This article needs additional citations for verification .(June 2013) |
In linguistics, semantic overload occurs when a word or phrase has more than one meaning, and is used in ways that convey meaning based on its divergent constituent concepts. Semantic overload is related to the linguistic concept of polysemy. Overloading is related to the psychological concept of information overload,[ citation needed ] and the computer science concept of operator overloading. A term that is semantically overloaded is a kind of "overloaded expression" in language that causes a certain small degree of "information overload" in the receiving audience.[ citation needed ]
An example of this is the Basque word herri which can be translated as nation; country, land; people, population; and town, village, settlement, [1] amongst other things leading to difficulties in translating the indigenous term Euskal Herria. Another example is the term memory, especially as used in scholarship. [2]
Expletives are also notable for this quality, and conversely this quality is also a contributor to why such terms may be regarded as crude or inappropriate.
Meanings associated with a semantically overloaded word have different qualities: those the word itself refers directly to, and other meanings inferred from its use in context. [3]
Minority languages that spread into new domains frequently suffer from semantic overloading by attempting to adapt existing terms to cover new concepts. One such example from Scottish Gaelic is the over-use of the word comhairle (originally "advice, counsel") for concepts such as committee, council, and consultation as exemplified by Donald MacAulay in dh'iarr a' chomhairle comhairle air a’ chomhairle chomhairleachaidh: "The committee sought advice from the consultative council"—a sentence that is opaque in meaning. [4] [5]
Slang is vocabulary of an informal register, common in verbal conversation but avoided in formal writing. It also sometimes refers to the language generally exclusive to the members of particular in-groups in order to establish group identity, exclude outsiders, or both. The word itself came about in the 18th century and has been defined in multiple ways since its conception.
Scottish Gaelic, also known as Scots Gaelic and Gaelic, is a Goidelic language native to the Gaels of Scotland. As a Goidelic language, Scottish Gaelic, as well as both Irish and Manx, developed out of Old Irish. It became a distinct spoken language sometime in the 13th century in the Middle Irish period, although a common literary language was shared by the Gaels of both Ireland and Scotland until well into the 17th century. Most of modern Scotland was once Gaelic-speaking, as evidenced especially by Gaelic-language place names.
Semantics is the study of reference, meaning, or truth. The term can be used to refer to subfields of several distinct disciplines, including philosophy, linguistics and computer science.
The Outer Hebrides or Western Isles, sometimes known as the Long Isle/Long Island, is an island chain off the west coast of mainland Scotland. The islands are geographically coextensive with Comhairle nan Eilean Siar, one of the 32 unitary council areas of Scotland. They form part of the archipelago of the Hebrides, separated from the Scottish mainland and from the Inner Hebrides by the waters of the Minch, the Little Minch, and the Sea of the Hebrides. Scottish Gaelic is the predominant spoken language, although in a few areas English speakers form a majority.
Hyponymy and hypernymy are semantic relations between a term belonging in a set that is defined by another term and the latter. In other words, the relationship of a subtype (hyponym) and the supertype. The semantic field of the hyponym is included within that of the hypernym. For example, pigeon, crow, and eagle are all hyponyms of bird, their hypernym.
The Gàidhealtachd usually refers to the Highlands and Islands of Scotland and especially the Scottish Gaelic-speaking culture of the area. The similar Irish language word Gaeltacht refers, however, solely to Irish-speaking areas.
Latent semantic analysis (LSA) is a technique in natural language processing, in particular distributional semantics, of analyzing relationships between a set of documents and the terms they contain by producing a set of concepts related to the documents and terms. LSA assumes that words that are close in meaning will occur in similar pieces of text. A matrix containing word counts per document is constructed from a large piece of text and a mathematical technique called singular value decomposition (SVD) is used to reduce the number of rows while preserving the similarity structure among columns. Documents are then compared by cosine similarity between any two columns. Values close to 1 represent very similar documents while values close to 0 represent very dissimilar documents.
In semiotics, linguistics, anthropology, and philosophy of language, indexicality is the phenomenon of a sign pointing to some element in the context in which it occurs. A sign that signifies indexically is called an index or, in philosophy, an indexical.
Comhairle nan Eilean Siar is the local government council for Na h-Eileanan Siar council area of Scotland. It is based in Stornoway in the Isle of Lewis.
Cognitive semantics is part of the cognitive linguistics movement. Semantics is the study of linguistic meaning. Cognitive semantics holds that language is part of a more general human cognitive ability, and can therefore only describe the world as people conceive of it. It is implicit that different linguistic communities conceive of simple things and processes in the world differently, not necessarily some difference between a person's conceptual world and the real world.
Semantic change is a form of language change regarding the evolution of word usage—usually to the point that the modern meaning is radically different from the original usage. In diachronic linguistics, semantic change is a change in one of the meanings of a word. Every word has a variety of senses and connotations, which can be added, removed, or altered over time, often to the extent that cognates across space and time have very different meanings. The study of semantic change can be seen as part of etymology, onomasiology, semasiology, and semantics.
Galwegian Gaelic is an extinct dialect of Scottish Gaelic formerly spoken in southwest Scotland. It was spoken by the people of Galloway and Carrick until the early modern period. Little has survived of the dialect, so that its exact relationship with other Gaelic language is uncertain.
In linguistics, a semantic field is a lexical set of words grouped semantically that refers to a specific subject. The term is also used in anthropology, computational semiotics, and technical exegesis.
Semantic interoperability is the ability of computer systems to exchange data with unambiguous, shared meaning. Semantic interoperability is a requirement to enable machine computable logic, inferencing, knowledge discovery, and data federation between information systems.
This article describes the grammar of the Scottish Gaelic language.
Word and Object is a 1960 work by the philosopher Willard Van Orman Quine, in which the author expands upon the line of thought of his earlier writings in From a Logical Point of View (1953), and reformulates some of his earlier arguments, such as his attack in "Two Dogmas of Empiricism" on the analytic–synthetic distinction. The thought experiment of radical translation and the accompanying notion of indeterminacy of translation are original to Word and Object, which is Quine's most famous book.
Mac Amhalghaidh is an Irish masculine surname. The name translates into English as "son of Amhalghadh". The surname originated as a patronym, however it no longer refers to the actual name of the bearer's father. The form of the surname for unmarried females is Nic Amhalghaidh. The forms for married females are Bean Mhic Amhalghaidh and Mhic Amhalghaidh. The Irish Mac Amhalghaidh has numerous Anglicised forms. The surname has been borne by at least one notable Irish family.
Macaulay, Macauley, MacAulay, McAulay and McAuley are surnames of Irish origin originating in Westmeath, Leinster anglicized from Irish Mac Amhalghaidh in the English language. The surname is also found in Scotland of distinct, but related origins due to Irish settling in Scotland. Some of the Irish Macaulay's settled in Scotland during the reign of Robert the Bruce. There are several etymological origins for the names: all of which originated as patronyms in several Gaelic languages—Irish and Scottish Gaelic. Although the English-language surnames are ultimately derived from Gaelic patronyms, the English-language surnames, and the modern Gaelic-language forms do not refer to the actual name of the bearer's father.
Dòmhnall MacAmhlaigh was a Scottish Gaelic poet and professor.
Arabic Ontology is a linguistic ontology for the Arabic language, which can be used as an Arabic WordNet with ontologically clean content. People use it also as a tree of the concepts/meanings of the Arabic terms. It is a formal representation of the concepts that the Arabic terms convey, and its content is ontologically well-founded, and benchmarked to scientific advances and rigorous knowledge sources rather than to speakers’ naïve beliefs as wordnets typically do . The Ontology tree can be explored online.