Orð og tunga - 01.06.2005, Page 53

Christopher Sanders: Bilingual Dictionaries of Icelandic
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could never be aids to production; this information would not for ex-
ample tell an Icelander how to produce an equivalent for satnhugur,
which is not in the dictionary. In other contexts in Iðunn 1989, typic-
ally where the first element was a full lexical item, and not a prefix, no
special attention was drawn to the fact that the element was also pro-
ductive in producing compounds, thus (an acute example) the noun
bragð is given in its two basic senses of 'prettur' ('trick') and ‘smekkur’
('taste'), as well as a third 'útlit’ ('look, appearance'); there are two
compounds that are headwords, bragðgóður and bragðlaukur, but there
is no help whatsoever with what are probably quite frequent words
such as bragðmikill and bragðsterkur; they are simply not included (and
there is no separate entry for bragð- as the first element in a com-
pound); there is, in other words, an acute need for more compounds
here, and this is before we have even begun to consider "L2/passive"
needs.
3.1.2 Compounds and "transparent words" for the English speaker
producing his/her own text
Compound words that are completely transparent in meaning should
nonetheless ideally be incorporated in a medium-sized bifunctional
dictionary because of the needs of the English-language user who
wishes to produce Icelandic:5 there are words he has heard someone
use, but he doesn't remember the pronunciation correctly, so how are
they to be spelled? An example would be ástarhaturs-samband ('love-
hate relationship'). Here the uncertain foreigner wants to know wheth-
er the word really exists - that he or she is not in other words, as a
foreigner, in danger of being the first to create the word. It is slightly
different with the next two examples, amfetamín, heróín, where the dif-
ficulty could be more with exact spelling and declension - is there, for
example, an accent over the o or over the /?
Given that we are including in this discussion of the "passive"
function the free production of an Icelandic text by a foreigner, there
is also a need to include more in the way of alternative forms of what
is essentially one and the same word - it may be possible to formu-
5Traditionally it would be argued that for this type of information the foreign user
must be expected to consult a monolingual dictionary, but the requirement is deliber-
ately upheld here to gain a full overall picture of what could be wanted or expected.