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Comment by lonesword | Hacker News Reader

> Every time a language dies, like latin or summerian did, we gain uniformity

And that's not necessarily a good thing. It is not just a language that dies, but a part of the culture also dies with the language. I do get the appeal of the world having one language, but attaining it at the cost of diversity would be a _big_ price to pay.

I speak a southern Indian language called Malayalam (34 million speakers). There are some things that are simply untranslatable to English - these words/concepts are closely tied to the way we live. Now if everyone in my town starts speaking only English suddenly, it would definitely affect the way they think[1], function, and would inevitable change the culture. I am not claiming that change is bad, simply arguing that preserving a language might help preserve a culture.

[1] IIRC there's been some scientific literature on this. I'll look it up and edit this post when I get time

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> There are some things that are simply untranslatable to English

I've often seen this claim, for all kinds of languages, sometimes even between two standard varieties of a single language. For a particular reason, I like to dig deeper. Invariably, the people making this claim are not very educated in linguistics, so it's not wonder this statement comes out wrong. And it is wrong. I challenge them to disprove me with a single counter example, and they are eager to do so. Typically the conversation goes like this:

Them: "You see, in my language we have ⅏⁝⏏⌸." Me: "And what does it mean?" Them: "The pain you feel when you stumble around in the dark in drowsy stupor and step onto a plastic construction toy brick with your bare foot." Me: "You just translated it perfectly, congratulations."

What they mean is: "there often is not a single corresponding foreign word or phrase for a word or phrase in my language", and that's fine; but very far removed from "untranslatable".

Not to mention, English is highly elastic and seems to have little issue "borrowing" words from other languages that don't have a reasonable translation in English. Schadenfreude is a good example. It's German, few people could tell you the actual direct translation into English, but generally people know what you mean when you say it.

Obviously it's not literally "untranslatable" meaning "unexplainable".

But it's about how certain concepts are easy to say in one language -- they fit like a glove -- and hard to say in another. So if they're hard to say, you wind up not saying them, and it changes what people communicate, which changes the culture.

In Brazilian Portuguese you can say "ai que saudades!" or "que malandragem!" which, poorly translated mean respectively, "I missed you!" and "What scoundrel-ness!"

But those translations miss the entire connotation and strength and context -- they're just plain inaccurate. And yes you can take an entire paragraph to explain the nuances of what they actually mean... but not in normal conversation.

Even when I'd speak in English with Brazilian friends, sometimes to explain a certain social situation we had to revert to Portuguese words, because there just aren't English words that fit the frames people understand Brazilian social situations in.

So the main claim that losing language means losing culture still stands 100%.

"Untranslatable" obviously doesn't mean the concept can't be explained if you're given a few sentences or paragraphs. It means there isn't an equivalent word or phrase that can be employed in normal everyday usage.

You can also think of it when translating movie subtitles, which I've done a little of in the past -- you only have a "normal" amount of on-screen space to fit your translation in. Some words just don't have anything you can translate to in the reasonable space. They're untranslatable.

Agreed.

Brings up another thing: when folks 'translate' a piece into English and substitute English phrases for the original author's idion. Frustrates me no end. I may have wanted (always want) to learn something about the culture the piece was written in/for. Such bastard translations wall me off from even guessing what the author said or meant. Just some watered-down elevator-music meaning, because the translator thought I was not smart enough to understand the original.

Maybe on the surface, but different words have different contexts and emotional attachments in different regions even with the same language. If the world spoke english, a combo of loan words and different words having different meanings in different places would naturally emerge I'm guessing.

You precisely made a point, it's easier and natural to say "⅏⁝⏏⌸" rather then "The pain you feel when you stumble around in the dark in drowsy stupor and step onto a plastic construction toy brick with your bare foot." It is the nuances and connotations in a particular language the bring out the 'true' meaning.

In one of the languages I speak, "hucci" means stupid, but in fun, loving way. Stupid just doesn't cut it.

What about silly?

> affect the way they think

That is linguistic relativity / Sapir–Whorf hypothesis[1], and intuitively I think it does hold. On the most simple level, there are groups of people who do not have a name for a certain color and they simply can not distinguish them from a related color which may be very obvious to us. And in fiction there is of course Newspeak from 1984.

So yes, I think killing off all other languages apart from English / Mandarin / Esperanto is a bad way to go, I'd rather go for early bi- or triligualism.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity

If there's no word for the colour you're perceiving then surely you make one or transliterate one? That's going to tend to create linguistic enclaves but mutual intelligibility should survive.

You can place where I grew up in the UK to within about 20 miles based on the word we used for lunch. Like the difference between bagged lunch (en-us) and packed lunch (en-gb) I suppose.

Yes, but this is about script. Some languages like Turkish and Vietnamese are doing fine adopting the foreign Latin script as Languages.

Sometimes people want/demand change in the direction of modernity too. I think during 1911 revolution in China, the people were really fed up with the system in place for centuries that they wanted it totally rid off; there was very serious discussion about adopting Esperanto as the language of the new republic.

> there was very serious discussion about adopting Esperanto as the language of the new republic.

No, there wasn’t. As a former Esperantist (very dedicated and active at the organizational level in UEA), I remember a lot of these claims being pitched to the public about how Esperanto was so esteemed here or there in history that it was almost used officially, but if you actually looked into the facts, never was serious consideration given to using Esperanto. At best there was just one or two government officials involved in these historical events who were Esperantists themselves, but they had no influence in this regard.

These are the sort of disingenuous claims about Esperanto that Marcus Sikosek sought to debunk in his book Esperanto sen mitoj, and they do more harm than good to Esperanto and they make the movement look kooky.

Esperanto, no, but there were several attempts at an alphabet. They all foundered because "Chinese" is actually a language family as diverse as the Romance languages, but that use Mandarin in ideograms as their writing system.

Vietnamese seems fine using the Latin script.

Vietnamese is one language. Imagine that French and Italian decided to agree on a writing system but insisted that the word for "dog" had to be spelled the same way in both.

Just like in Chinese languages/dialects.

Your [1] could be Walther J. Ong's Orality and Literacy? It goes into differences between cultures rooted in written/oral language, and has several examples where words that are "missing" from or present in a language reflect the way the speakers think and reason.

> And that's not necessarily a good thing.

Nothing is 100% gain or loss.

But I believe there is nothing in our current situation that is worth more than having a united humanity, which can only happen if well all can understand each others.

> There are some things that are simply untranslatable to English - these words/concepts are closely tied to the way we live

It's ok, you can use the native word in an english sentence. English does that all the time: "je ne sais quoi" (french), "taxi" (turkish), "pizza" (italien), etc.

> Now if everyone in my town starts speaking only English suddenly, it would definitely affect the way they think[1], function, and would inevitable change the culture.

Yes. Change is inevitable anyway. But we can choose to change in one direction. I think the direction of uniting the human specie is the best choice.

> preserving a language might help preserve a culture.

I'll exchange my own entire french cultural heritage in a blink if suddently I could make the entire world speak one common language.

But it doesn't have to be.

A culture is not this immutable things we think it is. Most thing we call ancestral are really just the result of a continuous transformation process that have the same flavor, and so that we identify as stable. Even centuries old religions have been changing all the time.

So culture will change as well. It will adapt, and keep what is meant to be kept, then drop the rest.

We will lose some valuable things in the process, but to gain much more.

One thing that I've noticed over the years is that foreign words readily slide into English, yet English words look and sound very jarring in other languages.

My second language is Spanish, and seeing an English word in Spanish text just looks wrong to me, never mind that Spanish is full of Arabic loanwords.

Can you give examples?

Most of the examples are newer words like "internet" or "chat", which are the same or similar in both languages. Spanish does have "proper" equivalents ("la red" and "la charla", respectively), but the loan-words are used pretty often. Because Spanish has fewer loan-words, the examples I gave don't sound like "real Spanish". This is less obvious in English because we have already abandoned any pretense of uniformity.

Thanks.

I was really curious how "red" [es] came about for "internet" [en], but I see it's from Latin word for web/net.

Also, I've not studied Spanish at all this just made me view "retina" in a new way, cool.

Perhaps it could also be because English is your first language (if I assumed correctly) and it stands out more as familiar as opposed to say Chinese words in Japanese? I won't deny that English is a Borg of a language though.

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