Talk:Hapax legomenon

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Sevagram is NOT a mysterious word. It is Hindi and means "village of servants", a name Mohandas "Mahatma" Gandhi chose for his Ashram in India which was already established long before 1946, the year the book The Weapon Maker was first published. Thus Vogt would have taken the name from Gandhi's village. Nothing mysterious about it.

But there's still the mystery of what the word means in the context of the novel. Since it only appears at the very end, there's no established meaning in that context far as the reader is concerned. Are you saying we should simply assume that the word means 'village of servants' in The Weapon Makers as well? Would that interpretation make sense in relation to the rest of the book? Even if, technically, the word is not a hapax legomenon, the meaning that Van Vogt intended might still be unique. 206.106.73.72 03:07, 10 Apr 2005 (UTC)

This article seems to have some problems. It tries to distonguish hapaxes from nonce-words, but includes "honorificabilitudinitatibus" as an English example of a hapax. Also, in Classical (Gr. & L.) scholarship, hapax refers *only* to words which have only one occurrence in all of extant literature. It does not, as it seems to in biblical studies, refer to a single instance in an individual author. Perhaps we can give both definitions and then break up the page? Existent80 July 9, 2005 12:24 (UTC)

Any idea what the greek meaning of the words are and would other people find that informative (I know I would)? Doctus 02:28, 9 December 2005 (UTC)

The last paragraph of the article - "The term hapax legomenon refers to a word's appearance in a body of text, not to its origins or prevalence in speech. It thus differs from a nonce word, which may never be recorded, or may find currency and be recorded widely, or which may appear several times in the work which coins it, and so on" - is completely opaque. Please rewrite this so it makes sense! funkendub Feb 2, 2006

Contents

[edit] tetrakis legomenon?

How many occurences would make a 'tetrakis' legomenon? This might need clarification in the article. -UK-Logician-2006 14:50, 2 January 2006 (UTC)

  • Tetra = Four. Just your basic Latin roots. :) 169.231.23.208 04:29, 31 January 2006 (UTC)
Actually, Greek... AnonMoos 17:53, 15 February 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Narrowly or Broadly?

From the second Paragraph: "...once in the Bible or yet more narrowly, once in the New Testament."

would that be narrowly... or would it be broadly (you'd be sure to find more legomena if you used a smaller text)

Mobius 23:34, 14 February 2006 (UTC)

But the scope is narrower. -Iopq 13:50, 13 December 2006 (UTC)
Maybe it's picky, but I agree with Mobius. It ought to be reworded, but offhand I can't think of a simple rewrite that would do. The words "broadly" and "narrowly" are probably not applicable metaphors in this context. I'll think about it. --King Hildebrand 18:15, 20 January 2007 (UTC)

Try specifically. Done and dusted. --King Hildebrand 22:19, 29 January 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Greek

Greek script should be added. I wasn't sure where to best add it so that the article would maintain its flow. The literal Greek meaning is "once read" (where hapax is an adverb, and so unpluralizable, and legomenon is a neuter singular passive participle form). AnonMoos 17:57, 15 February 2006 (UTC)

I agree, i've been bold and added it, as i think it's important to the article. Information comes from Wiktionary, and is less detailed than your explanation, but im not confident enough with the subject to combine the two. Provider uk 17:43, 17 May 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Apparent contradiction

"Gvina (Cheese) is a hapax legomenon ... The word has been extremely common in Hebrew since its appearance in the Bible." - If it's "extremely common" it's not a hapax legomenon, right? What's wrong here? -- 201.50.123.251 21:37, 25 August 2006 (UTC)

It is hapax within the Bible. Modern Hebrew simply reused all the Biblical words: "Because of its large disuse for centuries, Hebrew lacked many modern words. Several were adapted as neologisms from the Hebrew Bible or borrowed from other languages by Eliezer Ben-Yehuda." Ashibaka tock 06:11, 26 August 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Pronunciation?

The pronuncation of this term is not obvious. On terms like these a phonetic pronuncation key like a dictionary would be nice. Ltreachler 16:32, 11 June 2007 (UTC)

I added an IPA transcription. This is my first time adding an IPA transcription on Wikipedia, however, so if anyone wants to check my formatting (is there a template I should have followed?), or, for that matter, my Greek pronunciation, please do so. Chaoticfluffy (talk) 20:41, 6 May 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Epiousios

This should probably be mentioned. It's got its own article, it's one of the more notable examples from the new testament, significantly more notable than some of the hapax legomena existing in smaller sample sizes on that list. I don't know enough about it to say much myself, though. 128.211.210.48 02:49, 10 September 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Tintinnabulation

Does seem to be a rather common word (as unusual words go), especially in medical circles. I know, someone can argue it was used only once in the poem, but, if so, aren't we taking things rather far? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 70.117.164.123 (talk) 04:17, 8 January 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Two categories? More?

It seems to me this term describes two phenomena: 1) Words with a meaning lost or obscured by the passing of time, and 2) failed attempts at "inventing" a word. This ought to be addressed, rather than how it appears now. - Plasticbadge (talk) 00:47, 20 January 2008 (UTC)

The exact Greek meaning of Hapax legomenon is "something which is read once" (i.e. occurs only once in attested texts). Some forms can only occur once in a language's attested texts, yet their meaning still is relatively clear. Words which are invented by an individual for just one occasion are Nonce words... AnonMoos (talk) 01:26, 20 January 2008 (UTC)

[edit] NLP

Hapaxes are used in natural language processing, as they can be used to estimate the number of unobserved items (e.g. via Good-Turing estimation). For example if there are n hapaxes (words occurring only once) in a given corpus of N words, this indicates that the vocabulary from which the corpus was generated probably contains N + n words. Roughly n more words are in the vocabulary but weren't seen, because the corpus is a finite sample from a notionally infinite population.

Someone who understands this better than me might like to write it up properly!

--84.9.92.42 (talk) 17:45, 29 February 2008 (UTC)