bother of brother
  • Translations (meanings across languages)
  • Prototypes for the birds
  • Conclusion

Meaning

I won't use words again
They don't mean what I meant
They don't say what I said
They're just the crust of the meaning
With realms underneath
Never touched
Never stirred

Never even moved through

If language were liquid
It would be rushing in

Suzanne Vega, "Language"

If language were liquid, we could enter a submersible and use sound waves to reveal the subterranean terrain. For each word floats like a buoy, anchored to some unseen spot far below. The meanings of the word brother seem easy to pick out from the waters, but in fact the possible meanings stretch deeper than you might expect, ranging from "full brother" to "any kinsman" to "any fellow human" to "anything related" (as in the brother vices of greed and selfishness). Since we can't use sonar, how can we sound out the meanings of words?

It used to be thought that any word could be described in terms of semantic primitives. For instance, M. Bierwisch, writing in 1970, said that semantic features do not differ from language to language, but are rather part of the general human capacity for language, forming a universal inventory used in particular ways in individual languages.

According to this theory, every word can be broken up into primitive kernels of meaning, called semantemes (also called semantic features or semantic components). Some sample definitions using semantemes:

The process of breaking words down into semantemes is known as componential analysis and has been most often used to analyze kinship terms across languages. The components are often given in more detail. For instance, kinship terms like those shown above might have three components: sex, generation, lineage. Sex would be male or female; generation would be a number, with 0 = reference point's generation, -1 = previous generation, +1 = next generation; lineage would be either direct, colineal (as in siblings) or ablineal (as in uncles and aunts).

This is obviously a highly technical way to define words we all know and use without overdue consideration, but -- by using these components -- you can concisely define a variety of English kinship terms.

This can be the starting point of a more detailed analysis of English terms. One advantage of isolating and identifying each component is that it then becomes possible to identify "holes" in a language's vocabulary, areas for which it lacks a direct term. For instance, English lacks a genderless word for an aunt or uncle; you can't fill in the blank for the statement "parent is to mother and father, as *** is to aunt and uncle". You can still express this concept in English (we typically refer to aunts and uncles but you can more formally refer to parents' siblings), but you will likely express it less often than you would if there was a word for it.

Another gap is the lack of words for either "male cousin" or "female cousin". The paradigm parent/mother/father, sibling/sister/brother is just not carried out for cousin. This is unlike other Germanic languages, including Danish (Faetter and Kusine for male and female cousins respectively), Dutch (neef and nicht) and German (der Vetter and die Kusine). Old English probably also made this distinction, but lost it under influence of Norman French, which -- like most, if not all, Romance languages -- does not make this distinction.

The following table more fully fleshes out the distinctions English does make in kinship terms.

There are many more "holes" or gaps in the vocabulary than those labeled here. What about terms where the generation is not specified? Where the lineage is not specified?

Please note that the combination of {Generation 0, Lineage Direct} is meaningless (except for some backwater place -- choose your own to make fun of -- where brothers marry their sisters and people can be their own fathers). Since the sense of {Lineage Colineal} only applies to a generation of 0, it could be thought of as the manifestation of Direct in that area. (The term Ablineal can apply to any generation.)

A fuller componential analysis (yes, fuller) of kinship terms is presented in a sidebar below.

While componential analysis is useful for some exercises, it is not a representation of how language works; no linguist has ever been able to develop a complete list of semantic primitives. Invariably, some of the primitives identified are actually molecules that can be broken down into new atoms. For instance, parent, offspring and sibling are all interrelated terms; the word parent can be defined as "a person who has offspring" and sibling can be defined as "a person with a parent who has other offspring". If semantic primitives were to exist, they would number in the thousands and would resemble a mathematical logic system more than the mind's loom of language.

The bother of brother

While Suzanne Vega sings of language being liquid, the rigidity of componential analysis makes language seem like frozen liquid: ice cubes. While semantemes have their place, especially to compare and contrast languages' lexicons, they do not indicate how we actually define terms in our minds.

One of the problems with semantemes is that they assume words have a single basic meaning. Take brother, which was defined above first as "male sibling" and then as {Generation 0, Sex Male, Lineage Colineal}. The English word actually has a much broader meaning than either of these definitions, with many degrees of brother-ness radiating out from a core meaning of "male sibling", as shown below in a no-means exhaustive list.

• brother-german (male sibling)
  • half brother
    • stepbrother
      • kinsman
        • comrade
          • fraternity member
            • co-religionist
            • lay person
            • racial brother
            • fellow man

Defining these labels in more detail we have:

1. A male having the same biological parents as another person: a brother-german
2. A male having one biological parent in common with another person: a half brother
3. The son of one's stepparent by a previous spouse or lover: a stepbrother
4. A male with the same ancestor as another person: a kinsman
5. A male friend who is loved as if he were a biological brother: a comrade
6. A male friend who belongs to the same fraternity: fellow fraternity member
7. A man who follows the same religious beliefs: a co-religionist
8. A male lay member of a religious order: a monk or lay person
9. A person of the same race or nation
10. A fellow man
11. Something that closely resembles another in kind

Even this radius of meaning is not exhaustive: a brother can mean a "brother-in-law", a brother can be an adopted son raised by your parents, a brother can be used in the strict sense of "a fellow African American". The gender of a brother does not even have to be male -- we must help our brothers in the Fatherland uses brother to include both men and women (as illustrated in meaning #9 above).

As this example shows, people think of words not as fixed definitions composed of semantic primitives, but as examples or prototypes. The prototypical brother has the same biological parents as another person and has an emotionally close relationship with his siblings. On a scale of brother-ness from 0 to 100 the prototype is 100. A 90 might be a brother who was twenty years older than another person and as a result was never close to him, or the brother who was abusive and was disliked -- even though these examples are biologically brothers, they do not share in that emotional closeness of true brother-ness. A best friend can be considered a brother on the basis of emotional closeness, rather than kinship. The brother virtues of love and charity are considered brothers only because they resemble one another -- this is a metaphorical use of the primary sense of brother, scoring perhaps a 10 out of 100 on our hypothetical scale of brother-ness.

The word brother, then, is defined not in terms of semantic primitives, but in terms of a network of associations with other words. The human brain recursively defines words by words (just like a dictionary).

Translations (meanings across languages)

When you decide to translate brother into your model language, you will have to decide which of its many meanings you wish to convey. Too often we assume that an English word has exact counterparts in other languages. We say that English brother = Spanish hermano, when in fact hermano has different connotations. For one thing, hermano is the expression of a root form herman- with a masculine ending; give it a feminine ending and you have hermana, "sister"; hermano has less of a distinctively masculine connotation than brother does.

Rather than considering the breadth of the meaning of brother, let's take a simpler example. It is tempting to say that casa in Spanish equals house in English, like 1+1=2.

casa = house

In fact, casa also equals home, since Spanish does not distinguish between house and home with separate words. (Spanish does make a similar distinction, but it does so grammatically, by saying el casa, "the house", contrasted with casa, "home".)

casa = home

Of course, in English house and home are different.

house <> home

If this is so, then:

casa <> casa.

Clearly, semantics can never be reduced to an algebra of translation.

As further evidence that words with common meanings are not exactly equivalent, review some double-translations. The story is told of an American in the USSR who received a telegram, Your daughter was hung for juvenile crimes. In fact, the Soviet censor had translated the telegram into Russian, and then back into English. The original English telegram read Your daughter was suspended for delinquency. The words suspended and delinquency had different prototypes (different spheres of meaning) than the Russian words they were paired with.

Words in other languages will make different distinctions. Some will encompass a wider range of meanings than corresponding English words. For instance, Rick Harrison's planned language Vorlin has some interesting words: the basic sense of the word bat is "a ball-hitting tool", with its radiated meanings including "bat, hockey stick, and tennis racket", while the word sop means "soup" and "stew". Other Vorlin words cover a smaller range of meanings, so that for, "form, shape", does not include other senses of English form like "a paper document to be filled in", "a molding to be filled with concrete" or "manners or conduct".

As you determine what the words in your model language mean, you have to keep in mind that they will not exactly equal English words. But, as a practical matter, you probably don't want to create words for each separate meaning of brother and have each word assigned only to that meaning, like the following English words: brother german ("full brother"), half-brother, stepbrother, brother-in-law, comrade, fellow, kinsman, fraternity member, coreligionist. Doing so loses much of the flexibility of brother.

As an example, here's how I translated the different realms of brother into the model language Negasi.

Translating the English word comrade into Negasi henami will result in totally different associations. The Negasi view comrades as close to kin, and their word that would be translated comrade of course has no taint of communism. So the word henami has a stronger familial association than English comrade does. While an English-to-Negasi dictionary might list henami = comrade, this oversimplifies the relationship between the prototypes represented by each word. The words intersect; they are not mutually inclusive.

As an aside, please note the difference between sanami and sanemi. The word sanami was coined in the Nagada language, so its literal meaning of "near brother" has been forgotten, since it underwent sound change differently than sa nemi -- "near brother" as two words -- did. This allowed the literal meaning "near brother" to be used to coin a new word in Negasi, in this case referring to "a best friend", a previously absent word meaning.

Prototypes for the birds

Another useful example to describe semantic prototypes or semantic stereotypes is birds: the prototypical bird has feathers and wings and can fly. Yet penguins, ostriches and Big Bird are considered birds, even though they can't fly. A duck-billed platypus, on the other hand, isn't considered a bird, despite the fact that it lays eggs and has a beak; it is not considered a bird since it has no feathers, no wings and can't fly.

Prototypes are also a more useful way to describe meaning than semantic primitives, because prototypes embrace the connotations of a word, rather than just the denotations. The notion of prototypes can be used to show how words overlap. For instance, the following table roughly summarizes different types of body builds:

The words skinny and scrawny as meanings are subsets of thin; plump, chubby and obese are subsets of fat. Noticeably absent are any words for average weight. English, like many languages, rarely has words to describe midpoints, only extremes.

Words are often grouped together like this in semantic networks. However, these word sets can be exceedingly complicated. For instance, the words used to describe body builds each have complex connotations as part of their prototypes: plump is used more often to describe food such as meat and fruits than fat is; similarly, chubby is more often used for little boys (or girls) than fat is. The word scrawny also suggests bony; there are other words not shown on this list that also have connotations and specific uses, like lean, which suggests "muscular", and slim, which suggests "tall", and slender, which suggests "graceful". Connotations are not specified in dictionaries and are rarely articulated.

Besides connotations, there are habits governing what other words to use with a word. The synonyms pursue and chase are almost interchangeable, except that pursue is preferred when the object to be chased is highly desirable - pursue truth, pursue wisdom, pursue happiness, but chase a thief, chase a bus, chase a fox. You could write an essay on the difference between he pursued love and he chased love.

Obviously, it is very difficult to translate these prototypes from one language to another. Failure to properly account for the radius of meaning of a word often has comical results, as evidenced by this sign in a Bucharest hotel lobby: The lift is being fixed for the next day. During the time we regret that you will be unbearable. Historically speaking, the word unbearable had began with a strict literal meaning, but over time its radius of meaning had expanded to include a figurative sense as well. The combinations of connotations and detailed usage preferences for any word are not articulated, but mastering them is one of the hallmarks of literary writing.

Conclusion

Meaning is therefore a combination of prototypical examples. The important thing to keep in mind, when creating your own languages, is that the words you invent will not exactly equal the English words you define them as. While, for practical purposes, you will define most words very straightforwardly in English, you will want to highlight the unique culture of your language's speakers by noting how the range of meanings and the range of possible uses distinguishes your invented lexicon from English words.

No wonder Suzanne Vega sang, "I won't use words again. They don't mean what I meant. They don't say what I said."

Last updated: March 1996
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