Czech Translations of the Gospel of Matthew from the Diachronic Point of View – Plus Ça Change…

The paper focuses on dynamics of changes of several linguistic and text properties in diachronic development of Czech. Specifically, we analyze the proportion of identical word-forms (types), the average type length, text length, the proportion of hapax legomena, the moving average type-token ratio, and entropy. For the analysis, seven translations of the Gospel of Matthew from the 14th to the 21st century were used. The study reveals some differences in dynamics of changes of particular properties.

TWO ARMENIAN PERSONAL NAMES WITH ŠAH ‘KING’

There are a great number of Armenian compound personal names with the element šah ‘king’ of Iranian origin (Middle Persian and New Persian šāh ‘king’). It occurs: (1) in both masculine and feminine names; (2) with both native Armenian and foreign components; (3) either as the first or the second component; (4) often in doublet forms with a reversed order of the components. For instance: masculine Šah-amir and Amir-šah, Šah-paron and Paron-šah, Vahram-šah; feminine: Šah-xat‘un and Xat‘un-šah, Šah-tikin. Also note masc. Šah-aziz vs. fem. Aziz-šah, masc․ Sult‘an-šah vs. fem. Šah-sult‘an, masc. Melik‘-šah vs. fem. Šah-melē/ik‘ (the latter is sometimes masculine, cf. Middle Persian > Syriac Šāh-malīk, also masculine ). This paper aims to interpret two hapax legomena in which the component šah became synchronically unanalyzable due to phonological changes. In one of them, šah is the second member of the name (gen. Artamšin < *Artam-šah/y-in), whereas in the other it is the first one (Šaštʻi < *Šah-stʻi ‘Šah-Lady’).

Adjective–noun compounds in Mandarin: a study on productivity

In structuralist linguistics, compounds are argued not to constitute morphological categories, due to the absence of systematic form-meaning correspondences. This study investigates subsets of compounds for which systematic form-meaning correspondences are present: adjective–noun compounds in Mandarin. We show that there are substantial differences in the productivity of these compounds. One set of productivity measures (the count of types, the count of hapax legomena, and the estimated count of unseen types) reflect compounds’ profitability. By contrast, the category-conditioned degree of productivity is found to correlate with the internal semantic transparency of the words belonging to a morphological category. Greater semantic transparency, gauged by distributional semantics, predicts greater category-conditioned productivity. This dovetails well with the hypothesis that semantic transparency is a prerequisite for a word formation process to be productive.

Considerations on Two Cruces Philologorum (Ael. NA 15, 15)

The present article aims to elucidate an interesting narrative that forms a portion of Aelian’s paradoxographic work Περὶ ζῴων ἰδιότητος (On the Characteristics of Animals, Lat. De natura animalium). The passage under discussion describes some horned animals of oriental origin that were involved in the annual fighting contests during a one-day competition held on the initiative of a “great king of India” — probably Chandragupta (4th–3rd c. BC), the founder of the Maurya dynasty. Aelian’s chapter (NA 15, 15) was perhaps taken from Megasthenes’s Ἰνδικά (Description of India). The passage includes two hapax legomena referring to two species of animals: †μέσοι† and †ὕαιναι†. The first of these should be identified with the Ladakh urial (Ovis orientalis vignei Blyth); cf. Prasun məṣé ‘ram, urial’ (< Vedic mēṣá- m. ‘ram’). Aelian’s exact description of the horned animals called †ὕαιναι† clearly demonstrates that the alleged “striped hyena” (Gk. ὕαινα) must represent the chinkara, i. e., the Indian gazelle (Gazella bennettii Sykes). The Indo-Aryan term for ‘chinkara’ (Ved. hariṇá- m ‘Indian gazelle’, hariṇī́- f. ‘female gazelle’; cf. Pa. and Pk. hariṇa- m., hariṇī- f.) suggests that the corrupted form in Aelian’s passage should be emended as ὑάριναι [hyárinai]. This seems a near-optimal adaptation of the Pali or Prakrit appellative háriṇā pl. ‘chinkaras’.

It will certainly be found that some words are literally repeated: Horecký’s hypersyntax

The article reflects the linguistic work of Ján Horecký in connection with hyper syntax and text linguistics. In his work Základy jazykovedy (Outline of linguistics) Ján Horecký remarks (1974, p. 90) that one of the principles of text construction is the literal repetition of certain words. We discuss this Horecký’s assumption and describe its consequences for the langue parole opposition and the concepts of textual isotopy and textual cohesion. The main task of the article is to examine Horeský’s assumption. For these purposes, we present an authorship attribution analysis of literary works by two Slovak authors: Svetozár Hurban Vajanský and Martin Kukučín. We focus on low‐frequency lexicon, i.e. hapax legomena, which are supposed to be independent of the authorial style (e.g. Binongo, 2003) and should reflect random circumstances of communication (de Saussure, 1996, p. 50; Bloomfield, 1933, p. 170). This means that if the structure of the text were to be affected by the repetition of certain words, the low frequency layer of the lexicon should contain evidence of this repetition with a low degree of dependence on the content and style of the literary work (Baayen, 1996). The analysis and its presentation is based on separate processing of hapax legomena and their n‐grams, cosine dissimilarity and multidimensional scaling (Torgerson, 1952). Contrary to the general notion of the text structure, we conclude that the authorial texts are based on the repetition of certain word forms and word forms combinations (by n‐gram analysis), even in the level of low‐frequency words.

Changes in the productivity of word-formation patterns: Some methodological remarks

Changes in the productivity of word-formation patterns are often investigated using hapax legomena. In this paper, I argue that at least in diachronic investigations of productivity, a measure based on first attestations is a viable alternative to hapax-based measures. I show that such a measure is a more direct proxy to new words than hapax-based measures – it measures what we want to measure, which is not always true for the latter. I present a method that deals with the common problem of varying subcorpus sizes (I suggest we randomly resample the subcorpora up to a predefined size), and to the problem of old words appearing as new at the start of the corpus (I suggest we take an earlier corpus and determine a point in time when almost all old words have registered). Armed with these instruments, we can determine the ratio of new types to existing types for a time span, which can be regarded as the renewal rate of the respective category.