41–50 of 55 posts
It's a shame there is a huge lack of technical details here... maybe there is a profound thing that has been discovered, but I can't tell because the article is vague and describes the mundane and obvious in a grandiose style.
> 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…
"There are no synonyms." [1] Does "apple" in English truly equal "ringo" in Japanese? The context is similar, but the iconic implications and inferences are not an exact match. There is something uniquely American about "apple". Not "ringo", but "apple". Worth naming a company after even. And that's just with a fruit. Can only imagine how asynonymous less concrete terms would be. --- [1] Oddly, I hear this a lot rece…
Perhaps you mean that 'apple' has a different meaning in the United States than, say, in Wales, because its web of implications looks different in one place than another. Following that thought, though, the same would be true of two American speakers, who surely have their own idiosyncratic webs. It's an interesting idea. But are words not 'synonyms' that have the same referent, only because two speakers have different relationships to that referent? Is a word partly its evocation? Or can we look at its evocation separately from a stricter 'meaning' it shares between speakers? (Surely it shares something, or language would lose its point.)
Incidentally, synonym is not the word to be nullifying here. A synonym is a like word, something that may equal the original but usually differs in degree, amount, tone, allusion, or other effect. Anyone using a thesaurus without a dictionary is sure to embarrass themselves sooner or later: differences in meaning between like words are common, and it is no revelation to say that one speaker will have different associations with a word than another, particularly if they come from different cultures.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's never the complicated words. It's the simple words. English doesn't have a translation for German Brot. The English word bread denotes something almost but not entirely unlike Brot.
The criticisms ring hollow when you have to use a bunch of different languages to show the supposed paucity of English. Does German have a wabi-sabi? Does Japanese have a waldeinsamkeit? It's a similar thing with animals, when people say humans are useless animals because we can't swim as well as dolphins or see as well as hawks, even though we swim better than hawks and see better than dolphins...
Eg German doesn't have a single word for English bread.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
"There are no synonyms." [1] Does "apple" in English truly equal "ringo" in Japanese? The context is similar, but the iconic implications and inferences are not an exact match. There is something uniquely American about "apple". Not "ringo", but "apple". Worth naming a company after even. And that's just with a fruit. Can only imagine how asynonymous less concrete terms would be. --- [1] Oddly, I hear this a lot rece…
What is "uniquely American" about the word apple? Both the word and fruit come from elsewhere and still abound in those places: the word came into use in English over a thousand years ago, and the first apple tree to grow in the Americas would have been planted by a European settler some centuries later. There are cultural associations with apples in America, but do these attend to the word or the culture? And are th…
Absolutely. Red and blue states. The east and west coast. Socioeconomic class. Gender, race, age, education. You and I.
But those are the differences. What we have in common also pertains. Almost everyone is American, exposed to the same media climate, and, most importantly, speaks English.
And that is why we communicate. We connect and overcome our differences using what we have in common to get things done.
"Apple" is only the tip of the iceberg. It will mean different things to different people. But what we share between us culturally is the American "apple" and the English "apple". If we compare that with the Japanese "ringo" and the Japanese word "ringo" there will be differences. To say "apple" = "ringo" is only equating symbols and mere entry points, to which not all else automatically follows.
> evocation separately from a stricter 'meaning'
There is evocation, and there is meaning, at all times. There is also context, and the intent of the speaker. There is even body language and tone. Even this is a simplification, but it is far more accurate than what they taught most of us at school, which is something like "language = grammar + vocabulary". This model does not translate mechanically even though theoretically it's suppose to. What we've now found is that what is missing is not technology or algorithms or processing power, but rather, most of the picture. That's why it still takes a good human translator to translate it all. Computers still cannot infer intent, transfer emotions, or cross cultural lines without embarrassing themselves.
(Thank you for a thoughtful and stimulating response.)
> 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…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
I recently realized that the logographic misconception about Chinese writing probably stems from the pretty recent past when Classical Chinese was the sole written form, and thus certain characters represented a common meaning to speakers across dialects. Of course, it's still not historically accurate to describe even Classical Chinese as purely "logographic" (for that matter, even Egyptian hieroglyphs have phonetic…
Isn't that still the case?
Ah, Nautilus at it again. One of my favorite magazines! Any other proud subscribers out thete?
> 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…
It's never the complicated words. It's the simple words. English doesn't have a translation for German Brot. The English word bread denotes something almost but not entirely unlike Brot.
> 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…
I have never heard the word "Waldeinsamkeit" before and I'm a German native speaker.