LINGUIST List 12.442

Sat Feb 17 2001

Qs: European Wordlists, "Adopt" in Other Cultures

Editor for this issue: Karen Milligan <karenlinguistlist.org>

Directory

1. Moon Shadow, A Wordlist Request
2. Peter Yost, "adopt" in other cultures

Dear all at the Linguist List!

I am interested in locating nice, comprehensive and linguistically motivated 
word lists for a number of European languages including Russian and Polish.

After searching the Linguist List archives I found a number of references to 
the sites where wordlists are stored, namely 
ftp.gatekeeper.dec.com/.8/misc/stolfi-wordlists and ftp.ox.ac.uk (Linguist 
List 6.99). Unfortunately these addresses are not valid any more.

I will highly appreciate any information about where one can find 
them,including proprietory word lists which are commercially available. I 
need this information for lexicographic research and dictionary compilation.

Thank you very much.

Sincerely,

Natalie.

Hi - I thought I would try this list for assistance on this language
issue.

The word adopt and all its forms is completely inadequate for its
meaning when used for adopting a child. It carries no power of the
real event or process and carries a cold, even legalistic connotation.
In the English language, there does not seem to be a good word for
taking someone else's birth child as your very own.

The closest I can come is to substitute the word embrace for adopt as
in: "We embraced Cate as our daughter" but that does not work very
well.

My question is:
Do other languages or cultures have a term that we could borrow to 
bring full meaning to this?

It's possible that this may be more of an etymological question so if 
you can suggest other forums for posing this question, please let me 
know. When I tried to look up the derivation of the word adopt, it 
simply goes back to the latin term that denotes "taking on", nothing 
that reflects this particular meaning or use.

Thanks and I look forward to your responses.


Peter Yost