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The Amharic version of semantic indefinibilia

Paper · 2001 · Dagmara Deska

Summary

The paper tests whether the semantic primitives of Anna Wierzbicka's Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM) have lexical counterparts in Amharic. These primitives, also called indefinibilia, are concepts held to be simple and understandable in every culture. NSM has three stages: choosing the primitives, finding how each one is expressed in a given language, and checking that choice by defining many other words with it. Deska works only on the second stage and takes Wierzbicka's list as given. Her data come from the standard NSM test sentences, in English, Polish and French versions, which ten native Amharic speakers translated. She then checked the candidate words against bilingual dictionaries and against NSM's syntactic criteria. Most primitives found plausible exponents, for example and sew for SOMEONE. Several did not fit cleanly: some were built from other primitives plus affixes, some came from semantically complex verbs, and some were expressed by constructions rather than words. She argues that the NSM programme is still worth pursuing, even though it has no verifiable discovery method. The search itself also exposes overlooked features of Amharic structure.

Key points

  • Wierzbicka's inventory grew from 14 primitives in 1972 to about 60 in 1999. These fall into groups such as substantives, mental predicates, quantifiers, place, time and evaluators.
  • Ten native speakers from different Ethiopian regions, age groups and education levels translated the test sentences. Two worked from Polish, one from French and the rest from English.
  • The findings were checked with Amharic–English, Amharic–Russian and Amharic–French dictionaries.
  • Some primitives proved problematic:
    • HAPPEN: it was rendered by five verbs. Two of them (tederrege, fet't'ere) were judged semantically complex.
    • FEEL: it is the passive-reflexive tesemma plus an object suffix, built on semma ("hear").
    • HAVE: it is allé ("be") plus an object suffix.
    • WHEN: it has lexical forms (mechë, gïzë), but in temporal clauses it is carried by subordinate conjunctions and verb forms. Amharic has eight temporal-clause constructions.
  • The paper also notes a disagreement with Heine's cognitive account. Heine holds that body-part etymology shapes spatial terms, while Wierzbicka denies that it affects meaning.

Interesting ideas

  • I1. The paper uses a fixed set of probe sentences, built from simple concepts, to find how each concept surfaces in another language; a stable probe suite exposes gaps a free corpus would hide.
  • I2. Translators worked from different source languages, so artifacts of any single pivot language could be separated from genuine target-language choices.
  • I3. A primitive can be expressed by another primitive plus an affix (FEEL from HEAR, HAVE from BE), so identical roots do not mean identical concepts.
  • I4. A concept may have no standalone word in some contexts and live in a construction instead, as with WHEN in Amharic temporal clauses.
  • I5. The speakers accepted semantically complex verbs for HAPPEN without noticing any misuse, so native acceptance alone did not show that a word was simple.

For Mova

How these ideas could serve Mova, our small open language model — its files, stages and tests:

  • I1 (learn): Build a small, frozen suite of minimal English sentences, one per core frame or primitive, and rerun it after each training change as a regression and negative-control check.
  • I2 (learn): When gathering silver data or LLM-teacher labels, vary the prompt or source framing and keep only analyses that agree across these variants.
  • I3 (tokens): The lemmatizer and morphology layer should keep derivational or construction-specific readings separate rather than collapsing them to the bare root lemma.
  • I4 (world): Event ordering should also draw temporal relations from constructions without explicit "when", such as English participial or absolute clauses.
  • I5 (answer): Treat a fluent reader's or model's acceptance of an output as weak evidence, and pair it with checks that the intended meaning is actually preserved.

Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.

 Fields, topics and concepts

📚 Shelves 4The field of science this work belongs to (OpenAlex fields).Arts and Humanities · 16,039 worksLanguage and Linguistics · 15,891 worksPsychology · 1,552 worksExperimental and Cognitive Psychology · 870 works

🧭 Topics 1Research subjects and languages the work is about.Semitic languages · 2,908 works

Cite

Cite as Dagmara Deska. 2001. The Amharic version of semantic indefinibilia. Studies in African Languages and Cultures.

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work.

@article{deska2001amharic,
  title = {{The Amharic version of semantic indefinibilia}},
  author = {Dagmara Deska},
  journal = {Studies in African Languages and Cultures},
  year = {2001},
  url = {https://salc.uw.edu.pl/index.php/SALC/article/view/575}
}

References

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