1 - Introduction

Summary

It is a linguistic and anthropological truism that each natural human language carves out its unique lexical landscape. The resulting differences between languages constitute attractive articles of edutainment. It is indeed both amazing and amusing that the same dessert known as a floating island in English and in Spanish (albeit pluralized, as islas flotantes) is called “snow eggs” in German (Schnee-Eier), “nothing soup” in Polish (zupa nic), and “bird's milk” in Romanian (lapte de pasăre). In a situation somewhat resembling a projection test in psychometry, we are confronted with different projections of extralinguistic images in different languages. In some of them, such as French, two competing projections are found, viz. “eggs on the snow” (oeufs à la neige) and “floating islands” (îles flottantes). In a similar example, the “at” sign (@) is a little monkey, snail, duckling, elephant's trunk, dog, etc. if we move from one language to the other (see http://europapont.blog.hu/2014/06/12/at_ around_europe_bigger; accessed November 17, 2014).

Similarly fascinating is the fact that Mandarin Chinese does not construe brother as an integrated concept, insisting rather on separate words for “younger brother” (dìdì) and “older brother” (gēgē). Meanwhile, speakers of various Slavic languages do not have to differentiate between leg and foot, calling both noga (with g changing into h in some of them) – a feature that they share with the Bavarian dialect of German, in which fuas is used for both, unlike in standard German, in which one differentiates between Bein, “leg,” and Fuß, “foot.”

However fascinating these cross-linguistic lexical differences may be, linguistics, being a social and behavioral science, is not about entertaining people but, rather, about discovering generalized regularities and finding practical solutions to real-world problems. Consequently, the goal of this linguistic monograph is to go beyond fascinating and interesting, and attempt to find patterns and solutions in detecting and resolving linguistic conflict stemming from cross-linguistic lexical differences. Its first part, titled “Toward a Taxonomy of Cross-Linguistic Lexical Differences,” which follows this introduction, represents an attempt to outline configurations of differences, taking various linguistic, cognitive, and cultural parameters into consideration. In contrast, Part II of the book, “Lexicographical Considerations,” examines the solutions to the challenges that cross-linguistic lexical differences bring about in lexicography.