Re: English as a creole.

On Jul 29, 7:52 pm, Nathan Sanders <nsand...@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
In article <1185713516.105889.196...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,

Darkstar <darkstar...@xxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Jul 29, 12:49 am, phogl...@xxxxxx wrote:

German, for instance, has borrowed the words "Killer" (and the verb
"killen", to kill) from English, as if there were no German words for
killing. It simply has a particular ring to it. (Nowadays, however, it
is mostly used in the sense of a contract killer. It is also an
emotionally loaded word: somebody you call a "Killer" in German is an
exceptionally hideous and psychopatic kind of killer.)

Same in Russian. "Killer" (hitman) is now from English because there
were no hired hitmen before 1991.

"Killer" in Russian can only refer to a paid assassin?

That's right. A modern paid assassin.

(I also find it unrealistic that no one ever in the history of Russia
got paid to kill someone before 1991!)

They did but they have a native name for it: "nayomnyj
ubijtsa" (=hired assassin). And it's still used. "Killer" is normally
journalist, jocular, slang, spoken or other substandard usage.

"To kill" is one of the most synonym-rich words in any language. It
tends to have lots of formal and slang substituents, including
borrowings.

Can you provide a citation for this claim? Where can we find the
representative cross-linguistic comparison of synonym counts for
"kill" and for other words that you are summarizing? Surely you
wouldn't just make up a random linguistic claim without basing it on
actual research!

Any good English thesaurus + Webster dictionary would do. Same for the
common 5-10 European languages.
Learn to do YOUR OWN research and think with your own head instead of
looking into citations and references.

And, that's not basic lexics. At least, not a good example of it. See
a Swadesh list for an instance of basic lexics.

"Kill" is on the Swadesh list! It even made the cut for the 100-word
minimized list that Swadesh had to make after so many people pointed
out how unsound his original list was.

That's right. But it's not about the Swadesh lists. It's about the
STABLE BASIC LEXICS. Cf. 50 common IE languages and see that "kill" is
not a stable word. It differs already within each language group. Cf.
Eng "kill" and G "toeten", Sp "matar" and It "uccidere" Actually, it
was a bad idea to put into the 100-word Swadesh list.

There are plenty of words on the Swadesh list (including the 100-word
list) that have many synonyms in English:

man (guy, dude, bloke, fellow, chap, gent)
woman (chick, bird, lady, dame, gal)
child (tyke, kid, youngster, juvenile, minor, adolescent)
animal (varmint, creature, beast, critter)
big (large, substantial, hefty, immense, huge, enormous)
sleep (nap, doze, snooze, slumber)
say (speak, articulate, state, claim, utter)
walk (tread, step, traipse, stroll, saunter)
fly (soar, glide, hover)
give (donate, bestow, confer, present, bequeath, dispense)
see (look, observe, witness, behold, watch)
many (numerous, various, myriad, several)
head (noggin, cranium, bean, noodle)
belly (stomach, gut, abdomen, tummy, midriff)
breast (do I even need to list these?)

That's right. Especially, in the 200-word version (such as child, kid,
punk. Cf. ON 'barn' "the born one", etc ). No word is absolutely
stable. Except the numerals 2 and 3 which hardly have any possible
synonyms (both "one and one"; "one and two" (?)), or at least the
fewest number of them.

But I can give you more synonyms for "kill" than for "fly" or "stand".
That's why the latter two are more stable semantically, and listing
synonyms is a simple way to show or determine that.

Such common,
emotionally-unloaded adjectives as "green", "white", "short", "long",
"light", "round" (color, distance, size, mass) could be a good
example.

Could be, but aren't:

green (verdant, emerald, lime, chartreuse, jade)
white (albino, ivory, colorless, bleached)
short (dwarfish, tiny, stumpy, squat, diminutive)
long (extended, outstretched, protracted)
light (bantam, insubstantial, meager, gossamery)
round (rotund, spherical, circular, annular, globular, oval)

Compared to what? If you have 10 Canadian dollars how much is that?
What is the exchange rate to American dollars?

When a language has multiple words for the same entry on the Swadesh
list (whether non-interchangeable like "I/me", "we/us", "red/pink",
and I believe, Russian "goluboj/sinij", or essentially freely
interchangeable like "big/large" and "stone/rock"), do you have > some a

"Red", "pink", "goluboy", "sinij" have all different sematical
connotations. They're all diiferent colors.

"Big" and "large" differ stylistically. Big is the principle, most
common word, large is more formal and much less common (type it at
Google and see the ratio if in doubt). That's why "big" is basic
lexics, while "large", "huge" and "gigantic" probably not.

priori, principled method for selecting one word over the other
options,

I don't have any standard-rate methodology, but I could name a few
principles such as semantical simplicity, shortness (minimal consonant
or syllabical length), stylistic norm (neither slang, nor formal),
comparison to nearby languages (which would pinpoint "large" as a
French-English isogloss), archaicness.

or do you just wait until after you've done your comparisons
so that you can cherry-pick the word that gives you the best results
to prove your pet theory?

What "pet theory"? I don't have any. If you're foolish enough to have
any pet theories, don't take this out on me, please.

.

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