On Interpreting ‘Peninsula’ and the Japanese 半島 ‘Half-Island’

People interpret unfamiliar compounds by combining the component concepts into a new, complex concept. When constituents have foreign roots, as happens in English neoclassical and Japanese words borrowed from Chinese, interpreters must first assign semantic gloss to each component. The decoding of peninsula 半島 follows such pattern. But whilst construing processing Latin paene īnsula ‘almost island’ is relatively simple, inferring denotation more complicated because assignment yields opaque ‘half-island’. In end, though, interpretative process succeeds this case well, thanks world-knowledge validation, allows understand that ‘half-islands’ are not islands at all.