Meaning: sweet

Illustrative Context

This apple is ripe now, it tastes sweet.

Target Sense

• The most generic adjective for sweet in the literal sense of the type of taste, prototypically that of sugar, most fruits, or honey.
• In most languages the target lexeme will be one of a reduced core set of adjectives for basic taste types, e.g. sweet as opposed to sour, _salty/savoury and bitter. Indeed, in many languages the target lexeme will be the one used specifically in common two-way contrast expressions such as sweet and sour or sweet or savoury.
• The target is the adjectival meaning sweet, not the noun sugar. In most cases, avoid narrower adjectives derived from the sugar noun, e.g. sugary, or indeed from its equivalent verb for putting sugar on/into food (sugared), except if such a derived form has lost its unique relationship to the noun sugar, and become the default word in basic vocabulary for sweet in any context. So while most Romance languages, for example, retain cognates of Latin dulcis as their basic lexeme, e.g. Italian dolce and Spanish dulce, the cognate in French (doux) has shifted to mean soft, and in its place the derived adjective sucré has become the default term for this IE-CoR meaning ‘sweet’.
• The target sense is the literal one of the type of taste, of foods that are eaten. Avoid additional lexemes that are predominantly extensions to figurative and emotional senses of the English lexeme sweet, e.g. for endearment, character type, goodness, pleasure, etc..
• The term in the basic vocabulary, of neutral register. Avoid technical culinary or scientific terms, e.g. sucrose.