Semantic Distance Coefficient for Semantic Field ‘ Food ’ of Tatar Culture-Specific Concepts and their equivalents in English

In present time Intercultural communication is one of the issues of the day. Intercultural communication is closely connected with language worldview as any language reflects the world and culture worldviews. The article is aiming at OOV (out-of-vocabulary words) that present Tatar specific culture concepts. To research such words first we have arranged them into groups and then compared them with their equivalents in English. The more words we need to explain the meaning of the concept in other language the bigger is the difference in the sphere of concepts of the peoples whose languages we learn. We use the method of a dictionary article analysis, comparative and analytical methods to research the Tatar people specific concepts. We have investigated the semantic group “Food” and have calculated the semantic distance coefficient for this group. The coefficient made up 9.93 and it is showing that the sphere of concepts of this field differs much for Tatar and English people. The research results can be used in future research of the Tatar language and culture, Intercultural Communication as well as in Theory and Practice of Machine Translation.


INTRODUCTION:
It is well known that while learning the language we compare it with our native language.We try to find equivalents for the words of our language and it does not present any difficulty because as a rule the majority of the words lexicalize concepts known to all people of the world.A word expresses the relation to an object naming some compartment of the universe reflecting it through the concepts of a particular ethnic community.We know that the universe is the same everywhere but it is different for each ethnic group due to culture and environment reasons.Certainly a concept can be interlanguage, for instance, spoon (English), lozhka (Russian), kashyk (Tatar), etc.
But any language has the words that do not have equivalents in other language for some reasons.Some of them do not have equivalents due to the fact that the ethnic group does not have such an artifact: Russian banya (a small house where people wash themselves) does not have the equivalent in English; Tatar tubyatyaj (Tatar national cap) does not have the equivalent in English and Russian.In this case translators use various ways to introduce these subjects to other peoples' cultures.Any way using the special translation techniques they enrich the vocabulary.Morena Bracaj presented some translation techniques in the review article (Braçaj,2015).However the translation techniques do not help to understand the meaning of unknown subject and it raises the problem of lexical gaps, the words that do not have equivalents in other languages.Some words cannot have the equivalent in language A but they can have it in the language B (Vereshshagin et al, 1990).So we should conduct the research for a certain pair of languages.Moreover, the researchers use different terms to define the notion of the concepts that do not have equivalents in other languages, such as lexical gaps, outof-vocabulary words and specific culture notions.The variety of synonyms also causes some difficulties for researchers.The Russian researcher L. Barchudarov (Barchudarov,1975) made the classification for these words.He has distributed such words into three groups: 1. Proper and geographic names.2. Realias, the words that do not exist in the language of people of other community.Usually such words present specific culture concepts of particular ethnic group.3. Lexemes that L. Barchudarov named occasional lacunas (Barchudarov,1975).The object of our research is the second Semantic Distance Coefficient for Semantic Field 'Food' of Tatar Culture-Specific Concepts and their equivalents in English Revista Publicando, 4 No 13. (1). 2017, 711-720. ISSN 1390-9304 713 Articulo recibido: 05-11-2017 Aprobación definitiva: 05-12-2017 group, realias or specific culture notions of Tatar ethnic community.In our previous research we investigated the group 'Family and Human Being Environment' and presented the results in the article (Nutrtdinova,2015).We have compared it with their equivalents in English.According to the methodology developed by Russian linguists (Fenenko,2006) we selected the words that do not have equivalents in English from the corpora of Tatar fairy tales and distributed them in a few semantic fields.In this article we are presenting the results of the investigation for the semantic field 'Food'.This field is a subgroup of the bigger field "Ethnographic realias".

METHODS:
Tatar culture specific notions were taken from the collection of Tatar fairy tales of Kaum Nasyry, famous Tatar educator and writer, published in 1900 and the others were taken from the collection of Tatar fairy tales that were written down by well-known Tatar writers Gumer Bashirov and Khamit Yarmy during the ethnographic expeditions in 1939-1940.Basing on the collections comments we have concluded that the tales were told and then written in so-called "a village koine", the language received by joining Tatar language dialects, the stages of Tatar language development are presented in Tatar Grammar (Zakiev,1993).Any fairy tales are written in the style of folklore the language of which has a lot of specific culture concepts.We are using the methodology developed by Russian researchers of Voronezh University (Russia).The criterion of selection is the absence of equivalent in bilingual dictionary or a definition presented by a free word combination in metalanguage (Jurgita Cvilikaite,2006).We researched dictionary articles of printed English-Tatar dictionary, e-dictionaries and Explanatory dictionaries of English and Tatar.The researchers Vlachov, S. Florin (1980) consider that 'realias' (specific culture notions) can be presented mostly by nominative language units, nouns, very rarely, by adjectives, which have been derived from the nouns denoting specific notions (Vlachov,1986).We have distributed specific culture notions (SCN) into the following groups: 1) Family and Human being environment.
3) Ethnographic Realias.The group of 'Ethnographic Realias' we distributed into smaller fields such as Food, Household Objects and Clothes.So the next step of our research is to calculate the coefficient of semantic distance for the semantic group 'Food'.The higher is the figure the bigger is the distance between the concepts.The method was proposed by Russian researcher V. Nalimov (Nalimov,1979) to describe the meaning of explicated word and later it was used by V. Titov (Titov,2002) to calculate the semantic distance coefficient for a pair of any languages.According to this method the criterion for a lexeme selection can be the following: if a word of any language has an equivalent in an explanatory article of the dictionary it means that both languages segment the semantic field in similar way and form the similar concepts.But in the case when to explain the word meaning we need a few words we can say that the pair language does not have analogous concept.V. Titov concluded that the more words we need to explain the word meaning the less common concepts the pair of the languages have (Titov,2002).
To calculate the coefficient of semantic distance (SDC) it is necessary to get the data about the number of the definitions from a bilingual dictionary and the number of words in the definitions.Then we should get the total number of the words of all the definitions.To do it we have to multiply the number of the words of each definition by the number of the definitions.Total number we got will be the quantity Dthe sum of all the words of the definitions.V. Titov has presented the following formula of a coefficient of semantic distance calculation for a particular language: a coefficient of semantic distance = D : Q, where Q is the number of all the definitions in the dictionary) (9).Unfortunately at present time Tatar English bilingual dictionary has not been published yet so we are presenting our own definitions that have been edited by native speakers from the USA.
Basing the above mentioned opinion we excluded Tatar lexemes that have the conclusion that the objects the Tatars use in everyday life are similar to the objects the English people use but certainly there is some difference that should be explained for each notion.The word kishta (киштә) can be translated as shelf but the difference is that it is placed above a misch (Russian 'pech' (the object used to cook a meal) and used to preserve bread).English people do not have a special word for such a word.Russian pech has equivalent in Tatar misch but it is impossible to compare English stove or oven with this object.It demands special comment in the dictionary.We are going to present the results for the group 'Household Objects' (the words kishta, misch and tustagan belong to this field) in our future articles.

DISCUSSIONS:
Many linguists have been conducting research in the field of lexical gaps.However the problem is that some words cannot have the equivalent in language A but they can have it in language B (Vereshshagin,1990). Russian pech has the equivalent in Tatar misch but does not have it in English.Russian matreshka does not have the equivalent in Tatar but in English we have a word combination nest doll.So the study is endless as we can investigate specific culture notions of any pair of languages.Moreover, the researchers use various definitions and we can find a lot of synonyms to name such language phenomenon: lexical gaps, lacunas, xenonims and others but the problem of the definition has not been solved yet.Some researchers tried to distribute lexical gaps in different groups.Russian linguist L. Barchudarov divides them in the following way: 1.
Proper and geographic names.2. Realias, the words that do not exist in the language of people of other community.Usually such words present specific culture concepts of particular ethnic group.3. Occasional lacunas (Barchudarov,1975).The word realia is used by Russian researches and does not have a straightforward equivalent in English but we do not use the term lexical gap because the last one does not explain it as specific culture notion.The linguists of Voronezh University (N.Fenenko, A. Kretov, I. Bulgakova and others, 2013) developed the methodology for research of the second group, realias or specific culture notions.They use the term realia to denote culture specific notion.In opinion of N. Fenenko the term realia can be easily misinterpreted.
This can be explained by the fact that the term relaia was taken from other sciences.In her monography she is giving her own definition where she is defining realia as a Semantic Distance Coefficient for Semantic Field 'Food' of Tatar Culture-Specific Concepts and their equivalents in English Revista Publicando, 4 No 13. (1). 2017, 711-720. ISSN 1390-9304 718 Articulo recibido: 05-11-2017 Aprobación definitiva: 05-12-2017 source concept and recommends preserving it as a pair term for lacuna, the notion of comparative linguistics.Realia is denoting the significate of a word relating to one lingual culture when this word does not have a nomination in other language and the lexical gap can be named "lacuna".'Realia' is used both to name the culture object of reality and for the language nomination of the same object that can cause misinterpreting.In our article we have chosen the term 'realia' to name culture specific concepts of the Tatar people and compared them with the lacunas in English presented by zero direct equivalent or a definition presented by a few words.N. Fenenko offered to separate realias into a special lexical group and named it realicon (Fenenko,2013).
Following her hypothesis we can make an explanatory dictionary for any language.It should be noted that the word definition have to be a free word combination because a set-phrase can be interpreted as a language unit and cannot be accepted (Jurgita Cvilikaite ,2006).

CONCLUSION:
Lexicon of any language has the words that cannot have the equivalent in language A but they can have it in language B forming lexical gaps.Many researchers investigate such words and try to define the reason of lexicalization lack presented by the gaps.Some linguists call them out-of-vocabulary words (OOV) and tried to distribute them into groups.We are basing the classification made by Russian linguist Barchudarov.He distributed them into three groups, proper names, realias and occasional lacunas.The notion of realia is taken by Russian researcher N. Fenenko.In her works she defines it like a culture specific notion and a pair to the notion 'lacuna' in the target language.She developed the methodology of research for culture specific notions.Basing it we distributed Tatar culture specific notions that do not have equivalents in English into semantic fields.We are presenting the extract of a dictionary draft and the semantic distance coefficient for this field.It made up 9.93 while the coefficients of other fields made up 8.57 (Family and human Being Environment), 10.1 (Clothes) and 6.9 (Household objects).These numbers show the difference of concepts denoted by the words that verbalize the universe fragment for the English and the Tatar ethnic communities.
Figure 1.Food Number of words Number of the definitions (Q)