11–20 of 55 posts
> For instance, there is no English translation for the Japanese wabi-sabi—the idea of finding beauty in imperfection—or for the German waldeinsamkeit, the feeling of being alone in the woods. Writers who proclaim that English has no translation for word x from language y , only to provide a matter-of-fact translation in the very next clause/sentence always make me chuckle. Or they provoke pedantic ire. Depends on ho…
word != phrase
> For instance, there is no English translation for the Japanese wabi-sabi—the idea of finding beauty in imperfection—or for the German waldeinsamkeit, the feeling of being alone in the woods. Writers who proclaim that English has no translation for word x from language y , only to provide a matter-of-fact translation in the very next clause/sentence always make me chuckle. Or they provoke pedantic ire. Depends on ho…
word != phrase
In written Mandarin, for example, there are only pictographic characters. Each single character translates to an English word or phrase, but which it translates to is completely arbitrary. It is extremely anglocentric to say "English doesn't have a word" for a given Chinese character, if in fact English has a phrase for it. The Chinese language has no obligation to translate each character succinctly into a single English word.
In fact, one of the greatest strengths of pictographic languages is the high degree of information density per character. More often than not, a pictograph will translate to an English phrase, not an English word. For native Chinese readers, inference comes naturally, as each character is built out of a set of "radicals," each representing a narrowly defined idea, that act as the primitive building blocks to convey a complex combination of their ideas within one "character."
It's the ideas that matter.
Can somebody explain what does Wittgenstein have to do with the whole thing?
Contrast with his ideas in the Tractatus Logico-philosophicus, his first great work, where he boldly (arrogantly?) claimed that all philosophical problems are pseudo-problems caused by misuse of language.
https://aeon.co/essays/paradoxes-of-stability-how-life-began...
http://www.bgu.ac.il/~pross/PDF-10.pdf
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3843823/
The upshot is that life is its own state of matter, essentially a self-stabilizing repeating pattern of matter and energy, like a waterfall or a chemical clock.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
word != phrase
There is no such thing as "word" and "phrase" distinction across languages. There are only ideas. In written Mandarin, for example, there are only pictographic characters. Each single character translates to an English word or phrase, but which it translates to is completely arbitrary. It is extremely anglocentric to say "English doesn't have a word" for a given Chinese character, if in fact English has a phrase for…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
word != phrase
There is no such thing as "word" and "phrase" distinction across languages. There are only ideas. In written Mandarin, for example, there are only pictographic characters. Each single character translates to an English word or phrase, but which it translates to is completely arbitrary. It is extremely anglocentric to say "English doesn't have a word" for a given Chinese character, if in fact English has a phrase for…
Take wabi sabi for instance. The fact that they have a word for that is not a coincidence, it's a byproduct of their culture: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EBUTQkaSSTY.
Can somebody explain what does Wittgenstein have to do with the whole thing?
I guess the author tried to say that the word "life" has many meanings but in the physics "language game" its meaning is yet to be defined. In other words, defining what the word "life" means is defining what life is.
> For instance, there is no English translation for the Japanese wabi-sabi—the idea of finding beauty in imperfection—or for the German waldeinsamkeit, the feeling of being alone in the woods. Writers who proclaim that English has no translation for word x from language y , only to provide a matter-of-fact translation in the very next clause/sentence always make me chuckle. Or they provoke pedantic ire. Depends on ho…
word != phrase
For example, the English word power translates both pouvier and puissance from French, an imbalance which forces translators into circumlocutions that I lack the patience to attempt to explain on my tablet [1]. Which is to say, they are decidedly not matter-of-fact.
Its the presence of these ordinary words that really are problematic to translate that feeds my reaction here. By singling out highly-specified words that are unlikely to exist but straightforward to express, the real heart of the translation issue is actually obscured. What's worse is that this misleading and cursory method of explanation has become a sin twice over by embedding itself as a worn-out pop-science cliche. By now you may have surmised that I didn't sleep too much last night.
Having got that off my chest, I will now stop soapboxing all over this really quite fascinating article.
[1] this distinction has been heavily discussed however, as it's important in the work of several famous theorists. a googling should yield explanations.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
There is no such thing as "word" and "phrase" distinction across languages. There are only ideas. In written Mandarin, for example, there are only pictographic characters. Each single character translates to an English word or phrase, but which it translates to is completely arbitrary. It is extremely anglocentric to say "English doesn't have a word" for a given Chinese character, if in fact English has a phrase for…
I hate to be pedantic because I totally agree with the idea you're articulating here, but it is misleading to describe Chinese characters as pictographic. The correct term is "logographic" because they are graphic structures that represent morphemes. There is a large variety of character types, some of which are pictographic but most are not. My favorites are characters that visually represent abstract ideas: 上 下 凹 凸…