TY - JOUR AU - Brink, Lars PY - 2007/01/01 Y2 - 2024/03/29 TI - Leksikalske huller JF - Nordiske Studier i Leksikografi JA - NSL VL - 0 IS - 9 SE - Artikler DO - UR - https://tidsskrift.dk/nsil/article/view/19147 SP - AB - <p>Everyone thinks lexical gaps are interesting. But they do not appear in our dictionaries. Except for those more trivial cases where the very phenomenon behind a concept does<br />not exist in a population, e.g. Højnæsbjerget, the name of a steep hill in my home town for which there is no established name in any other language, or Kildeskattedirektoratet, the<br />tax authorities in the same area. But an English concept like cousin has no established Danish counterpart, and in spite of this being a well-known fact, it is well concealed in our<br />dictionaries. – I analyse a list of the 1000 most frequent Danish words and find as many as 27 instances where Spanish has a lexical gap, i.e. lacks an equivalent. I try to determine<br />whether the gaps are due to culture or accidental. But whichever the reason may be, I appeal to all lexicographers not to obscure the gaps, for not only do we have an obligation<br />to show them in good dictionaries, they are also of high interest for the learned as well as the unlearned.</p> ER -