: Go to
blog home : Go to
M-Space home
The other day, I was chatting with one of my linguist friends when I realised that one of the technical terms he was using, although it seemed familiar to me from my mathematical background, actually has a completely different meaning in linguistics. The term is lemma and a quick bit of additional research showed me that there are several other distinct uses of the word in different fields...
To start with the mathematical one, as that's closest to being my native language, a lemma is a proposition that is principally intended as a stepping stone towards another result rather than as an end in itself. This definition can tend to downplay the importance of lemmas (or lemmata, to give the more classically formed plural), as they can often be quite deep and interesting results in their own right and many of them end up being very useful in proving a number of (often quite disparate) theorems.
Apparently I once caused quite an interesting coffee-time discussion amongst the mathematicians of Nottingham University. When I was an undergraduate there (about 12 years ago), I asked my tutor about the difference between a proposition, a theorem and a lemma; he wasn't sure, so he raised the question with his colleagues. Their consensus, which I've later discovered seems to be shared by most mathematicians, is that there is no formal distinction. Instead, it's a mixture of personal preference, convention and tradition. A proposition is the general term for a mathematical statement that is proved (whether or not the proof is given); a theorem is a proposition that is considered to be especially important or difficult and a lemma is one that is mostly of interest as a means of proving another proposition (or perhaps several). By contrast, a conjecture is a statement that is believed (at least for the sake of argument), but not yet proved, to be true.
Anyway, enough of the mathematical digression and on with the parade of lemmas...
According to Wikipedia, there are two distinct uses of the term lemma in linguistics. The most common one, which I believe is how my friend was using the term, denotes the canonical form of a word. Many words can appear in different forms. For instance mouse/mice is an English noun in singular and plural forms, while a verb can appear in several different forms (e.g. sing, sings, sang, sung). The canonical form is the one which appears as the headword in a dictionary, i.e. it's the form of the word that you would look up. Some dictionaries also contain entries for other word forms, especially irregular ones, but generally refer you to the canonical form to find the actual definition.
The word lemma is used differently in psycholinguistics, where it means the abstract conceptual form of a word that is first mentally selected, before your brain figures out details of morphology and pronunciation. Not altogether different from the general linguistic usage, but a slightly different shade of meaning.
In logic, a lemma is a statement that is simultaneously the conclusion of one argument and the premise of the next one. To me, that sounds pretty much the same as the mathematical use of the term.
In all these uses, the etymology of lemma is apparently from the Greek word λαμβανω (lambano), which means to take (actually, it means "I take" because the canonical form of Greek verbs is the 1st person singular, while for English ones it's the infinitive), via the Greek word λεμμα (lemma), meaning a premise or something received.
Another, completely different, use of lemma is in botany, where it refers to a type of leaf found in grasses. This word, although it has the same form as the other English lemmas, comes from a different Greek word λεμμα (lemma), meaning a husk or shell. This one ultimately derives from the word λεπειν (lepein), meaning to peel (NB this is an infinitive in Greek - I'm not sure of the canonical form of this verb).
Apart from being an interesting little study of etymology and a glimpse into several different academic worlds, this example highlights one of the dangers of jargon - words don't always mean what you think they mean!
Whenever I visit a foreign country I always try to learn at least a few words in the local language, even if it's just basic greetings and simple stuff like that.
In preparation for my trip to Romania a few years ago, I learned some Romanian. I also spoke enough French and German to get by in most of the countries we visited on the way (driving across Europe). However, I was at a complete loss in Hungary since I didn't speak a word of the language and most of the Hungarians I met on that trip didn't seem to speak any of the languages I did know (since I was in their country I couldn't really blame them for that).
For my trip to Hungary earlier this month I made an effort to learn some Hungarian before I went. It is a truly fascinating language, with a not entirely unjustified reputation for being difficult. One thing that makes it challenging and interesting is that it is completely unrelated to any of its neighbouring languages and in fact it isn't an Indo-European language at all, so both the grammar and vocabulary are considerably different. Apparently it is fairly closely related to Finnish (although the two aren't mutually intelligible), and both are members of the Finno-Ugric language family.
Here are some of my thoughts on particularly interesting features of the language. The Wikipedia article on Hungarian has a lot more detail if you want some further reading.
Hungarian is an agglutinative language, meaning that it uses lots of prefixes and suffixes to convey grammatical meaning and often strings several words together into one compound word to convey more precise meaning. It doesn't use any prepositions but has a whole bunch of different cases (about 20, I think) which perform a similar function. For example Budapesten means "in Budapest" (superessive case), while Budapestre means "to Budapest" (sublative case).
Another characteristic feature of Hungarian, shared with some other languages (including Turkish, I think), is vowel harmony, whereby the vowels in the grammatical suffices are chosen to match the vowels in the word stem. For example, kések is "knives", while sajtok is "cheeses", with plural endings -ek and -ok respectively.
Incidentally, Hungarian has no concept of grammatical gender, which I find a refreshing change from other languages where it just seems to be an unnecessary complication.
In case you're wondering, the title of this blog post means "the weather is fine". It was one of the first Hungarian phrases I learned though, to my great regret and despite the good weather we had for most of the trip, I didn't get round to using it while I was there.
To finish with, here's a phrase that any good Hungarian phrasebook
should include:
A légpárnás hajóm tele van
angolnával - My hovercraft is full of eels.
On my recent trip to Hungary I learned a few words and phrases in Hungarian. I'll talk more about this fascinating language in a few days' time but for now I just want to mention an interesting fact about greetings.
One straightforward, if fairly informal, way of greeting people is to say hello, which is conveniently pronounced in much the same way as it is in English. To take your leave of someone, again informally, you can say szia, which is pronounced more or less like "see you" in English (you have to say sziasztok if talking to more than one person; by contrast hello is used unchanged for one or more people).
The thing that makes it a bit confusing is that both terms are interchangeable and can be used both for greeting and taking your leave of people. I didn't find it too difficult to get used to greeting people with szia, but the first time somebody shook my hand and said "hello" as we were getting ready to go our separate ways I did find it somewhat strange!
There are several other greetings too, of various shades of formality, but those two seemed to be the most common ones used between friends.
It's interesting to observe how two languages used in the same geographical area can influence one another.
Just before Christmas I was travelling on a train in North Wales and I heard two older ladies chatting. Although they were speaking in English it was clear from their accent that they were local. One of them said "I've got a cold on me". It struck me that this is not what I'd think of as a common way to say you have a cold in English, but seems to be influenced by the "official" way to say it in Welsh: Mae arna i annwyd (literally, "there is a cold on me).
In fact, most Welsh speakers in this area would tend to say Mae gen i annwyd these days. Although a very literal translation of that is "There is with me a cold", mae gen i is the standard way of saying "I have" (since Welsh lacks a dedicated verb for that concept), so a more natural though still fairly direct translation would be "I have a cold", which is evidently influenced by the usual English pattern.
So it seems that, in this phrase, modern Welsh usage has been influenced by English while colloquial English usage in a still fairly-strongly Welsh speaking area has been influenced by the more traditional (and, many would argue, more correct) Welsh idiom. Of course, I don't know if the speaker in this instance actually spoke Welsh herself.
There are plenty more examples of English constructions affecting Welsh and vice versa. Sometimes it can lead to a certain amount of misunderstanding, as happened at our local gym (so I'm told) shortly after they had acquired a new set of weights. They found that the new weights very quickly started disappearing from the gym, and after some investigation they discovered the reason. It turned out that one of the gym employees, a native Welsh speaker, had put up a poster (in English) asking people to tidy the weights away after use. Unfortunately, she had literally translated a Welsh idiom often used to refer to tidying up, namely the use of the word cadw, whose root meaning is keep. So she had written "Please keep the weights", and naturally the people using the gym were only too happy to do as they were told.
Another anecdote that I remember from my Welsh lessons (and I've no idea if it is true) is really about code-switching (i.e. changing from one language to another, in this case in mid-sentence), although that's not too far removed from the foregoing discussion. It concerns a Welsh-speaking teacher who was talking to some English-speaking parents who'd recently arrived in the area. The concerned parents, wishing to provide adequate support for their child who had been thrust into a Welsh-medium school, wanted to know if they should try to learn Welsh themselves. The teacher intended to say that a smattering of the language would be useful. Unfortunately, the Welsh word for smattering is crap and, unable to find the English word she subconsciously switched into Welsh, so what she actually said was "it would help if you had a crap"!
A few weeks ago I was having breakfast with some friends and I was surprised to see what looked to me like a jar of lemon curd labelled as lemon cheese. It turned out that it was indeed lemon curd and that lemon cheese is just another name for it, albeit not one I'd ever heard of. Interestingly, one of my three companions was as unfamiliar with the name as I was, another had heard of it but tended to use the name lemon curd, while the third used lemon cheese as his main term for the stuff and was under the impression that its use was fairly widespread and that lemon curd was the non-standard term.
It just goes to show that while dialect variations within (British) English are nowhere near as pronounced as they are in Welsh, they definitely do exist. Another example that springs to mind is the names for television remote controls. In my family, this device was usually referred to as a zapper, which seemed to be a fairly standard term in South East England. My cousins, growing up in the South West, called the same thing a doofer and found our term as strange as we found theirs.
It's not just individual words that are subject to regional specialisation, but phrases too. For instance, the phrase "cut the cheese" had a certain idiomatic meaning at least amongst my schoolfellows, though I've met very few people from other places who understand why I often grin when somebody mentions cutting the cheese. Rather than give the game away, I'd be interested to know if anyone who didn't grow up on the South Eastern fringes of London in the 1980s and 1990s has come across the phrase in any non-literal meanings and whether it means the same to them as it does to me.
As I mentioned, dialects are a relatively bigger feature in Welsh than in English, and there's quite a bit of variation even within a small area. For instance, on the isle of Anglesey, a common slang term for "microwave oven" is pobty ping (literally "the oven that goes ping"), a phrase I learned from one of my Welsh tutors who came from the island. I was at a Welsh course in Conwy, which is only about 15 miles away, and discovered that my tutor there, who came from that area, was unfamiliar with the phrase (I think she only knew the machine by it's official name of meicrodon, which is a literal rendition of "microwave").
: Go to
blog home : Go to
M-Space home