| Pages in topic: [1 2] > | What do you think of this debate on language use? Thread poster: Zolboo Batbold
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Zolboo Batbold 
Italy
Local time: 10:01
Member (2021)
English to Mongolian
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SITE LOCALIZER
Hello everyone. I hope you're doing good. I'd like to ask your opinion about an ongoing debate between me and a Mongolian historian. For the sake of simplicity, I will use the English equivalents of the Mongolian between quotes "".
So he made a post in a FB group about linguistics, what he did was he looked up the definition of "research" in two dictionaries of Mongolian language, one from 1966, the other from 2014. According to him both definitions are inaccurate. So he concluded that Mon... See more Hello everyone. I hope you're doing good. I'd like to ask your opinion about an ongoing debate between me and a Mongolian historian. For the sake of simplicity, I will use the English equivalents of the Mongolian between quotes "".
So he made a post in a FB group about linguistics, what he did was he looked up the definition of "research" in two dictionaries of Mongolian language, one from 1966, the other from 2014. According to him both definitions are inaccurate. So he concluded that Mongolian speakers nowadays have a misconception about the concept of "research" because the word "research" is defnited inaccurately. In order to prove that Mongolians who lived in the 1920's (I have no idea why he chose that particular time period) had a better understanding of the concept of "research", he made a thorough analysis of a novel written by a notable Mongolian writer from the 1920's. He searched for all the occurences of the lemma "research" in the novel, and found all the relevant collocates. He then made his own defintion of "research" based on his findings.
My reply:
"Sir, if you want to find out how people from two different time periods viewed the concept of research, you should find out how they actually used this word in real life. You should look up the lemma research in corpora that represent the language of these two time periods. You cannot base your judgment on the novel of a famous writer who probably means a lot to you, and compare it to a modern dictionary definition which is presciptive in its nature, and not corpus-based. Sir, you are comparing apples to oranges."
Just because a dictionary definition of the word "research" is inaccurate, doesn't mean that all the speakers of that language have a distorted view about the concept of "research", right?
[Edited at 2022-02-28 15:33 GMT] ▲ Collapse
| | | | Tom in London
United Kingdom
Local time: 09:01
Member (2008)
Italian to English
| Not qualified | Feb 28, 2022 |
Zolboo Batbold wrote:
,,,, We are all translators so we know a thing or two about corpus linguistics, representativeness, discourse analysis etc. What do you guys think about this current debate?
I don't know anything about corpus linguistics, representativeness, discourse analysis, etc.
| | | | Samuel Murray
Netherlands
Local time: 10:01
Member (2006)
English to Afrikaans
+ ...
Zolboo Batbold wrote:
At this point, I told him:
Sir, you are comparing apples to oranges. That is unprofessional of you.
It is not unprofessional to make logic errors when reasoning about something.
Now, I would like to hear a third person's objective opinion on this debate. We are all translators so we know a thing or two about corpus linguistics, representativeness, discourse analysis etc.
I'm afraid only academics would know about corpus linguistics and how to apply it correctly.
| | | | | maybe you should try another (academic?) forum | Feb 28, 2022 |
Once I listened to an interview with the first translator of Orwell's 1984 into Rusian where he mentioned something like 'I really don't know anything about theory of translation and such things'. BTW, he did a great job.
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Zolboo Batbold
Italy
Local time: 10:01
Member (2021)
English to Mongolian
+ ...
TOPIC STARTER SITE LOCALIZER | Let me rephrase my point | Feb 28, 2022 |
Samuel Murray wrote:
Zolboo Batbold wrote:
At this point, I told him:
Sir, you are comparing apples to oranges. That is unprofessional of you.
It is not unprofessional to make logic errors when reasoning about something.
Now, I would like to hear a third person's objective opinion on this debate. We are all translators so we know a thing or two about corpus linguistics, representativeness, discourse analysis etc.
I'm afraid only academics would know about corpus linguistics and how to apply it correctly.
Forget what I said about corpus linguistics etc. and just focus on the logic here. Do you think it is logical to assume that if the dictionary definition (presciptive one, not based on empirical evidence) of the word "research" in language A is inaccurate, then the speakers of that langauge must have a misconception about the concept of research?
| | | | | Not qualified | Feb 28, 2022 |
The first thing I’d say is that in order to analyze a particular language use I’ll need to master that language and I am completely ignorant of your language…
| | | | expressisverbis
Portugal
Local time: 09:01
Member (2015)
English to Portuguese
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| Zolboo Batbold
Italy
Local time: 10:01
Member (2021)
English to Mongolian
+ ...
TOPIC STARTER SITE LOCALIZER
I would have posted it there if I wanted to. I've rephrased the post, so it should be clearer now.
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Alex Ossa
Chile
Local time: 06:01
Spanish to English
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| Not sure it's worth debating | Feb 28, 2022 |
I agree that it's not sound practice to analyse meaning from a single novel and two dictionaries rather than compare the dictionaries to general texts such as news articles and opinion pieces, and I'm surprised a historian doesn't realise that his approach is inconsistent just based on how historians research historical events in the first place. It sounds like he's made a conclusion then looked up a way to support that conclusion, rather than use a scientific approach to his work.
... See more I agree that it's not sound practice to analyse meaning from a single novel and two dictionaries rather than compare the dictionaries to general texts such as news articles and opinion pieces, and I'm surprised a historian doesn't realise that his approach is inconsistent just based on how historians research historical events in the first place. It sounds like he's made a conclusion then looked up a way to support that conclusion, rather than use a scientific approach to his work.
As such, if several years of academic teaching were unable to provide him with the proper mindset to research properly to find conclusions (testing his hypothesis rather than cherry-picking what evidence supported his hypothesis), then an online discussion with him isn't going to change that. If you pointed out the mistake and he insists he's right, I wouldn't bother any further with him. ▲ Collapse
| | | | Zolboo Batbold
Italy
Local time: 10:01
Member (2021)
English to Mongolian
+ ...
TOPIC STARTER SITE LOCALIZER | Exactly my thought | Feb 28, 2022 |
Alex Ossa wrote:
I agree that it's not sound practice to analyse meaning from a single novel and two dictionaries rather than compare the dictionaries to general texts such as news articles and opinion pieces, and I'm surprised a historian doesn't realise that his approach is inconsistent just based on how historians research historical events in the first place. It sounds like he's made a conclusion then looked up a way to support that conclusion, rather than use a scientific approach to his work.
As such, if several years of academic teaching were unable to provide him with the proper mindset to research properly to find conclusions (testing his hypothesis rather than cherry-picking what evidence supported his hypothesis), then an online discussion with him isn't going to change that. If you pointed out the mistake and he insists he's right, I wouldn't bother any further with him.
| | | | Samuel Murray
Netherlands
Local time: 10:01
Member (2006)
English to Afrikaans
+ ...
Zolboo Batbold wrote:
If the dictionary definition (prescriptive one, not based on empirical evidence) of a word is inaccurate, would the speakers of that language have a misconception about the concept?
This depends on how many speakers rely on the dictionary? My experience is that speakers will consult a dictionary for the meaning of a word only if they are truly unable to deduce the meaning in other ways. When speakers don't know what a word, means, they guess, based on how they hear the word being used. Only in rare instances will they consult a dictionary. This applies to both cultures with very little literacy and cultures with a high level of literacy. We learn what words mean mainly from how they are used.
That said, a dictionary entry (whether prescriptive or descriptive) reflects what an expert in the language thought that that the word means. In a descriptive dictionary, it reflects what the author thought the data bears out. In a prescriptive one, it usually signifies some kind of consensus between multiple experts anyway (and in that regard is also descriptive, in a way).
| | | | Mihai Badea (X)
Luxembourg
Local time: 10:01
English to Romanian
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| Potential issue | Mar 1, 2022 |
Zolboo,
If you have a Western education, while your interlocutor on the Facebook group (the Mongolian historian) doesn't, that could be what prevents you both from understanding each other well. It is possible you have different systems of reference.
Has your historian friend read a book and compiled a definition just for you? That would be rather extraordinary.
If you take a look at a Cambridge Dictionary entry, there are various contexts provided, includi... See more Zolboo,
If you have a Western education, while your interlocutor on the Facebook group (the Mongolian historian) doesn't, that could be what prevents you both from understanding each other well. It is possible you have different systems of reference.
Has your historian friend read a book and compiled a definition just for you? That would be rather extraordinary.
If you take a look at a Cambridge Dictionary entry, there are various contexts provided, including from corpora.
e.g. https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/research ▲ Collapse
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Zolboo Batbold
Italy
Local time: 10:01
Member (2021)
English to Mongolian
+ ...
TOPIC STARTER SITE LOCALIZER
Mihai Badea wrote:
Zolboo,
If you have a Western education, while your interlocutor on the Facebook group (the Mongolian historian) doesn't, that could be what prevents you both from understanding each other well. It is possible you have different systems of reference.
Has your historian friend read a book and compiled a definition just for you? That would be rather extraordinary.
If you take a look at a Cambridge Dictionary entry, there are various contexts provided, including from corpora.
e.g. https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/research
I think he got his master degree abroad. No he didn't compile the definition for me. He has reason to believe that not much has been accomplished in the scientific field lately. So maybe in an attempt to find out the possible reasons for this, he looked up the definition of RESEARCH in two modern dictionaries, and considiered them inaccurate. He concluded that today's scientific field has not achieved great accomplishments because the definitions of RESEARCH are inaccurate, adding that because of that people have a wrong conception about research - "they are not creating new knowledge"). So in order to prove that people in the past had a better understanding about research, he looked up the definition of RESEARCH in a novel of a famous Mongolian writer from the 1920's (whom he regards with utmost respect). He then created his own definition based on his findings.
Thing is, Mongolian scholars do not fully appreciate the value of language corpora (as of today there's not a single publicly available general corpus of Mongolian). As a result, dictionary entries are based more on authors' intuitions than on empirical evidence such as word frequencies.
[Edited at 2022-03-01 07:20 GMT]
| | | | Mihai Badea (X)
Luxembourg
Local time: 10:01
English to Romanian
+ ...
| That is a different discussion | Mar 2, 2022 |
"Publish or perish", a diction that any member of academia would know. There is indeed great pressure on researchers to publish. Obviously, not everything that is published is of extraordinary quality.
There might be researchers in the world - including Mongolian, who have no idea of the various ways dictionaries define their field of study. What matters is whether they create new knowledge that ideally is of high quality.
Dictionaries are authoritative. However, they a... See more "Publish or perish", a diction that any member of academia would know. There is indeed great pressure on researchers to publish. Obviously, not everything that is published is of extraordinary quality.
There might be researchers in the world - including Mongolian, who have no idea of the various ways dictionaries define their field of study. What matters is whether they create new knowledge that ideally is of high quality.
Dictionaries are authoritative. However, they are unlikely to be perfect. They reflect the use at a certain moment.
If you are interested in how dictionaries are designed and elaborated, you might want to read a book on lexicography (e.g. The Oxford Handbook of Lexicography). ▲ Collapse
| | | | Samuel Murray
Netherlands
Local time: 10:01
Member (2006)
English to Afrikaans
+ ...
Zolboo Batbold wrote:
As a result, dictionary entries are based more on authors' intuitions than on empirical evidence such as word frequencies.
This is true of most minority languages. Corpora in these languages may only available be to those who are willing to pay a lot of money for it, and most lexicographers do not start out as people will access to such resources, so their intuition is typically not based on such information. However, many 20th century lexicographers do/did try to take into account actual usage (except perhaps in controversial cases), even if their sources of information are/may have been limited, so one can put at least some trust in what they wrote.
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