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Linear algebra explains why some words are effectively untranslatable

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Re: Linear algebra explains why some words are effectively untranslatable

#51

Post by seanhunter »

adrian_b wrote: post #23
suddenlybananas wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's just a difference in orthography. English could easily have had an orthographic standard where we write "compoundnoun" for compounds. This is in contrast with a language like French, where compound nouns are relatively rare. Compare English "Olive oil" and German "Olivenöl" with French "huile d' olive". In French you need to have a preposition to combine the two nouns, whereas English and German do noun-noun c…

You are right but neither yours nor those of the previous posters are good examples of compound nouns. These examples have just the meanings of a noun + adjective or of a noun + noun in genitive case, where some languages are lazier than others and omit the markers of case or of adjectival derivation from noun, which are needed in more strict languages. There are also other kinds of compound nouns, where the compound…

> There are also other kinds of compound nouns, where the compound noun does not have the meaning of its component words, but only some related meaning (usually either a pars pro toto meaning or a metaphorical meaning)

The example that people often quote from German is “kummerspeck” which would literally translate as “grief bacon”, but means weight you put on through comfort eating having gone through a bereavement or other trauma.

Re: Linear algebra explains why some words are effectively untranslatable

#52

Post by nyeah »

drivebyhooting wrote: post #6
pjsg wrote: post #5

The article seems to think that a word is untranslateable if there is no single word in the target language. If I'm not misreading the article, then this is completely obvious -- just consider the number of words in English and the number of words in almost any other language, and you will find that there are more English words than the other language. It is now clear that there exist English words that don't corresp…

That isn’t a proof. Synonyms can bolster the enumeration sans augmenting novelty.

It kind of is a proof if we assume that single words can be translated at all. Translate a single word from Language X (more words) to language Y (fewer words) and back. I can't uniquely recover all the words in Language X that way.

Re: Linear algebra explains why some words are effectively untranslatable

#54

Post by [deleted] »

tptacek wrote: post #28
epistasis wrote: post #19

> If the mere sight of the above is like a punch in the face for you, don't worry. I'm not going to math you to death in what follows. I will only remind you of a tiny basic part of it that I think relates to languages. Yes, that mathematical expression is like a punch in my face, but not for the reason you think. I am offended that the rank of the matrix does not match the dimension of the matrix, not that I'm seein…

It's a 3x3 matrix with 3 independent rows. The rank matches the dimension.

[deleted]

Re: Linear algebra explains why some words are effectively untranslatable

#55

Post by [deleted] »

tptacek wrote: post #28
epistasis wrote: post #19

> If the mere sight of the above is like a punch in the face for you, don't worry. I'm not going to math you to death in what follows. I will only remind you of a tiny basic part of it that I think relates to languages. Yes, that mathematical expression is like a punch in my face, but not for the reason you think. I am offended that the rank of the matrix does not match the dimension of the matrix, not that I'm seein…

It's a 3x3 matrix with 3 independent rows. The rank matches the dimension.

[deleted]

Re: Linear algebra explains why some words are effectively untranslatable

#57

Post by dvfjsdhgfv »

drivebyhooting wrote: post #46
sjducb wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Synonyms rarely have identical meanings for example: Happy: Joyful, cheerful, merry, delighted Or Beautiful: Lovely, pretty, attractive The only truly identical synonym I can think of is flammable and inflammable

Perhaps perhaps. But what joyful means to you likely differs from what it means to me, simply because we haven’t read the exact same literature and had the same conversations.

True true.

Re: Linear algebra explains why some words are effectively untranslatable

#58

Post by ErroneousBosh »

pjsg wrote: post #5

The article seems to think that a word is untranslateable if there is no single word in the target language. If I'm not misreading the article, then this is completely obvious -- just consider the number of words in English and the number of words in almost any other language, and you will find that there are more English words than the other language. It is now clear that there exist English words that don't corresp…

> It is now clear that there exist English words that don't correspond to a single word in the other language.

But that's true of any language. Not only that, but English uses loanwords heavily which are often Anglicisations of words from other languages, which may not in themselves be just one word.

"Ho ho ho", the flag-waving Little Englander types say, "Gaelic is such a stupid language, they don't even have a word for 'television', they just say 'television' in a stupid accent!"

But English also has no word for "television". Worse, the word "television" isn't even just a loanword, it's two words from two different languages, "tele" from Greek and "vision" from Latin. What a bodge job! Imagine letting something like that slip through to production use!

The hypothetical Catalan-Hungarian inventor of it in another leg of the trousers of time may have called it llunylátás, and then where would we be?

Well, most languages would have some variant of that word to mean "television", as they do now, I expect.

The English word "galore" (meaning "sufficient" shading towards "more than enough") comes from the Gaelic words "gu leòr", (goo lyaawr, the grave accent above the o makes the vowel sound longer). What a silly language English is, doesn't have a word that means "more than you're ever likely to need", has to steal one from Gaelic and then spell it wrong.

Oh, they use this word "whisky". You know what that means? It means "uisge beatha" but they only say the first word, in a silly accent because they can't pronounce it properly.

Quite often there's no single word for a thing you're trying to translate but that doesn't mean it's untranslateable. English has only one single word for rain, for example, but Gaelic has about half a dozen of which the only ones I can reproduce here are "uisge" (that word again) which just means "water", and "fras" which is more like a gentle shower. The rest of the words in the Gaelic of the North-West of Scotland that refer to rainy weather are, of course, profane in the extreme.

Re: Linear algebra explains why some words are effectively untranslatable

#59

Post by andoando »

yubblegum wrote: post #47

Interestingly enough for this morning's walk I was musing over the tension between the hypotheses that: 'LLMs can map between languages in the vector space' (thus languages are ~equivalent); and 'Language affects thoughts' (as in German is good for Philosophy and English for getting things done). If both these thoughts are true, then it would appear that languages have topological characteristics. We can (topological…

My take is the human brain learns concepts primarily through differentiation. To a newly born child who has no concept of door or a wall, has no reason to see the two as being different parts. Different languages form different differentiations, but one can always compound concepts, and differentiate them differently.

Re: Linear algebra explains why some words are effectively untranslatable

#60

Post by realusername »

ErroneousBosh wrote: post #58
pjsg wrote: post #5

The article seems to think that a word is untranslateable if there is no single word in the target language. If I'm not misreading the article, then this is completely obvious -- just consider the number of words in English and the number of words in almost any other language, and you will find that there are more English words than the other language. It is now clear that there exist English words that don't corresp…

> It is now clear that there exist English words that don't correspond to a single word in the other language. But that's true of any language. Not only that, but English uses loanwords heavily which are often Anglicisations of words from other languages, which may not in themselves be just one word. "Ho ho ho", the flag-waving Little Englander types say, "Gaelic is such a stupid language, they don't even have a word…

Not to mention that the English dictionary is stuffed with legacy words that no natives understand. Is it even part of the language if no native use it? It's another debate.
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