122 Yves Peirsman, Kris Heylen and Dirk GeeraertsTable 1. The ten highest climbers in the list of nearest neighbors to islam and
christendom after 9/11 for the syntax-based modelObviously, there still exists considerable overlap between the neighbor lists
of the two religions. It would therefore be interesting to look for the nearest
neighbors that are typical of one religion or the other. We can do this again
by calculating the difference in ranks, but this time we contrast the post-
9/11 islam list with the post-9/11 christendom list. Table 2 shows the
neighbors with the highest scores, i.e. the items that display the biggest
differences between their rank in the islam list and their rank in the chris-
tendom list.
Let us investigate the results in detail. The most highly distinguishing
neighbor for islam is christendom, and vice versa. This is no surprise, since
a word cannot have itself as its nearest neighbor, and the two religions are
obviously semantically related. Apart from the expected differences, like
moslim ‘Muslim’ or Koran ‘Quran’ to the left and christen ‘Christian’ or
kerk ‘church’ to the right, the two lists show a surprising internal consisten-
cy. On the one hand, most neighbors with a clear preference for islam are
of an outspoken political nature. They either directly refer to politics (ver-
zorgingsstaat ‘welfare state’, regime ‘regime’, democratie ‘democracy’,
politiek ‘politics’) or to issues high on the political agenda in many coun-
tries (minderheid ‘minority’, homoseksualiteit ‘homosexuality’, immigratie
‘immigration’, integratie ‘integration’). In addition we find a few words
related to terrorism (terrorisme ‘terrorism’, terreur ‘terror’). On the other
hand, most neighbors typical of christendom are of a much more cultural,
artistic or social nature. Here we see words related to faith (spiritualiteit
‘spirituality’, theologie ‘theology’, mystiek ‘mysticism’, jodendom ‘Ju-
islam christendomterrorisme ‘terrorism’
koran ‘Quran’
moderniteit ‘modernity’
islamist ‘islamist’
verzorgingsstaat ‘welfare state’
religie ‘religion’
fundamentalist ‘fundamentalist’
islamiet ‘Islamite’
moslim ‘muslim’
jihad ‘jihad’rechtsstaat ‘constitutional state’
jodendom ‘Judaism’
burgerschap ‘citizenship’
moderniteit ‘modernity’
hindoeïsme ‘Hinduism’
christen ‘Christian’
moraal ‘moral’
protestante ‘Protestant’
fundamentalisme ‘fundamentalism’
idealism ‘idealism’