"No Word for Looting"? | Hacker News Reader

"No Word for Looting"?

languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu

25 pointstelemachos19 comments

I should probably double-check this with a Japanese first, but I think the words 「強盗」 and 「略奪」 don't mean "looting" in the sense of people snatching whatever they can from stores after a disaster. My (possibly incorrect) understanding is that 「強盗」　is forcible robbery, and 「略奪」 is the kind of looting an army or band of pirates would pull off during a raid.

Of course, words take on different (and sometimes surprising) meanings in different contexts, and I'm not a native speaker.

Yeah, and EDICT is pretty weak Japanese dictionary, IMHO. One-word translations lead to misunderstandings. Having gone to school in Japan, I found EDICT useless whereas a random paper dictionary or denshi-jisho would actually help me find the right word.

So anyway, I would not use EDICT as my sole source for "there is no word" or "the correct word is..." If I cared, I would probably read through the Japanese newspaper coverage until I found a word that seemed relevant in both dictionary definition and actual context. If there is no word for the phenomenon or it never happened, then you wouldn't be able to prove anything... but if there is a word and it did occur, then you would have something a little more solid than "I googled for Japanese dictionary and found some words in them."

Do you feel the same way about Jisho (http://jisho.org/)? I generally find it handy.

This looks good, too. I especially like the fact that it tells which words are "Common word"s.

I take issue with calling it "weak". EDICT is useful resource that needs sentence examples.

It certainly is far better than any e-dictionary I could find for French back when I was forced (by law) to attend French class. It definitely helped a lot when I was in college (and, admittedly, situations where I used the wrong word)

Really, I always found it pretty useful. I guess this might be because when doing J->E translation I already had context from the source text. Still the WWWJDIC results at least link to ALC (which does give lots of context) or to Japanese Wikipedia entries (which can compare to the English version of the same article)

For arguments sake: http://eow.alc.co.jp/%CE%AC%C3%A5/EUC-JP/ has lots of usage examples of 略奪 in context suggesting it does in fact mean looting.

Thanks for the link! Somehow I'd never come across that site before (I guess because I've got a good densi jisyo. The only times I check out words online is when I want more context; in which case I go to the Japanese Wikipedia).

The question left open, though, is whether that's the word reporters normally would use. It's not clear in the examples whether or not the word is being used hyperbolically. I mean, just because you can say "Muhammad Ali annihilated his opponent" doesn't mean that "annihilate" is a synonym for "defeat".

This Chunichi Shimbun Article: http://www.chunichi.co.jp/article/national/news/CK2011031702...

about the increase of looting in Japan following the earthquake uses 略奪 to refer both to armed robberies and taking things from unattended stores.

my wife is a native (from tokyo), who has only been in the states for a few years. when i asked her about this she said she'd read the article and was surprised that we thought this way. that is to say, that we assumed that because the japanese didn't have a word for something, they didn't loot. she said they don't loot because they have respect for each other.

of course i immediately asked her what the word for looting is. she said, "ryakudatsu - when the crisis happens and people don't have stuff so they go to the store and steal."

she said there is another word sometimes said casually as well "dorobou - thieving", but it's generally not used except when someone is breaking into other people's homes.

For maximum metareferentiality, read the comments - patio11's joke that Japanese has no word for over-preparation is cited as a similar linguistic confusion (I defended Patrick's honor, of course).

It doesn't matter at all whether a language has a word for describing something. Any human language can describe all concepts that other human languages can describe.

That's not true. There's lot of cases of particularly charged words in certain languages lacking a direct emotional analog in others. See http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/3830521.stm for one example; Russian has many like this, too. There's even languages that aren't "complete" in the semantic sense; see: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/04/16/070416fa_fact_...

The Pirahã story is very controversial.

"Shlimazl" sounds to me like it could be translated pretty easily into Japanese: 「ついていない」. The phrase uses no noun, though, so would that disqualify it?

I get sick of hearing foreigners going on about how there's no translation of the word "should" in Japanese. Well, yes, there isn't a word for "should in Japanese. The concept behind the word is conveyed through a grammatical construct, however; not having "a word" for "should" doesn't impede a Japanese from expressing "shouldness" in the least.

Piraha is a language that people love to bring up in these kinds of discussions. You should keep in mind, though, that what's been said about the language (and culture) are not without controversy.

Word or no Word, its part of the culture, atleast from my small sliver from way over here in the US.

Remember the scenes from 'Grave of the Fireflies'? During the fire-bombings, the boy, Sieta, would run and loot the homes of fleeing civilians. Powerful imagery indeed, but he was looting.

In that case, was invading other countries also part of their 'culture'?

What was that even supposed to mean?

My point was to highlight the subtlety of the CNN statement, alluding that the very concept of looting is alien in the Japanese culture, so much so that a word does not exist for the act. It is false, of course but the announcers lack of syntactical skill is used to make a semantic interpretation of the Japanese, and directs the audience to make a equivocation: African-Americans loot.

No one here is saying it, but as an African-American, that is what I heard.

When I read the original article, I took it as a joke playing on the snowclone of "X doesn't have a word for Y".

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