Urum Basic Lexicon

A cooperative research project at the Universities of Athens, Bielefeld, Bremen, and Potsdam (funded by the Latsis Foundation) WORDS Urum Basic Lexicon Stavros Skopeteas, University of Bielefeld (conception) Violeta Moisidi, Tbilisi (data collection, transcription, and translation) Eleni Sella-Mazi, University of Athens (comments/discussion) Efy Yordanoglu, University of Athens (Turkish translations) February 2011 Manuscript, University of Bielefeld Table of Contents Table of Contents ....................................................................................................................... 3 Introduction ................................................................................................................................ 5 1. The physical world............................................................................................................... 13 2. Kinship ................................................................................................................................. 17 3. Animals ................................................................................................................................ 23 4. The body............................................................................................................................... 29 5. Food and drink ..................................................................................................................... 37 6. Clothing and grooming......................................................................................................... 43 7. The house ............................................................................................................................. 47 8. Agriculture and vegetation................................................................................................... 49 9. Basic actions and technology ............................................................................................... 53 10. Motion ................................................................................................................................ 57 11. Possession........................................................................................................................... 61 12. Spatial relations.................................................................................................................. 65 13. Quantity.............................................................................................................................. 69 14. Time ................................................................................................................................... 71 15. Sense perception................................................................................................................. 75 16. Emotions and values........................................................................................................... 79 17. Cognition............................................................................................................................ 83 18. Speech and language .......................................................................................................... 87 19. Social and political relations .............................................................................................. 91 20. Warfare and hunting........................................................................................................... 95 21. Law..................................................................................................................................... 97 22. Religion and belief ............................................................................................................. 99 23. Modern world................................................................................................................... 101 24. Miscellaneous function words.......................................................................................... 105 Introduction Our aim is to create a lexical inventory of Urum, a non-documented and not previously described language of the Minor Caucasus. For this purpose, we used a list of concepts to be elicited in the object language by means of translation. Our expectation from this list is to obtain a inventory of lexical items representing a broad range of fields of language communication. On the basis of this material we expect to estimate the consistency of the lexicon of this virtually unknown language and to identify the lexical input from the involved contact languages (i.e., Russian, Turkish, Georgian, and Greek) as well as the extend to which the object language is intelligible with the languages in its environment. Why we use word-list translation? Given that there is no available text collection in the object language in order to establish a lexical inventory by observational means, our methodological choices are restricted to those methods that allow for collecting lexical material from scratch. Beyond word-list translation, there are at least two methods that are popular in field linguistics. The first possibility is to elicit lexical material through the presentation of extra-linguistic stimuli (pictures or videos). This method have been effectively explored for semantic fields that allow for visual representation, e.g., colour terms (see Berlin and Kay 1969), spatial relations (see Levinson 2003) or several types of artefacts (see Bowern 2008: 107f.). The main advantage of the use of extra-linguistic stimuli is that it excludes interferences from the contact language. However, it shares with translation a number of common problems: picture- elicitation is based on an a priori determined inventory of concepts, and the product of elicitation is a laboratory (i.e., non-naturalistic) dataset. In contrast to translation, the product of picture description is less controlled, i.e., the obtained data may contain a substantial amount of variation with respect to the choice of concepts or with respect to the morphosyntactic environment. Furthermore, picture description has the crucial limitation that it can be only applied for a very restricted subset of the lexical inventory, namely for those concepts that may be visually represented. A further possibility is to collect lexical material by asking the native speaker for the concepts that are contained by a particular field, e.g. “tell me the names of fruit and vegetables you grow and eat” (Mosel 2006: 76). The most important merit of this approach to field lexicography is that it allows for insights into the relevance of the particular concepts in the specific language and culture. In comparison to word-list or picture elicitation, this SKOPETEAS, MOISIDI, SELLA-MAZI & YORDANOGLU method does not restrict the collected inventory to a list of a priori selected concepts. However, the collected material is less controlled (concerning morphosyntactic variation) and is subject to the limitations of the recall competence of the native speakers. Most crucially, it is not clear whether this method can be applied for the elicitation of a full list of lexical concepts (there are no attempts to create an global lexical inventory by means of this type of questions). Elicitation by word-list translation has the main merit that it is a highly controlled method. As any other method, the use of translation comes with a number of limitations. Some of these limitations can be circumvented through appropriate adaptations of the elicitation procedure. Some other limitations are inherent to the methodological approach and imply that particular types of generalizations are not permissible in datasets obtained by this kind of method, i.e., they are only possible if translation will be complemented by other means of observing lexical properties (see discussion in Section 3). 2. Method 2.1. Inventory of concepts The basis for our inventory is the word list of the World Loanword Database/WOLD (see Haspelmath and Tadmor 2009). Our inventory involves some marginal deviations from the original list: we removed some concepts that are unknown in the cultural environment of the Urum people and added other concepts that are of substantial cultural relevance. Terms corresponding to the Caucasian flora and fauna as well as to the traditional food and spices in Georgia have been added from Roudik (2009: 3-4; 128-137). Efy Yordanoglu added a set of concepts that are of particular relevance for the Greek minority of Turkey. The final inventory contains 1419 concepts classified in 24 semantic fields following the classification of the WOLD database, see Table 1. Table 1. Basic vocabulary in semantic fields semantic field illustrative examples n sense perception smell, bitter, hear, etc. 47 spatial relations remain, pick up, in front of, left, etc. 71 body head, eye, bone, cheek, etc. 138 kinship mother, father, sister, younger sister, etc. 82 motion fall, throw, swim, carry on the back, etc. 76 physical world land, soil, mud, mountain, etc. 71 emotions and values heavy, happy, cry, proud, etc. 54 6 INTRODUCTION quantity fifteen, count, few, empty, etc. 39 time slow, sometime, soon, year, etc. 56 actions and technology cut, pull, build, hammer, etc. 64 cognition study, teach, pupil, doubt, etc. 51 speech and language tell, speech, paper, pen, etc. 42 animals cow, sheep, goat, chicken, etc. 104 possession give, find, pay, price, etc. 47 warfare and hunting army, soldier, victory, defeat, etc. 35 social and political relations

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