Well, actually, concept time. First come the useful concepts, then come the terms for them. My comments are prompted by Martin Haspelmath on Facebook today, on the useful terms (due to Alexandre François) colexification and dislexification for the expression, in some language, of distinct concepts in a single lexical form or distinct lexical forms, respectively; with MH citing this 2024 article from the journal Asia Pacific Translation and Intercultural Studies: “Colexification of “thunder” and “dragon” in Sino-Tibetan languages” by Hongdi Ding and Sicong Ding. From the abstract:
[372] languages were classified into colexifying and dislexifying languages, depending on whether the two concepts are associated with shared lexical forms. The findings reveal that 47 languages in the sample exhibit thunder-dragon colexification; most of them are Bodic and Na-Qiangic languages, with a few Sinitic, Mongolic, and Turkic languages. This areal pattern results from both inheritance and language contact.
So, patterns of colexification spread areally, through both inheritance and language contact, just like other linguistic features.
Note that colexification must have arisen in at least one language at some time, but this article isn’t about the mechanisms that might have given rise to colexification of ‘thunder’ and ‘dragon’ or to simple examples of colexification in English: ‘grain stalks’ (in the mass N straw) and ‘drinking tube’ (in the count N straw); ‘riverside land’ (in the count N bank, as in both banks of the Seine) and ‘financial institution’ (in the count N bank, as in savings banks).
But now the terminology.
Prefixes for ‘same’ and ‘different’. François’s choice of co– — a variant of con– / com– etc. (from Latin cum ‘with’) ‘joint; mutual’ — for same lexical forms strikes me as felicitous, easily understood. The Latin opposite of cum is sine ‘without; lacking’, but for complex reasons sin– isn’t available (in English or French). As something of a term-wrangler myself, I would not be above inventing a si– as the opposite of co-, but I’d expect a lot of resistance to silexifying.
So François cast about for a negative prefix, to use for not-same lexical forms. There’s really no good choice here. He went for the dis– of disinterested, but negative dis– is most common as a prefix to verbs (disable, disentangle, etc.), where it conveys change of state, not simple opposition, so that dislexification inappropriately suggests undoing colexification. Then there’s non-, but nonlexification would inappropriately convey failure to lexify — a lexical gap, not an opposite.
What we really want is prefixes for ‘same’ and ‘different’, not ‘with’ and ‘without’, and for those we have the Greek-based prefixes homo– and hetero-, as in homogenous and heterogenous, homozygous and heterozygous, and of course homosexual and heterosexual. So homolexifying and heterolexifying would be the right terms for the task. But I’d expect a lot of resistance to homolexifying, because people would view it as irrevocably contaminated by homos.
Well, there’s iso– ‘equal’ and its opposite aniso– ‘unequal’ — Greek again — but they’re uncommon and forbiddingly technical. Could we learn to love anisolexifying?
It’s a harsh terminological world we live in.
Leave a Reply