Abstract: This paper is aimed to study about connotation and its implication in language use. In line with this paper it is discussed the connotative utterance found in the translation of the Holy Quran, Surah Al Anfal verse 60. The connotative utterance is regarded having negative emotional response to the readers, therefore it is suggested to replace such utterance with the utterance which contains positive emotional response to the readers without changing the meaning of the surah.
Keywords: connotation, denotation, connotative meaning.
INTRODUCTION
A connotation is not the exact meaning (= denotation) but a vague implication, semantic associations of a word or phrase. For example, the denotation of caviar is simply “sturgeon eggs” but it connotes wealth and indulgence. This word is the noun from the verb to connote; the adjective is connotative, as the connotative significance of a remark. An implication of a statement is a meaning directly and inevitably bound to it, as smoke implies fire. A connotation is a vaguer association, as wearing furs connotes wealth, even though the furs may have come from hard work and saving or working on a mink farm. The Word derives from Medieval Latin connotare “to mark with” from con “with” + notare “to mark” (from nota “mark”). The root of notare started out its life as Proto-Indo-European *gno- “know”, which came down to English as know. In some of its variants a vowel was inserted between the two consonants at the beginning of this root. One of these variants became English cunning from Old English cunnan “to know how to”. (Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia). Within contemporary society, connotation branches into a culmination of different meanings. These could include the contrast of a word or phrase with its primary, literal meaning (known as a denotation), with what that word or phrase specifically denotes. The connotation essentially relates to how anything may be associated with a word or phrase, for example, an implied value judgment or feelings. In logic and in some branches of semantics, connotation is more or less synonymous with intension. Connotation is often contrasted with denotation, which is more or less synonymous with extension. A word’s denotation is the collection of things it refers to; its connotation is what it implied about the things it is used to refer to. So, the denotation of dog is just the collection of all the dogs that exist. The connotation of dog is (something like) four-legged canine carnivore. Alternatively, the connotation of the word may be thought of as the set of all its possible referents (as opposed to merely the actual ones). So saying “You are a dog” would imply that you were ugly or aggressive rather than stating that you were canine. The relationship between words and meanings is extremely complicated, and belongs to the field of semantics. So, the words do not have single, simple meanings. Traditionally, grammarians have referred to the meanings of words in two parts:
denotation: a literal meaning of the word
connotation: an association (emotional or otherwise) which the word evokes
It is useful to make a distinction between this kind of “naming” meaning, which is called denotation, and another kind of meaning, which is called connotation. Connotation refers to the associations that words can have in our minds.
EXPERTS’ OPINION
According to Barwell (1983: 60), Connotation includes the emotional response which the word arouses in a person because of his attitude to the object referred to. This response may be positive, negative or neutral in varying degrees. For example the word ‘mother’ arouses positive emotional response in most people compared with ‘woman’ which is rather neutral. Furthermore, He said that connotative meaning is often culturally conditioned in English. The word ‘fox’ carries negative overtones being associated with qualities of cunning and deceitfulness. In another language, the equivalent word may have no negative emotional content. But there may be other words which would be neutral in English and have strong emotional content in the other language. Emotional reaction is largely determined by differences in culture and to some to some extent by differences in personal background. Connotation relates to the association that a word has over and above its denotation. Linguistically significant are the associations that a word carries for a whole language community or at least for a defined group within a language community. For example, the word caviar denotes ‘the salted roe of large fish (e.g. sturgeon)’, but it may said to connote luxury, high living and sumptuous food. For many people candle may have religious connotation or alternatively romantic associations as lighting for an intimate meal. Faraway, which is denotationally synonymous with distant, has romantic connotations absent from the latter. Milk for many people will connote health and strength, especially if you belong to the generation that consumed one-third of a pint every school-day; more recently perhaps the connotation has changed to the opposite, at least with the health and slimming conscious, especially in view of the association of dairy products with hearth disease. Pig no doubt connotes uncleanness and unpleasant smells for many. Tram on the other hand may have connotations of nostalgia or holidays.
Ahmadin (2002: 45) stated, connotation arises as words become related with certain characteristics of item they evoke which may or may not be indicated in a dictionary definition. The word dog, for instance, understood by mot British people has positive connotation of friendship and loyalty. Whereas the equivalent in Arabic as understood by most people in Arabic countries has negative association of dirt and inferiority. Within the English language, moist has favourable connotation, whereas dank has unfavourable. We could describe something as ‘pleasantly moist’, while ‘pleasantly dank’ would seem absurd. In addition, the burdening of women for many years with attributes such as weakness, inconstancy and irrationally has resulted in this becoming connotation of the word ‘woman’ for many people.
The connotation of a word is subdivided into two parts: the defining qualities of the category or class it names, and the emotive or affective responses it arouses in the minds of its users. In popular parlance “denotation” is often thought of as the real or proper meaning of a word, and “connotation” as the mere accretion of illogical, even capricious feelings that help or color this meaning-hence, something that well-organized linguistic society would probably legislate out of existence. Note that we are making no such individious distinction. All part of the meaning of a word are there only because the users of the word impute them; denotation and connotation (both kind of connotation) are equally respectable, equally important to our inquiry. They all require extensive examination.
It would seem, at first glance, that the function of proper names must be purely denotative, each one pointing to one single referent in the extensional world. We must remember, however, not only such names as God, Brahma, Zeus, and so forth, referring to “beings” whose existence cannot be extensionally verified, but also the complex of emotive connotation associated with these or with the names of specific persons and places by the great majority of partakers in a common cultural heritage: for example Lincoln, Gandhi, Caesar, Lenin, Marx, Athens, Mecca, Wall Street. The strength of the connotative element is shown by the fact that many of this names gradually come to function in the public vocabulary as common nouns, regardless of whether we continue to spell them with a capital initial letter or not. Thus when call a man a Shylock, a city of Athens, we communicate both a quality or set of qualities and a feeling-of favor, disfavor, terror, amusement, and so forth.(Salomon, 1966)
Two points need to be noted from our discussion of connotation so far. One is that connotations are far more indeterminate that denotations. On the one hand connotations may be subject to considerable variation from one generation to the next (e.g. milk, or consider what the word siren means to the generation that experienced the Second World War). On the other hand connotations may be rather subjective and not shared in the same way by all speakers of a language: our individual experience of language and its relation to the world is to some extent unique and idiosyncratic. The other point about connotation is the extent to which it relates to the lexeme itself rather than to the entity that the lexeme denotes, or whether it is not possible entirely to separate the two. The connotation of a word for us must reflect our experience of the entity to which the word refers and the place which this entity has in our belief systems and thought patterns; but we no doubt transfer the associations of the entity itself to the lexeme we use to denote it. Besides, connotation shared by a group of language users or whole language community are part of the cultural package that we inherit with the language itself.
Another term that is associated with connotation, though rather narrower in scope, is emotive meaning. In any culture at any time there are words which are used by sloganisers, political or otherwise, to stand, some for positive and some for negative values, judges as such by that culture. Sometimes these ‘emotive’ overtones have been more important in world’s use than the denotation of the word. We may cite as example such as: imperialism, revolution, freedom, democracy, republic, justice, equality, progress, rights, law, etc. And you can probably think of more to add to the list. After all, both communist and capitalist system call themselves ‘democratic’. Similarity, advertisers have a series of adjectives (and images) whose emotive meanings all but eclipse their denotations, such as: modern, delicious, special, fine, real, fresh, pure, genuine, healthy, etc. The referential meaning of a lexeme therefore, its denotation and connotation, depends on the context of its use, in two senses. First of all it depends on it linguistic context, the other words in the same sentence, paragraph or even text. The lexeme freedom has a different meaning in the context of prisoner, gaol, cell, sentence and warder that it has in the context of oppression, dictator, injustice, regime and junta. Secondly, the referential meaning of a lexeme depends on its situational context: who is using the word, who the audience is, what the occasion of use is. (Jackson, 1996: 60)
Clearly, the definitions of lexemes that we find in dictionaries do not, indeed cannot, take account of the kinds of variation in referential meaning that we have been discussing. The division into senses is an attempt to take account of context, but the description of connotation by and large finds no place in dictionary definition. The meaning of (the sense of) a lexeme that we find given in a dictionary entry must therefore be regarded as ‘potential’ a distillation of the essentials, awaiting actualisation in a particular linguistics and situational context. Because this is so, we cannot cite a dictionary definition as authoritative in the interpretation of a word in a particular context. We must allow for the possibility that a word will be used in new contexts with new ‘meanings’.
SOME CONNOTATIVE EXPRESSIONS
The followings are the examples of connotative words: Freedom for a dissident in the Soviet Union might mean the capacity to read, hear, say and write what he or she thinks; in South Africa, on the other hand, freedom for a black person might mean the lifting of apartheid restriction on movement and residence. In both context the ‘freedom from oppression’ sense is meant, but the situation determines the meaning more precisely. For some words it may be the connotation that is affected by context; in choosing clothes the word stylish may have a positive connotation for one person but a negative connotation for another. (Jackson, 1996: 60)
A stubborn person may be described as being either strong-willed or pig-headed. Although these have the same literal meaning (i.e. stubborn), strong-willed connotes admiration for someone’s convictions, while pig-headed connotes frustration in dealing with someone. Likewise, used car and previously owned car have the same literal meaning, but many dealerships prefer the latter, since it is thought to have fewer negative connotations.(taken from Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia)
For example, both “woman” and “chick” have the denotation “adult female” in North American society, but “chick” has somewhat negative connotations, while “woman” is neutral.
For another example of connotations, consider the following:
negative
There are over 2,000 vagrants in the city.
neutral
There are over 2,000 people with no fixed address in the city.
positive
There are over 2,000 homeless in the city.
All three of these expressions refer to exactly the same people, but they will invoke different associations in the reader’s mind: a “vagrant” is a public nuisance while a “homeless” person is a worthy object of pity and charity. Presumably, someone writing an editorial in support of a new shelter would use the positive form, while someone writing an editorial in support of anti-loitering laws would use the negative form.
The American linguist S. J. Hayakawa invented the terms purr words and snarl words to describe words with different associations in people’s minds.
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thinking
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day-dreaming
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dancing
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Jiggling about
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smiling
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smirking
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weeping
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snivelling
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writing
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scribbling
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Some words bring very different connotations to mind among different groups of people.
feminist
rugby
socialist
casino
Those whose profession it is to persuade us, such as advertisers, politicians, preachers, and orators, need to be sensitive to the connotations of the words they use. One way of testing the connotative meaning of words is to ask speakers to rank them on a scale of different qualities.
good———-bad
sincere——–insincere
happy———unhappy
light———–dark
beautiful——-ugly
strong———weak
valuable——-worthless
smooth——–rough
It might seem a little strange, but people seem to be quite good at saying whether words like natural or fresh or smelly or fragrant are smooth or rough, light or dark, valuable or worthless.
The connotations of words are culturally determined. In English, the word “red” can have negative connotations of “blood” or “communism”. In Russian, krasnyj, the word for “red”, has very good connotations. The Russian word for “beautiful” is prekrasnyj, which contains within it the word for “red”. Many of the most obvious changes in the English language over the past few decades have had to do with the connotations of words which refer to groups of people. Since the 1950’s, words like “Negro” and “crippled” have acquired strong negative connotations, and have been replaced either by words with neutral connotations (ie “black,” “handicapped”) or by words with deliberately positive connotations (ie “African-Canadian,” “differently-abled”). A very simple approach to words is to see them as labelling things in the world. This works well for some words. Concrete nouns like cat, sheep, or frog are used to refer to certain animals that can readily be described or pointed to. The denotation of the noun pig is a non-ruminant omnivorous ungulate. For some people, the word pig might have connotations of dirty and smelly; others will think of inquisitive or cheeky.
Often we have a choice of words that can express our point of view. One person’s din might be another person’s music. Some might see terrorists where others see freedom fighters. One person’s stunning architectural statement might be another’s hideous blot on the landscape.
DISCUSSION
Let’s see the translation of the Qur’an taken from Qur’an Viewer 2.72 which was translated by Abdullah Yusuf Ali in surah Al Anfal (The Spoils of War) verse 60:
(#rÏãr&ur Nßgs9 $¨B OçF÷èsÜtGó$# `ÏiB ;o§qè% ÆÏBur ÅÞ$t/Íh È@øyÜø9$# cqç7Ïdöè? ¾ÏmÎ/ ¨rßtã «!$# öNà2¨rßtãur tûïÌyz#uäur `ÏB óOÎgÏRrß w ãNßgtRqßJn=÷ès? ª!$# öNßgßJn=÷èt 4 $tBur (#qà)ÏÿZè? `ÏB &äóÓx« Îû È@Î6y «!$# ¤$uqã öNä3ös9Î) óOçFRr&ur w cqßJn=ôàè? ÇÏÉÈ
“Against them make ready your strength to the utmost of your power, including steeds of war, to strike terror into (the hearts of) the enemies, of Allah and your enemies, and others besides, whom ye may not know, but whom Allah doth know. Whatever ye shall spend in the cause of Allah, shall be repaid unto you, and ye shall not be treated unjustly”.
In the verse above we find the word which is underlined “to strike terror into” and one of the nouns of that word is terrorist which in today’s fact has negative emotional meaning and part of world public opinion claimed that terrorist come from Moslem people. In fact, Islam doesn’t teach and even doesn’t tolerate the act of terror to others as well as to non Moslem people. Now we compare with the Indonesian translation taken from “Terjemah Al Qur’an DEPAG’
“Dan siapkanlah untuk menghadapi mereka kekuatan apa saja yang kamu sanggupi dan dari kuda-kuda yang ditambat untuk berperang (yang dengan persiapan itu) kamu menggentarkan musuh Allah, musuhmu dan orang-orang selain mereka yang kamu tidak mengetahuinya; sedang Allah mengetahuinya. Apa saja yang kamu nafkahkan pada jalan Allah niscaya akan dibalas dengan cukup kepadamu dan kamu tidak akan dianiaya (dirugikan)”.
The word “menggentarkan” seems more acceptable in that translation. So, to avoid negative emotional meaning, we can change the word “to strike terror” by the proposed words such as: to threaten, to dismay, or to frighten. That words seem more neutral. And the words mentioned do not change the meaning of its translation.
CONCLUSION AND SUGGESTION
Connotation refers to a subjective cultural and/or emotional coloration in addition to the explicit or denotative meaning of any specific word or phrase in a language and emotional association with a word. In this case, the dry legal expression “with no fixed address” quite deliberately avoids most of the positive or negative associations of the other two terms — a legal specialist will try to avoid connotative language altogether when writing legislation, often resorting to archaic Latin or French terms which are not a part of ordinary spoken English, and thus, relatively free of strong emotional associations. It is often useful to avoid words with strong connotations (especially disparaging ones) when striving to achieve a neutral point of view. A desire for more positive connotations, or fewer negative ones, is one of the main reasons for using euphemisms.
Bibliography
Ali, Y.A. Qur,an Viewer 2.72: The Translation of Qur,an (http://www.muslimNet.co.id)
Barwell, L.G. 1983. Introduction to Semantics and Translation. New York: Bentley House.
Jackson, H. 1988. Words and Their Meaning. New York: Longman Group UK.
Kempson, Ruth M. 1977. Semantic Theory. Translated by Abdul Wahab. 1995. Surabaya: Airlangga University Press.
Salomon, B.L. 1966. Semantics and Common Sense. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, Inc.
Wahab, A & Lestari, A.L. 1999. Menulis Karya Ilmiah. Surbaya: Airlangga University Press.
