88 Christo H.J. van der Merwe cultures tend to have not more than five or six levels of categorization of biological domains; (2) the relationships tend to be complex, not always forming logically structured hierarchies; and (3) any folk taxonomy has a core, referred to as its basic level, e.g. in the case of animals it will be things like fish, dog, cat, bird, etc. Geeraerts observes as follows in this regard: … basic level categories exhibit a number of … characteristics. From a psychological point of view, they are conceptualized as perceptual and functional gestalts (18). From a developmental point of view, they are early in acquisition, i.e. they are the first terms of the taxonomy learned by the child. From a linguistic point of view, they are named by short morphologically simple items. And from a conceptual point of view, it has been claimed that the basic level constitutes the level where prototype effects are most outspoken, in the sense that they maximize the number of attributes shared by members of the category, and minimize the number of attributes shared with members of other categories (19). Categories tend to have fuzzy borders (20), e.g. they may include items that are regarded as good examples of a category and those that are less typical. In the case of the category fruit, apples and oranges would be regarded by American speakers of English as good examples of the category, while pomegranates, lemons, watermelons and pineapples will be regarded as not such good examples (21). “Good examples” are regarded as prototypes of a particular category. Definitions of categories are as a rule made in terms of the attributes that apply to its prototypical members, e.g. fruit will be described as “the soft and sweet edible entities that grow on trees and bushes”(22). Practising lexicographers and lexicologists would be the first to agree that one of the most problematic aspects of describing lexical items is that of their sense relationships. Pertinent questions that often arise are: (1) how many senses should be distinguished? (The same question posed from a different perspective: How does one distinguish what are no longer polysemes, but homonyms?) (23) (2) How should the relationships between the different senses of the same lexical entity be interpreted? (3) Should one distinguish a “basic meaning”? What is the relationship between such a “basic meaning”, an “original meaning”, a “prototypical meaning”, and the different senses of (18) This means that people can form a mental representation of a fish, a dog, etc., but not of an animal. (19) GEERAERTS, “An Overview”, 312. (20) Cf. CROFT – CRUSE, Cognitive Linguistics, 89. (21) The notion of “Goodness-of-Example” is not uncontested. Cf. CROFT – CRUSE, Cognitive Linguistics, 76-81. (22) D. Geeraerts refers to this type of definition of the sense of fruit as its “basic reading”. For him it is “the center of semantic cohesion in the category; it holds the category together by making the other readings accessible. Three features, in short (psychological salience, relative frequency of use, interpretative advantageousness) may be mentioned as indications for the central position of a particular reading (“An overview”, 306)”. However, the prototype theory is not without is shortcomings. Cf. CROFT – CRUSE, Cognitive Linguistics, 87-96. (23) When one tries to describe the Biblical Hebrew item qzj the crux of this problem is evident.