Lexical gap
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A lexical gap or lacuna is an absence of a word in a particular language. Several types of lexical gaps are possible, such as untranslatability and missing inflections.
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[edit] Translatability
Often some concepts lexicalized in one language does not have a corresponding lexical unit in another language and thus presents a difficulty of translation: circumlocution, a descriptive phrase, must be used instead, or even different phrases in different situations. If the concept is important, then borrowing from one language to another may happen.
This case should not be confused with translation into a different type of lexical unit, e.g., a simple word may be translated as a compound or a collocation. For example, the Russian word "bosoy" is translated as a compound "barefoot" and the English word private (rank) is "soldato semplice" in Italian.
An abundant source of lacunas used to be a contact of primitive cultures with more advanced civilizations. For example the Russian ethnographer Miklukho-Maklai, famous for his study of the aborigines of New Guinea, recorded that Papuans, who have never seen an ox, gave the animal a name back-translated as "a huge pig with teeth on the forehead".[1]
[edit] Missing inflection
Sometimes a certain inflection of a word by produces a word phonetically forbidden or awkward in a given language. For example the Russian word 'dno' in the meaning of bottom (of a river) does not have the plural form.
[edit] See also
- Lacuna model
- Defective verbs lack some of the inflections of normal verbs.
[edit] References
- ^ M. Kolesnikov, Miklukho-Maklai (Moscow, Young Guard, 1961), a book from the Life of Prominent People (Жизнь Замечательных Людей) series (Russian)
