Border Patrol
One intention with last week’s “mílujem ťa” was to show how the notion of “listeme” can be rather more helpful in explaining language than the notion “word”: As I pointed out, the Slovak expression has two words, while the English expression has three, yet they mean the same thing. Thanks to Eva S, we can highlight further the problem with the notion “word,” she writes:
“But let`s complicate the task with a Hungarian word “Szeretlek” which means “I love you”. It is just one word in which everything is included as in “I love you”. In “szeretlek” there is included both the object and the subject.”
So whether we have one, two, or three words we nevertheless have the same meaning in each case, crucially because each of these expressions contains exactly the same three listemes: the content listeme {love}, and the two function listemes {first person, singular, subject} and {second person, singular, informal, object). I leave it to my students with a knowledge of Hungarian to show exactly how “Szeretlek” expresses these three listemes.
I think most readers could see the distinction between word and listeme involved in analyzing “mílujem ťa.” However, how to separate out the boundaries between the three listemes turned out to be considerably more contentious. Zdenka K thought that the scope of the content listeme should be a bit more expansive:
“As far as concerning the word MILUJEM TA, in my opinion the base of the verb is MILU and the person who wrote it is JEM.”
And Michaela L argued to push the boundary of the content listeme “to love” even farther rightward into the sentence:
“But in the word “Milujem”, I think that this ending “m” means that “I” love somebody. If there will be “miluješ” – it means that not “I” but “you” love somebody (ja milujem, ty miluješ, on miluje, my milujeme, vy milujete, oni milujú). I think that the root of the verb “milujem” is “miluje”. Because, “mil” is not a verb, we do not know from which word, verb it is derived.”
So we have as possible candidates for the content listeme we associate with the meaning love: “mil-“, “milu-“, or “miluje.” One of Michaela’s problems with the first two possibilities is that they do not stand for something on their own; that is, they cannot be used as separate phonological words in a sentence. This, however, should not rule out their status as listemes, which are defined as he smallest units of meaning in a language, and not as something that must stand alone. When it cannot possibly stand alone, we have the terminology “bound listeme” for describing it. Note that we would have a problem in considering “miluje” to be a listeme in that there are not one but two meaningful units, the contentful notion involving love, and the functional notion involving a third person singular subject: “miluje” means ‘he or she loves”.
Deciding on a content listeme between “mil-“ and “milu-“ is a bit trickier, although a beautiful posting by Lenka V helps point the way. Notice that all the words in Lenka’s list share two things: in terms of meaning, a positive, affective denotation; in terms of form, the sounds constituting “mil-“:
“In the classroom last week you asked about the meaning of ‘mil-‘, and then about what the love is. That discussion motivated me to do a little research: Immediately after the lesson I went to the library and took an old Slovak dictionary (Slovník slovenského jazyka II. Vydavateľstvo SAV. Bratislava 1960). I found all the words beginning with ‘mil-‘, meaning something positive. I came to a list of 30 items as following:
miláčik
milec
milenec, milenecký
milenka
milený
milerád
milkovať sa, miliskovať sa
milký, milkovný
milodar
milohlasný, milohlasý
milokrásny
milosrdenstvo
milosť
milostiplný
Milostenka
milostivý
milostnica
milostnosť
milostný
milošialený
milota
milosťpán, milosťpani, milosťslečna
milovanie
milovaný
milovať
milovážne
milovník
milovonný
milozvučný
milý
All these words have a listeme indicating positive feelings (or love) of somebody towards another person or thing, or pleasant, agreeable perceptions. The underlined items are strange to my computer and probably to a modern Slovak reader too, because they were created by some Slovak writers like Andrej Sládkovič (milokrásny, milovonný, milošialený) or P. O. Hviezdoslav (milký, milkovný, milohlasný). I did not understand the words put in italics. Just to make it clear: the term ‘milostnica’, introduced by Margita Figuli (also a Slovak writer), was used to denote a beloved woman or a courtesan; and Milostenka is the name of a goddess of attractiveness, Grace (according to Sládkovič). Another surprise for me was the fact that I have never heard about ‘milota’ denoting a genus of gramineous plants (milota veľkoklásková, milota chlpatá). No idea what it is, however, interrresssting… Some proper nouns should belong to the list above too: Milada, Milan, Milena, Milica, Miloslav, Miloslava, Miloš, Milota (again!). I am sure that they were created through the application of our “positive listeme” as well as all the mentioned nouns.”
To capture the overlap in meaning in the list that Lenka V provides, we must narrow down to the listeme “mil-,“ the only surface phonological part that all the words share. Lenka’s posting is an excellent model of the way we can circumstantially detect bound listemes, those that cannot stand alone as a phonological word.
Now Mirka O’s question can be sorted out:
“I just wonder about how did you came up with the idea that the first part “MIL” of the word MILUJEM means something laden ‘love’. When I think about “MIL-”, I rather connect it with another Slovak word “mily” (kind).”
We can trace the difference between “mil-” and “mily” not to the meaning of “mil-“, but rather to the contribution made by the functional listeme “-y,” which may have the role of somewhat softening the intensity of “mil-“.
But this last claim points to another “boundary issue” regarding in particular content listemes: their meaning tends to be a little slippery. As Petronela L observed . . .
“I would like to add my personal experience with the expression ´milujem ťa´, or, more precisely, with its french equivalent ´je t´aime´. When I was in France, I met a boy and after some time, we became really good friends. As the time went on, the expression ´je t´aime´started to appear in his messages and e-mails and I became confused about what it could mean, so, after some hesitations, I simply asked him. Much to my surprise, it turned out to be just a casual way to finish one´s message or e-mail! I made a fool of myself, but the idea of saying ´milujem ťa´to any of my friends appears really strange to me! This proves that even such a simple expression like ´milujem ťa´ doesn´t necessarily have to have one clear content and clear meaning. In one language, it is used to express feeling of love, whereas in another, you can use it when adressing even to your neighbor!”
That fluidity of meaning in content lexemes is not just across languages, but occurs language internally, as Alena B observed . . .
“Many words and expressions are becoming less and less intensive. Even their true and original meaning is sometimes arguable. They are being used so often and in so many different situations that they start to lack the power they once had. They are more and more often being taken for grounded. Milujem ta, for example. It used to be a verbal proof of one’s strong and true affection, emotional warmth towards some other person (your “definition” is nice as well); a testimony of profound feeling that one could rely on, believe in, consider to be of great importance…
Today, Ja milujem otca, matku, brata, sestru;
Also Ja milujem priatela, manzela, milenca; – boyfriend, husband, lover
But I also milujem vychadzky do parku – walking in the park
A ja proste milujem taliansku kuchinu – Italian kitchen
A ja ozaj milujem Channel 5…
Ja milujem on every step I make, in every situation, what ever comes into my way.
I am rather disappointed and sad to see/hear that even the expressions such is this are becoming usual, universal and worn out.”
Thus boundaries, both in terms of phonological form and semantic content prove to be continual points of interest. It nevertheless becomes quite clear when borders are illegitimately crossed, as Renata M shows us in this final anecdote:
“I add a special kind of explanation of the utterance “Milujem”: it has nothing to do with love… just I was playing with the verb milujem and I create a sentence Milu(as a slovak biscuit)jem (eat)=I eat Milu:-)”
October 18th, 2006 at 6:13 am
Hello,
according to me l appreciate a lot the choice of our textbook-Harley.l like the style it is written and the organization of the chapters.it is not very time-consuming to read it and also easy to understand however most of the things we have already done on other courses.also the size of trhe articles is all right because with long texts /over8pages/it is easy to loose the idea of it.
concerning the blogs, well it is not easy to comment them because they are very subjective and most of the things we do not think of when we talk.but it is interesting to find a foreigner who is so fascinated with our language as you are.
on the other hand l like the way you put the theory into practice-it is more practice oriented and the theory stays in the background and we are not expected to summarize and answer Qs like what did you read for your HW? what was it about?what else do you remember?
l also like that you are trying to generalize and do not stick on one-two examples for the whole lesson.
so that´s for my comments,hope that some of them will be helpful.
October 18th, 2006 at 10:59 am
Dear professor, let me express my admiration to your genius. If I had known you were talking about biscuits all the time, I would not bother looking for linguistic point of “eating Milu”-I would simply eat it. Thanks once again for a nice briasnstorming
October 18th, 2006 at 11:40 am
Hello 8:)
Milu jem a milu zjem
That was a good one. But it is very bad for my weight because I have one in the draver and I would like to eat one, but it is too late in the evening 
So you see it is going to become an everyday expression at all.
You dont need to be afraid that the expression is getting used to often, because as Alena suggested it depends on the context. When I am going to tell this word to my girlfriend, it is very difficult for me to say when I am unprepared. I need to think about it first how and when and I need to be very emotionfull
October 20th, 2006 at 9:09 am
I would like to start my comment today with a question. I’m not very sure about the notions of bound listemes and phonological words. Harley defines phonological word as “a sequence of sounds which is identified as a unit on the basis of how it is pronounced”, and she gives us examples such as ‘can’t', ‘bendable’ or ‘dogs’. Bound listeme is a listeme that has to be connected to something else, it cannot stand on its own. Now when we were discussing the borders between the listemes of the word (or listeme) ‘milujem’, we classified the suffix ‘-m’ or ‘-ujem’ as a bound listeme, that has to be connected to the root of the verb because otherwise it doesn’t have any meaning at all. So it’s a bound listeme. If we look at the examples that Harley listed to make the notion of phonological word clear, we can see the listeme ‘dogs’ there, where the plural suffix ‘-s’ would be the bound listeme (according to your definition, dear Mark), but the whole word ‘dogs’ is a phonological word. Do I understand it right? I find it a little complicated and confusing.
We also talked about how the phrase ‘I love you’ or ‘milujem ta’ is losing its expressivity slow but sure. I agree, but I think that sometimes it really depends on the context ( what doesn’t!). I’m sure that every boyfriend, girlfriend, wife, husband or whoever would notice the different degrees of expressivity between ‘milujem ta’, ‘lubim ta’ or mere ‘mam ta (celkom) rad’. :>
Nice weekend to all of you!
October 21st, 2006 at 6:50 am
It’s really interesting feature of language, that from one, the main part of the word (it’s root), we can find out the meaning of the whole. It was really nice to look at the list of so many words with mil part, because they were really connected with the positive meaning. I also want to add, that the essay, you read this week was interesting- from that point, that you don’t need to understand the whole word, it’s enough, when you understand the part of it and the meaning then reveals from it. This, accoding to me, confirms the importance of listems.
October 22nd, 2006 at 5:16 am
Hurrah! I have finnaly understood the language is not really about words (from the lexical semantics point of you), but listemes are those that actually matter… Sometimes we do not need many words to say a great thing, express a great meaning – even in one word “szeretlek”.
Many of us tried to set certain boundaries in “milujem ťa” – where does one listeme end and another one start. I do not know whether there is one specific answer to that, I have not come across it when reading the chapters either, but I think it is not so important for us to define exact bounds of listemes in order to get the meaning… What I find important (at least for me) is to SEE that those listemes ARE THERE, regardless of knowing where does one end and following one start…
And now, let’s eat one Mila…
October 22nd, 2006 at 10:00 am
I agree that even the expression like “milujem ta” starts to lack its original meaning. Some people use it too often, for example to say what they like to do, to eat, etc. For saying things like that they could rather use “mam rad” which would be more appropriate. I think the word MILUJEM carries such a strong feeling of love which should be connected with a person – not a thing – in that case we can use “I like”. The main problem I have noticed about people who say “milujem” too often is that they alreday don´t realize the real meaning of this word. And then it is possbile that some of them are able to regard love as one of that things…
October 22nd, 2006 at 12:01 pm
Wow, we are all Slovaks or most of us but I´ve never heard about such words as miliskovať sa, milký, milkovný, or Milostenka. It is true that with this one listeme we could express lot of positive feelings to somebody.From my personal point of view, I think that´s not important how many words ´Milujem ťa´, ´I love you´, ´Je t´aime´ or ´Szeretlek´ contain, it depends on how you say them and to whom you address them. From the linguistic point of view it is interesting how this simple phrase can differ one from the other. And what about ´worn out´words or rather ´cliché´? I´m quite sure that when the one use them daily without thinking what does it really mean, it could become ´worn out´ but when people use them carefully and the words are said honestly and sincerely they do not lose its intensity and meaning.
October 23rd, 2006 at 3:01 am
I would like to look at “milujem ťa” and “I love you” from the different perspective as we have looked at them before – what do “milujem ťa” and “I love you” have common and what different? First of all for sure it is a positive message from the semantic point of view, both the expressions are about the strong positive emotions which are expressed in two different languages and there we are the first difference – English belongs to the Germanic languages like for example German, in which “I love you” means “Ich liebe dich”. The phrase “Ich liebe dich” contains three listemes (two function listemes and one content listeme) as well as the English one “I love you”. But Slovak with “milujem ťa” belongs to the Slovanic languages together with Polish with “kocham te”(means I love you) and we can see that two listemes are common for both of them. So the distinction of the languages to the Germanic and Slovanic ones creates one of the differences. Let us move ahead another difference can be strictness of the usage “milujem ťa” on Slovak side and openness of the usage “I love you” in English. Slovak people are very careful about “milujem ťa” when, how often, with whom it uses, on contrary are democratic about it because they know that positive message of “I love you” never hurt anybody, so why to save it in human communication. And finally Slavonic infinitive form “milovať” and Germanic infinitive form “to love” are proof of different difficulty of grammar. While Slovak verbs posses their own system of inflections (ja milujem, ty miluješ, my milujeme, etc.),which are not the same as the infinitive: milovať, English verb endings (I love, you love, we love, etc.) correspond with the infinitive: to love. To come to the conclussion and discover what I already found out at the beginning, we can admit that the both phrases “milujem ťa” (milosrdný, milujúci, etc.)and I love you ( lover, loveable, etc.) are the bases of the words which indicate the positive feelings or love-láska. Have a nice day
October 23rd, 2006 at 4:28 am
Considering the meaning of ‘milujem ta’ I agree with Alena in that point that it is a really wide-spread expression . However, I think that it is completely OK. In my opinion the meaning, and the strenght of the meaning depends on the context. Therefore not the strenght of ‘milujem ta’ became more universal, but the number of contexts in which we use it had increased. I don’t think that ‘milujem ta’ indicating the relationship between women and men, characterised by affection, desire, tenderness, devotin, etc. is more universal now. Maybe I’m wrong but I think that ‘milujem ta’ indicating the above mentioned relationship between women and men is still rare, it is still hard to say and it is still very precious to hear. We can use ‘milujem ta’ in other contexts as well, for example, ‘milujem matku, dceru, brata’, etc. In these contexts ‘milujem’ means almost the same, only without the element of sexual desire. However, ‘milujem’ in the context ‘milujem zmrzlinu’ means something else. I mean by that only that I like ice-cream, without any real emotion. The fact that ‘milujem zmrzlinu’ does not lessen my love towards XY. Finally, I think that only with words it is impossible to cover what we mean or feel, especially in the case of our ‘milujem ta’. Somethimes a tender glance tells much more than words.
October 23rd, 2006 at 12:08 pm
I am going to be personal. As my name is Milada, I’d like to comment on you claiming that also proper names beginning with ‘mil-‘ “were created through the application of our “positive listeme” “. It was some time ago that I was asked about what my name ‘meant’. Searching on the internet, I found out that Milada is of Czech origin and means ‘milá, milovaná; mladá‘ (kind, loved; young), (http://aba.wz.cz/jmena.htm ) or just ‘mladá‘(young) (http://jmena.na-webu.cz/index.php ). It was this second web site where the author claimed that the original of this name was ‘Mlada’ and after some time it changed to Milada. Harley claims that the etymology of a word is not important in order to know how to use it properly. I agree (and it’s special with proper names), but anyway, I’d like to know what caused the change from Mlada to Milada (though the explanation of the meaning of Milada is – acc. to the second web site – still the same: mladá – young) and I wonder whether there is such a difference between the two names and if so, are both meanings included in each of them? (or are they to be regarded as two versions of one name?)
As for the expression ‘milujem ťa’ becoming worn out, I agree that it loses its intensity when it’s used so much, but on the other hand, I think that it is natural, because the language still develops. Some words become archaic, some new enter the language, and others lose their intensity. This happens naturally and that’s why the linguistics is descriptive, not prescriptive (though there were attempts to be prescriptive, as far as I know, they hadn’t been successful).
October 23rd, 2006 at 1:09 pm
Hi dear professor Lencho,
Now after reading I am quite confused but what thing occured in my head is this: I wrote that MILUJEM TA is used when we show love to somebody and our true feelings. But now I relized that I used MILUJEM when I say: milujem miesto kde byvam, milujem mojich rodicov a milujem prirodu, milujem môjho psa etc.
I did not realize that the word MILUJEM is not only used when there are two people in love.
Another thing I thought of was the base of MILUJEM TA. Because I told to myself: ja MILUJem, ty MILUJes, on,ona,ono MILUJe, my MILUJeme, vy MILUJete, oni MILUJu = so in this case the base can be seen as MILUJ and EM is a person – subject and of course TA is object.
I am quite confused but I know that TA is deictic word and MILUJEM is content word.
I am not sure if I am right.
Have a nice day, thank you.
October 23rd, 2006 at 2:58 pm
Your discussion about “word and listeme” in analyzing “Milujem Ťa” helped me a lot in understanding their difference. When we characterize these two terms from lexical point of view it sounds rather contentious than in the example that you made for us. Let`s look at definition that Harley made for listeme. He describes it as a sound-meaning correspondence. Well, looking at this definition I was quite confused, but trying to find out what this expression stands for. Then you showed us the example of either “I love you”, Milujem Ťa” or “Szeretlek” where it is not important at all whether we have one, two or three words with exactly same meaning. Further more, each of these expressions contains three listemes, the content listeme and the two function listemes as you described in your blogs. Thank you for giving us this example. It was really helpful!
October 24th, 2006 at 5:55 am
As to define how to divide the “milujem ta“ into smaller units, I immediately thought of similarly sounding words such as :
ďakujem
ukazujem
upratujem
banujem
ukazujem
uvažujem
úradujem
obedujem
obťažujem
pospevujem
unavujem
…
Notice that these words end with „ujem“, which means that I do something. So when we consider the division of “milujem ta” we should consider “mil” as definitely the boundary between two listemes.
“mil” = Love (content listeme)
“ujem” = I /do/ (function listeme)
“ta” = You (function listeme)
That’s the same division you came up with. I agree with it. It also makes sense to me this way for the reason I described above.
Meaning of words lose their true value ? Consider these words :
freedom
equality
brotherhood
solidarity
justice
tolerance
truth
…
For the first four many nations fought their revolutions and also died for. Now these words lost their value, and definitely we are not going to fight or die for them. I feel sorry for those who have (what happened in Budapest last night was only vandalism and stupidity).That’s the right way, which is simply some kind of positive historical development.
October 24th, 2006 at 9:37 am
Hello,
First of all, this analyzing of the expression “milujem ťa” helped me to realize the difference between word and listeme. It is practical explanation of the theory, I mean, it is good to analyze something in this way because it is useful for understanding the theory.
Secondly, it is interesting, but it did not come to my mind that the content listeme in “milujem ťa” could be “milu-” or “miluje-” as some of my colleagues suggested. The infinitive is “milovať”, so when we divide it into “mil-ovať”, we have the content listeme “mil-”. This is for me the “natural way” how to separate the content listeme in this expression.
Similar to some of my colleagues, I also think that the usage of “milujem ťa” instead of “I like” is not very good. This makes the meaning of “milujem ťa” less valuable than it really is. What is more, I think that it changes the real meaning of this expression into the “ordinary” meaning that has “I like”. “I love” does not mean “I like”, so why should we use them as synonyms? There is no reason for it.
But I found interesting that there are so many words in Slovak that begin with “mil-” and they have positive meaning because “mil-” in many cases “naturally” evokes positive feelings.
Have a nice day.
October 25th, 2006 at 12:26 am
This weeks reading was very good. When I read the part of this chapter about argument structures I was thinking about our structure “milujem ťa”. I think that we can call it Experiencer – theme verb. We have subject – the argument doing the feeling – I – experiencer and also the argument – ťa – that is the target of the feelings – theme. I like the term used by psycholinguists call the Universal Packager and I relised how did I learn English – countable and uncountable nouns at primary school. Our teacher gave au advice to packaged up into some kind od countable unit (e.g. milk – 2 bottles of milk) And after that we were able to sort out which of the nouns are C or UC.
I’m looking for the next class and can you explain to us thet cartoon, please
October 25th, 2006 at 2:21 am
Lenka´s comment about different words beginning with „mil“ I found very ineresting. I didn´t realize before that the meaning of these words is always something positive.
When I read this week about countable and uncountable nouns I tried to compare them with Slovak. I realized that most of the uncountable nouns are uncountable as well in our laguage (for example furniture, weather, happines, health,…). But for example word like information we use in Slovak usually in plural form: „Musím si o tom zistiť nejaké informácie.“ – „I have to find some information about it.“
In mail you sent us you wrote „priam Vam“. Of course, you derivated it from the infinitive „priať“, like for example infinitive in „čítať, hovoriť, plávať,“…. . In this case, the first person Sg is „čítam, hovorím, plávam“, but in verbs like „siať“ – sow or „vziať“ – take, the first person Sg is not „siam, vziam“, but „sejem, vezmem“, so that is why not „priam“, but „prajem“.
October 25th, 2006 at 3:12 am
Mark, thank you for using my list in our lecture. I hope I will be able to write something usable for the next time too.
Now just a short comment:
It’s a pity that we haven’t discussed the elements of the utterances which declare our strong feeling of attraction or love to somebody else.
I think that all the Indoeuropean languages are so similar in their structures that they all will use exactly three elements when declaring love or using any other verb. Some of these elements can be hidden in some languages, because its grammar rules allow it. As like in the Slovak language, it is equal to say “milujem ťa” or “ja ťa milujem”. Thanks to various endings in such languages, the utterances are understandable even if not used in their complete form with all the pronouns, articles etc. Languages able to do this are synthetical. I suppose that English is the most analytical language I came in contact with, having no possibility to omit the subject-marking pronoun. Then, when comparing I love you – ich liebe dich – ja te volim – ja ťebja ljublju – je t aime – (yo) te quiero – ja ťa milujem, I founnd the similarity of Indoeuropean languages obvious. Even the Hungarian “szeretlek” contains three elements, or not?
Maybe some of my colleagues have opposite opinion. Help me to find out. How is it with Italian declaration of love?
October 25th, 2006 at 3:35 am
Hi!
I would like to respond to one of your paragraphs. You wrote: „So we have as possible candidates for the content listeme we associate with the meaning love: “mil-“, “milu-“, or “miluje.” ”. But what about the ‘miluj‘ ? It has also the association with the meaning love and even it is the meaningful unit which is able to stand on its own (so we don’t need to call it ‘bound listeme’). Here are also two meaningful units as in ‘miluje’ – the contentful notion involving love and the functional notion involving 2nd person singular subject imperative: ‘miluj’ means (You) love!
By the way, I think it is not allowed to take a photo of Polish customs officers…
October 25th, 2006 at 5:01 am
I’m writing you a comment for the first time, so I’m quite confused about it, and I hope you will get it. But I liked the topic if your lecture, and I would like to write my opinion to you. It is enthralling how many words are in the dictionary associated with the expression “I love you” or “milujem ta”. It was still more interesting for me to read them, because I am Hungarian,and there were some expressions among them, which I haven’t heard before. It was really interesting to read and find out their Hungarian meanings. So thank you for your work and “contribution”.
October 25th, 2006 at 9:20 am
Mark, it’s interesting how you see the expression ‘milujem ta’. Some of my collegues wrote that they use the word ‘milujem’ with other words like: milujem prechadzky, milujem telku and so on. When I thought about it I can say that in these examples I rather use the word ‘zboznujem’ (to adore). However, if I said it in English I would use ‘love’ or ‘like’ not ‘adore’. I don’t know why but may be it is because I associate the slovac word ‘milujem’ wirh love.
November 3rd, 2006 at 1:50 pm
Maybe we could ask a Slovak linguist about how to analyze the expression „Milujem ta”. : ) I’m a bit confused because I would analyze it a bit differently as you did it and nobody came up with the same idea as mine.
I think the word „milujem” consists of THREE listemes! First of all, the base (or bound listeme) is mil- .
Then, -(u)j is a verb-forming suffix,
–e is only a kind of linking vowel
and only –m is what expresses the first person singular.
My analysis is based on the assumption that if we take different verbs such as vidím, robím, čakám, ponáhľam sa etc. the only suffix that is common in all of these verbs is the single –m, however all aspects (first person, singular, present tense) are the same.
And if we take the verbs which are structurally similar to „milujem” e.g. maľujem, obedujem etc. we can also see that the base of the verbs can be separated similarly: mal-, obed- and the remaining listemes also behave similarly: -(u)j is the verb-forming suffix and -(e)m is the suffix expressing the person.
Perhaps this is not essential from the point of view of lexical semantics and we should concentrate more on the meaning of the verb and the two arguments (the experiencer and the theme) but I felt I have to add my analysis.
November 4th, 2006 at 7:07 am
Hi,
vau, really great words whit the same listeme MILU. Do you see that all this words have only possitive meaning? They sound so nice, lovely, positive, peaceful … And I like Mila (biscuit) too. Last week I was not sure about listeme, but after reading some chapters, I must tell that I really undertand it, and I am happy. Have a nice day.
Michaela
November 5th, 2006 at 10:12 am
Hi Mark.
I would like to comment on Border Patrol.
Whether you can express this feeling of love by 3,2words or 1 word,what’s matter is if you really mean it. The base of the word milujem is mil- as all versions of this verb share the same stem mil-. e.g. mil-ujem,mil-oval,mil-uješ. However, it is difficult to decide whether this is right explanation as a listeme is the smallest unit of meaning in language. Can it be also milu- or miluje-? When we look at the word milovať,-lovať is derived from the word love, it is meaningful unit,the boundary of the content listeme would then be miluje- . That’s why it might be confusing.
I would be more positive about the posiibility of mil- as content listeme.
I already commented the usage of milujem and now
I asked some of my friends, when do they use it. Most of them say this sentence only to their partners-boyfriends, girlfriends, they trully love.(only very rarely in connection with concrete/abstract things.The reason for this is maybe in element of sexual desire, because when you make love you say- milovali sme sa…and you do that only with your partner.
When we have three expressions(mám rád,milujem,ľúbim) to differ feelings towards people and things,why don’t we do that?
BTW also British people use I love stg/smb so often,that it’s nearly like saying Hi to someone.
P.S.I looked at the book in which are all meanings of names e.g. Milan,Milana-slovanic name from the adjective milý,kind
Miloslav,Miloslava,Milena,
Milo,Milka-from the word kind,famous for its goodness, kindness.
December 19th, 2006 at 6:45 pm
We’ve defined the content listemes as- something we build upon that carry the meaning, they carry the main point of the message we want to send
and functional listemes- they restrict and organize the meaning, providing the structure, that helps us to communicate better the message.
Let’s talk about the “Milujem ta”
It is thru that Slovak has a great number of related words, that all contain –mil. We forgot to mansion- milion, miliarda, milenium- which might also have the positive connotation. But I’ve also found 1 word, with rather negative connotation- mílka (mistake), míla (mile)
And because of the great number of related –mil words, I would also divide Milujem ta in to 1. content list. mil, 2. functional listm ujem, 3. functional listem ta