POLYSEMY VS. HOMONYMY.

July 31, 2006 by languagehat 3 Comments

Lameen of Jabal al-Lughat is back from Algeria and posting again (hurray!), and has some interesting things to say about Algerian Arabic examples of “polysemy (different meanings with a shared conceptual core) and … homonymy (different meanings coincidentally identical in phonetic shape).” I agree with his analysis and think people should be more careful about separating the two concepts.

Comments

sara says

August 1, 2006 at 9:02 am

Fijne verblogdag gewenst, & nog vele jaren.
Matt says

August 1, 2006 at 12:17 pm

Kind of a tangent:
http://arabicgems.wordpress.com/2006/04/20/two-ends-of-the-same-stick/
“There is a category of words in Arabic known as al-ad`daad الأضداد. They are a type of ishtiraak in which a single word shares different shades of meaning, but what is special about the ad`daad is that the same word is applied to two completely opposite meanings.”
John Cowan says

July 27, 2018 at 6:27 pm

As well as a type of camel and an obscenity.

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POLYSEMY VS. HOMONYMY.

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