Tertium comparationis in searching for cross-linguistic equivalents at the lexical level.

 

1) Tertium is the quality that two things have in common.

For instance: Goodbye, England's rose.(These words are about Diana’s, Princess of Wales’s death)

Objects of comparison: rose; Diana, Princess of Wales

Tertium Comparationis here = beauty

2) T.C. ( Tertium comparationis) presupposes both  similarity of meaning and similarity of a context usage. What does it mean? – We should pay attention to the way we use the word For instance:

Bite – укус

Fish bite – рыбный клев ( considerable difference)

Bite of the wind  - холодный обжигающий ветер ( has nothing in common with the word “укус”)

3) Some notions can’t be expressed  by one word, that’s a why “equivalence” presupposes just a partly correspondence, not the absolute one.

For instance:  to glare – пристально и сердито смотреть ( as you may see,  it can be only tranlsated in a descriptive manner)

4) The degree of equivalence depends on the grammar and lexical pecularities of languages.The closer they are, the more precise will be the equivalence between them.

5) The words, presented as equal in dictionaries, usually have their own spectre , range of meanings.

The first 1-3 meanings may coincide, but further you will inevitably notice that they diverge.

Dog – пес

Dog – самец волка, лисы, шакала

Dog(разг.) – парень, малый.

6) We should also keep in mind that in our heads we have a specific shape of a word that includes all possible and potential uses and meanings. And the most surprising results we can find out, comparing verbs of motion and perception, like go, get see. They have a great number of collocations unusual to Russian language. As well as countless amount of contextual usage.

7) Every language is unique in its way of covering reality. Basically, each language reflects the reality as he sees it.

For example:

Каша – porridge

Гречневая крупа – buckwheat

Гречневая каша - ?

The answer is “boiled buckwheat”. 

As we see, for British people гречка is but a boiled sort of wheat. While for Russians гречка is a  special type of porridge. Moreover, each language has its own methods of rendering the outer world, to be precise, each language pays attention to different things, trying to describe a certain object of the world. For example, “parallel bars” (gymnastic apparatus) is “брусья” in russian. The thing is, that English language pays attention to the fact of parralelism, while Russian points out the material they are made of, which is actually called “брус” This example vividly shows how different kinds of perception are reflected in different languages, therefore, our languge is closely connected with our way of thinking.