“There’s glory for
you!”
“I don’t know what you
mean by glory,” Alice said.
Humpty Dumpty smiled
contemptuously.
“Of course you don’t-
till I tell you. I meant ‘there’s a nice knock-down argument for you!’”
“But ‘glory’ doesn’t
mean ‘a nice knock-down argument,’” Alice objected.
“When I used a word,”
Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what i choose it
to mean-neither more nor less.”
“The question is,”
said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.”
Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass
As just discussed, the
meaning of a phrase or sentence is partially a function of the meanings of the
words it contains. Similarly, the meaning of many words is a function of the
morphemes that compose it, as we saw in chapter three. However, there is a
fundamental difference between word meaning- or lexical semantics-
and sentence meaning. The meaning of most words and all morphemes is
conventional; that is, speakers of a language implicitly agree on their
meaning, and children acquiring the language must simply learn those meanings
outright. On the other hand, the meaning of most sentences must be constructed
by the application of semantics rules. In this section we will talk about the
meaning relationships that exist between words and morphemes.
Although the
agree-upon meaning of a word may shift over time within a language community,
as we shall see in chapter 11, we are not free as individuals to change the
meaning of a word at will; if we did we would be unable to communicate with
each other. As we see from the quotation, Humpty Dumpty was unwilling to accept
this convention. Fortunately, there a few Humpty Dumpty. All the speakers of a
language share a basic vocabulary-the sounds and meanings of morphemes and
words. Each of us knows the meanings of thousands of words. This knowledge
permits us to use words to express our thoughts and to understand the thought
of others. The meaning of words is part of linguistic knowledge. Your mental
storehouse of information about words and morphemes is what we have been
calling the lexicon.
Dictionaries such as
the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) or Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary are
filled with words and their meanings. Dictionaries give the meaning of words
using other words rather than in terms of some more basic vocabulary. In this
sense a dictionary really provides paraphrases rather than
meanings. It relies on our knowledge of the language to understand the
definitions. The meanings associated with words in our mental lexicon are probably
not like what we find in the OED or Webster’s, although it is admittedly very
difficult to specify precisely how word meanings are represented in the mind of
speakers.
Victoria
Fromkin, Robert Rodman, Nina Hyams
An
Introduction to Language
English has been in use for many years, and it has been known to be one of the
easiest languages to acquire. Learning basic English is a piece of cake,
compared to learning the linguistic and literature of English. Sometimes, what
we say cannot be taken literally. There is a hidden meaning to the sentence,
meant to be something different from the context.
This is the same for the Quran, where Quran reveals many important things, and
yet, the ayah in the Quran too, cannot always be taken
literally. The Quran gives us paths to take, and guide us to do the right
thing. But the ayah is not written in such a way that readers
could understand, such as ‘don’t do this’ and ‘don’t
do that’, but it tells us in a different way, and it is up to us to really
understand it.
The reason the Quran
is pretty vague is because Allah S.W.T want us to think for ourselves and do
the right thing on our own. It guides us to the right path, but it is up to us
to actually think and do the right thing, to know what is right and what is
wrong, and to do the right thing even without the guide.
A lot of things in
Quran are said in a way that many critics would find faults, but many believers
would understand easily. An example is the ayah that stated women
should cover their aurah and wear hijab. In the Quran, it did
not state ‘Wear a hijab’ literally, but in surah an-Nur [(24):31] it is
stated:
“And
tell the believing women to reduce (some) of their vision and guard their
private parts and not expose the adornment except that which (necessarily)
appear thereof and to wrap (a portion of) their head covers over their chest
and not expose their adornment except to their husbands, their fathers, their
husbands’ fathers, their sons, their husbands’ sons, their brothers, their
brothers’ son, their sisters’ son, their women, that which their right hand
possess, or those male attendants having no physical desire, or children who
are not yet aware of the private aspects of women. And let them not stamp their
feet to make known what they conceal of their adornment. And turn to Allah in
repentance, all of you, O believers, that you might succeed.”
By this ayah, the
critics might say that the Quran did not
actually stated that women must wear hijab, as the word hijab is
not there, and in the ayah said that they need to cover the
chest, and private parts but they did not say that women must
cover their hair and head. And from the ayah that says ‘or
those male attendants having no physical desire’, critics could also say
that they have no desire towards men thus they do not need to cover their aurah.
But to the
believers, it is clearly stated that the Quran
precisely ask us to cover our head, by the use of the head covers, as well as
using the head covers to also cover our chests and not to expose our adornment.
Meanwhile, ‘male attendants that have no physical desire’ are
slaves back in the days where slaves are aplenty. Now that there are no more
slaves, it is a must to cover our aurah from all men except as
stated.
Therefore it can be seen that there are a lot of lexical semantics used in the Quran, and to really understand Quran, one have to understand, and think deeply, rather than taking it literally, nor ignoring it, as it shows how ignorant and stupid we really are to not grasp the real meaning of the ayah.
Prepared by: Sharifah Nurina Alia
