| In studying the meanings of words lexicologists often group them into domains or small sets. A few examples would be kinship terms, military ranks, color words, and names of parts of the body. Some of these sets can be ordered in a sequence or series so that it is possible to map them to some set of whole numbers in a natural way: first, second, third, etc., as required. In the ontologies introduced in the previous sections is an obvious example of such a mapable set. The whole numbers themselves form such a set, each one mapping to its symbolic representation. Certain expressions of time participate in this kind of order as in the days, the months and the seasons of the year as well as the years of an era. Other objects may be set up in more elaborate tree structures as, for example, the parts of the body, or in even more involved networks. The animal kingdom provides us an example of a dendritic structure (McArthur, 1992). “Sheep” designates an animal of a certain kind so that the word sheep is a hyponym of animal. Ram, when it refers to a male sheep, and ewe to a female sheep, are hyponyms of sheep. These words distinguish the instances of the species in terms of sex. Sometimes such arrangements of words by their meanings guide the design of dictionaries. Thus their order is by semantic fields. However it seems that the division and arrangement cannot be established and fixed across the different cultures of the world. Every language appears to comprise them differently, thus adding another level of structure. |
Standardizing semanticsOver the years knowledge and instrumentation in many cultures have developed the semantics surrounding the analysis of measurement to various degrees of accuracy and precision. Science and technology have so far acknowledged seven basic measures of observables of the real world. These become basic elements in the models built of the pre-extensional world towards which our language is developing. Institutions have come to accept these measures as given in the units established by the Système Internationale (SI). Thus there are the following measures: |
| Measure | Unit | |
|---|---|---|
| 1. | length | meter |
| 2. | mass | kilogram |
| 3. | time | second |
| 4. | electric current | ampere |
| 5. | thermodynamic temperature | kelvin |
| 6. | amount of substance | mole |
| 7. | luminous intensity | candela |
| Notice that as we pass downward the linguistic contructions become more complex and the abstraction greater. These basic measures may also be extended and combined. To measure direction the system acknowledges two supplementary units: radians (in a plane), and steradians (in three dimensional space). From the seven measures and the two directions are derived 45 additional units for measuring various combinations. Just two examples: frequency (hertz) measures occurrences (number) in time (seconds); entropy (joules per kelvin) measures energy (joules) against heat, i.e., thermodynamic temperature. And the task of breaking the real world down into parts in a logical and sytematic way has only just begun. |
Color terms in scienceA good introduction to linguistics must include an illustration of how languages divide and order concepts differently. Consider the colors when what is essentially white light is spread out by the effect of water droplets in the air into a rainbow or by the intentional use of a crystal prism into a spectrum (Gleason, 1961:4). There seems to be no natural dividing and grouping of the many visible frequencies (or wave lengths) from one another. An American will name the various regions as red, orange, yellow, green, blue, and purple. School children remember the order from the acronym ROYGBIV, by adding the color indigo. To more evenly divide the spectrum scientists add this color as cyan. Of course, there is nothing stopping society from adding more and more color names to finer and finer hues as well as to different saturations and luminous intensities (called “values” with oil paints). The point is that different societies and different cultures go about doing this differently. Figure 13 shows the normal scheme for speakers of English contrasting with the scheme for speakers of Bassa (a language of Liberia) and Shona (a language of Zimbabwe). |
Color terms in ShonaThe Shona speaker sees three major portions of the spectrum with which to talk of color. What the American has to divide into orange, red, or purple belongs to the same color, “cipswuka.” It is also interesting that black (no color) belongs to citema and white (all colors), to cicena. To these may be added all the specialty colors, just like in English we have teal, brown, scarlet, etc. The result, then, is a full tree structure of classes and subclasses for describing what science analyzes as combinations of three scalar values of 1) hue, 2) saturation, and 3) luminous intensity, each to different degrees of precision. |
Color terms in BassaBesides all the specialty colors the Bassa speaker sees only two major categories: ziza and hui. This would be handy for the botanist in Western science, who has had to coin some special terms to describe the two natural divisions of flowering plants. They have needed the general colors of xanthic to divide yellows, oranges and many reds, from the cyanic or blues, purples and purplish reds. The denotations of these scientific words are easily translated into Bassa, but the words are no longer scientific in that culture. To divide up an infinite number of hue values, people find different kinds of expression, more or less unique in each language and culture. |
Modeling kinship terms.How people designate their relatives is an area studied in some depth by anthropologists. The terms are clearly different according to the language and culture of the society. The structure of individual persons in a nuclear family is taken advantage of by genealogists in tracing family relationship. To symbolize the elements required to diagram these structures the analyst might use those diagrammed in figure 14. Kinship terms are often distinguished by the sex (type of individual) and the ordering imposed by attributes such as age in the family. The “ego” (E) is the person from whom the relationship is calculated. |
| Figure 15 uses the proposed symbology of figure 14 to give a fundamental semantic structure of some simple as well as some more involved kinship terms of English. From these figures the reader should see how the model elements might be made to correspond with some simple lexical items of English. This mapping or association is formally stated by certain rules of the grammar. |
Individuals & families in genetics.Figure 16 gives some tools that geneticists use to model instances of individuals as they relate to other instances through the nuclear family. In this small structure the only roles expressible are spouse, parent and child, the three simplest of kinship terms. Larger structures of multiple families must be examined to determine more extended familial relationships in the clan or lineage. |
Forms of address in China.Even confining the vocabulary to elements of the family structure, we still find considerable variation in different cultures. The following figures draw out typical trees for people, families, and clans in China. I have translated some of the relatives of “ego” into rough English terms for orientation, but it should be clear that the individuals are distinguished more precisely in Chinese. When cousins are addressed it is often important to consider their age relative to “ego”, and when the younger generations are addressed, the sex of “ego” comes into play (as it does in English for husband and wife). |
| For figures 18 and 19 an additional modeling tool is required. The language generalizes some instances of children in family groups, so I have used solid blue lines to enable the same line to represent multiple groups. |
| The syntax of the Chinese words and how they structure to make meaning may not be clear in these diagrams. However, the point of this exercise has been to point out that semantic structures are quite different from the structures that the language appeals to for their expression. Both kinds of structures need to be modeled before the relationship between them can be explicated. I have explicated further the layered structure and interrelationships between the various layers in more recent work in this area. The most up-to-date models are in The Language of Kinship with the older approach in British Family and Kinship Terms. This work presently awaits further efforts to develop additional modeling tools and descriptive apparatus. |
Chronology & Dates.In introducing kinship terms the reader probably noticed that dates were useful in describing differences in ages between individuals. Dates and the measurement of time are established by cultures in multiple ways. Different peoples use different calendars and clocks and different expressions of their language to refer to the parts of their calendars and clocks. The semantic base, the entities being referred to ultimately, are expressed scientifically using real numbers. Due to the discoveries of Joseph Justus Scaliger (1540–1609) each day may be assigned a Julian day number (JDN) on a scale with zero most easily set to January 1, 4713 B.C.E. The author examines some of the considerations that must be made in English and Western cultures in another work (Date Names). |
Names of people & places.See the works Personal Names and Locality Names on this site. |
