Words that don't translate into English
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
[1] https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=2741
> But what is the notion of untranslatability here? It seems to have been confused with "lack of an exact one-word equivalent". Who on earth ever argued that translatability only exists when source text words are mapped bijectively to target words, each with exactly the same shade of meaning as the corresponding source word? Does French jeune fille fail to translate English girl, and ne … pas fail to translate not? Does English fall down fail to translate French tomber, and look at fail to translate regarder? What kind of madness is this?
For one thing, many of the swear words/expressions cannot be translated, not even by using more than one word/a few words, there are languages where one can fill entire books with swear-words/expressions (one of them is Romanian, which I speak natively, I've heard the same thing about Russian or Hungarian) and there are languages where swear words/expressions are a lot less diverse (English is the example I know best).
Of course, one can try to naively translate the "băga-mi-aș pula în morții mamii tale!" into the English "I will insert my dick into your mother's dead people", but this naive translation doesn't (can't) catch the word inversion "băga-mi-aș" (from "mi-aș băga") which makes the whole action sound a lot more dynamic and direct in Romanian, plus the word "pula" has a lot more meanings and context in Romanian compared to the simpler uses of "dick" in English, and last but not least the Anglo world seems not to care about one's dead people as much as we Romanians do (and I think we're not the only ones), and as such mentioning some other person's dead close relatives in a derogatory way is seen at most as quaint (while "morții tăi!"/"your dead people!" in Romanian is oftentimes used as a swear expression all by itself, I know I use it frequently).
And this before we get to all the diminutives/suffixes that can be added to any word that is part of a swear expression (and not only) in a language like Romanian, a feature that is absent from most of the English language. For example the mentioned above example can very be easily changed into:
> "băga-mi-aș pula în morții mămițicii tale!"
with the "mamii" to "mămățicii" change (basically from "your mother" to "your little mother", where "little" actually means "more loved"/closer to the person being addressed) giving the whole swear expression a new other, even more personal feeling.
"...with the same cultural meaning into a different culture."
But that's a truism, surely. The words and expressions themselves can be translated as you demonstrated.
What OP is ranting about is websites glorifying certain words as “untranslatable”, imbuing them with esoteric cultural meaning. As a polyglot and linguistics enthusiast it frustrates me too but we all have to come to terms with people being wrong on the internet some day.
In practice, we get by mostly fine (partly because, as you point out, we have footnotes).
English has many diminutives as well, mother is considered rather formal. Mum, mummy, mumsie, mam, all convey different semantic levels of closeness.
The point linguists try to make is that 'untranslatable' doesn't exist, based on what they've seen thus far. To use a JS metaphor, some language features may require a semantic polyfill to translate a particular word (and some of these "polyfills" will be larger than others). But literally nothing in any human language is untranslatable, and this has to do with fairly fundamental issues of neuroscience and biology.
If we did find untranslatable concepts in Earth-based human languages, it'd have very interesting implications about the nature of human brains.
He also told me about his favorite untranslatable Hungarian word, "bezzeg", which has to be handled on a case-by-case basis when translating into English.
Learn what? The link just goes into a long bit of semantics stemming from the author's personal dislike of how other people use "untranslatable" as a word. There's nothing to "learn" from it, because it's a nothingburger.
Meanwhile, most if not all language teaching that goes on today still does treat translation as bijection. Students are constantly asked to remember "the word for X in language Y". While that might be a good-enough approximation, it also majorly encourages the idea that that's how translation itself works - so people might be forgiven trying to set the record straight by pointing out that many words are "untranslatable" that way.
Language Log isn't a personal blog, it's a group blog run by some fairly distinguished linguists, and their[1] point about bijection is coherently argued and deserves consideration.
> most if not all language teaching that goes on today still does treat translation as bijection
I'm not convinced - beyond beginner-level one quickly realizes that translation is not one-to-one. Is there a citation for this?
[1] 'Their' because "no word for X" is a running joke in LL: https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=1081
You don't believe the vast majority of language teaching happens at the beginner level? I certainly do, and it would be most people's only first-hand exposure to any kind of translation.
At beginner level language teaching, beyond the first few lessons, you run into words that are difficult to translate bijectively, e.g. ser/estar while learning Spanish from English.
Being a Scot, he usually followed up with a "They should settle on Scottish as a compromise!"
So in the news it was popularized when talking heads surmised the whole “Russia collusion” was a “nothingburger”. It had no substance —harking back to “where’s the beef?”
I think what's immediately wrong in your argument is equating untranslatability with exact one-word equivalent. Then instead of arguing against untranslatability, you argue that translation isn't just equating word for word. I agree with that. Most everyone I think agrees with that.
What's missing from that view is that different cultures mean different ways of viewing and experiencing the world, which necessitates different ways of expressing oneself, that is, different words and expressions. Words and expressions carrying a "cultural weight" so to speak, containing deep meaningful connections with its people and their history.
A talented person with excellent knowledge of two languages and great skill using at least one of them (being themselves an author, or a poet) can translate great works from the other language. And yet the resulting work may not be able to convey every nuance of the original.
Try it if you speak another language and read both the translated version and the original of a great work of literature and you'll see what I mean.
Agreed.
There's an even simpler way to experience this: jokes and puns. Often times, they are untranslatable because their literal meaning is nonsensical and all of its expressiveness comes from timing/context, play on words and/or a local cultural references. By the time you've explained a joke, it has already lost its effect.
There's a curious story among diplomatic translators where in a live diplomatic meeting, one of the parties blurted out a joke and the interpreter, attempting to accurately set the mood, translated it as "X just blurted out an untranslatable joke, please laugh heartily"!
So they might be untranslatable in certain contexts, for sure, and you have to scramble for alternatives which inevitably lose subtle shades of meaning.
That would be "difficult to translate", then, not "untranslatable", no? As for breaking the flow of the text, I'm pretty sure you're going to have to do that anyway translating Russian to English.
Example:
A Pole, a German and a Russian meet the devil. He locks each one of them in a cell, gives them two small marbles each and tells them they have a month to impress him with them, or he'll eat them otherwise. So he comes back after a month and sees that the German's cell is full of complicated mathematical formulas and one marble is perfectly balanced on top of the other. He nods his head and moves on to the Russian's cell to see him doing one-handed pushups while juggling the marbles with the other hand. The devil nods again and moves to the Pole's cell, only to see that he lost one marble and broke the other one.
Is it funny? Because it's pretty good in Polish and I don't know how to translate it withotu longwinded explanation.
The problem is that the word "zepsuć" used for "breaking the marble" means "to spoil" or "to make something nonfunctional without destroying it physically". In English "break" is overloaded and people assume other meaning.
So the Pole in the joke managed to make the marble stop doing what marbles do without damaging it.
There's an opposite self-stereotype, captured by the phrase "Polak potrafi" (a Pole can do it), which actually emphasizes resourcefulness as a national trait. Although it's often tainted with irony, or at least implies that the creativity employed isn't really by the books, etc.
Where would you draw the line? No culture has a concept which is literally unexplainable to any other.
Translators could potentially give meaning-for-meaning accurate translations if it were desirable, or possible, to give each word a paragraph of qualifiers and contexts. But translators are restricted to at least trying to preserve the structure of the translated work, and for words that means trying to pick a one- or two-word substitute.
Some words just don't have an accurate substitute. You can easily pick translations which are "not wrong", but none would be correct. What would you call those words, if not "untranslatable"?
But, I enjoy prozd's short sketch on "official subs vs fansubs" in this regard: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YvNxgHTWIlo (It demonstrates translation where an 'official' one is lossy, but the fansub tries to be more faithful).
Translators that work dubbing movies have harder constraints and seldom fail to make sense, only when there're wordplays or words that sound similar to others...
When watching dubbed things (which in Swedish means exclusively children's shows) I often hear things which make little sense until I suddenly realise there's an English sentence with similar structure that would make sense in this context.
edit: In other words, translations often fail to make sense when poorly done, and a lot of them are.
Sometimes I enable English subtitles keeping the dubbed Spanish audio and it's often well done. There is very talented people working on the translations, giving the right tone to conversations.
Compare "Fuck" said with mad, resigned and amazed voice. It's 3 different words in some languages.
Or compare a line "Our hero heard someone crying 'I loved her' from the crowd". In some languages depending what grammatical gender is the person shouting the word ending in 'love' is different.
English books often skip that information, so the translator has to deduce or ask the author who was shouting that line. In a movie you know because you can see that person or hear the voice.
This makes more sense to me because your relationship to your mother's brother is actually meaningfully different to your mother's sister's husband.
My German was minimal, but when a swagman got out of a semi that had just given him a lift, he said "Danke Comarade" and I realized that he said "Thanks mate" which has greater connotations and meaning than just a thank you.
All the characters in Winnie the Pooh represent a group of school boys. When Kanga shows up, it upends their world. In the canonical Russian translation and animation Owl is a fussy old lady. Which reduces all shades of meaning.
These are simple works of fiction, and already they are greatly reduced just by the singular gender choices made by translators. And there are dozens to hundreds of such choices per book.
Complex books like Too Like Lightning may be even untranslatable entirely because TLL rests on gender ambiguity. Russian has gender even in verbs, so you can see a character's gender even in simple phrases like "I did" which are ambiguous in English.
etc. etc. etc.
However, that seems to me like an over-reductionistic view of translation. Typically, in all except highly technical contexts, you don't only want to convey meaning, you want to keep at least a modicum of naturalness, the feeling that your translated sentence is something that a native speaker of language B might really say.
With that in view, I think it makes sense to say that there are words that are untranslatable in practice. Meaning is not lost, naturalness is.
For example, to say "facepalm" in Spanish you would have to say something like "I place my hand on my face in frustration". Does that convey the meaning? Sure. Has any Spanish speaker ever said it? I highly doubt it, except for the joke of trying to translate something that just doesn't lend itself to it.
Obviously, if you are using it in an internet forum you're probably not literally facepalming, just as if you use "lol" you're not laughing out loud, but even in these cases, I don't think that means that you can entirely decouple the word from the gesture. At least for me, when I read the word, what I imagine is someone facepalming. There are several other ways to express resigned frustration (a sigh, a shake of the head) but they are not the same even if they are ways of expressing the same.
Sobremesa means afternoon if you're not trying to be pedantic. If you are, it's after-lunch instead of after-noon.
You wouldn't enter the office and wish your coworkers "buena sobremesa". Or if you did, they would probably understand that you are mocking them for being idle at work.
Literally it is sobre (over) + mesa (table).
By contrast, I think a great, useful Japanese phrase that I wish we had in English but is very hard to translate is otsukaresama (お疲れ様) and its variants. It's what you say to someone at the end of the work day, or after finishing something challenging like a hike, or just to acknowledge that some task is being put away for now.
The closest thing might be "good job", or "good work". But otsukaresama has no implied assessment of someone's performance. Which is good, because it means anyone can say it - a peer, family, superior, junior. You can say it to be comforting even after someone gives up for the day having failed to solve a problem, where "good work" might sound sarcastic. A literal translation might be "with respect to the tired", or something like that.
The other big one I'd add is yoroshiku (+onegai-shimasu), which in the abstract conveys that the speaker anticipates some kind of help or cooperation from the listener. It can translate as anything from "looking forward to working with you" to "Please help, I'm counting on you", or even "I'm leaving this in your hands, get it done" depending on context, tone, honorifics and so on.
Another class of untranslatable japanese words that I find interesting are onomatopoeias. The language has a ridiculous number of them! "Pikachu", for example, is a famous example that is a combination of the onomatopoeias for sparkling (pika) and a mouse's squeaking sound (chu).
I think お疲れ様 is the phrase/word I miss the most in English, and I often catch myself wanting to say it to a non-Japanese speaker.
Conversely, "interesting" is a word I have been feeling a lack for in Japanese. As in "That's interesting" after hearing something.
Isn't "naruhodo" close enough? It's often translated as "I see", but the acknowledging filler variation is usually just "un", whereas naruhodo expresses a mild level of surprise.
I don't want to imply I find it amusing or something positive - it might be something sad or atrocious (面白い is out).
I don't want to imply I want to learn more or am deeply invested in it (興味ぶかい also out).
That pretty much exhausts the available options when I've asked Japanese friends.
Good luck is out of your control, while ganbatte is cheering for you to do your best and the phrase can therefore be used even broader than good luck.
In a similar vein I always felt like otsukaresama somehow appreciates the effort that was put in to the work, where “good work” appreciates the result.
During a review the following verdict is given: “Its good. In fact it’s better than good: it is good enough”
I find it so funny because it really plays with our normal use of “good enough” as “not good, but useable” but of course it is entirely possible to make something that is good but not good enough
That's the thing I fail to understand with these words/phrases that are hard to translate. Sure, if you need to work it into a pun or joke you almost by definition need to have a single word for two different situations, but for everyday life, I don't understand why not two or three similar phrases suffice, one for each context.
It's just that, I've had times where I'd have a strong urge to say otsukaresama to someone, and trip over myself for lack of any appropriate way to say it. Usually those would be cases where none of the translations listed here work; not "let's call it a day" because I'm still working, not "good effort" because it's clear in the context that I have no knowledge of their level of effort and anyway that sounds like what a coach would say after practice. It just sometimes doesn't have any good translation.
It was also used (in the cultural sense) when you've been banging your head on a problem, a co-workers says "It's Miller time?" meaning, perhaps it's time to stop and relax, and do something else for a while?
Or, when coming home, your roommate might way "It's Miller Time!", meaning "you've maybe had a tough day at work, welcome back to a place where you can relax." This may or may not be accompanied by a can of beer.
It's kind of like how people say Eskimos have 50 (or however many words for snow). Any word they have for snow can be described in a corresponding way in English using adjectives, but for them it makes sense to boil down each of those concepts to a common word, since Eskimos have a more frequent need to describe snow than most English speakers.
What's interesting to reflect on is why some cultures need a singular word for something while others don't. It's why I love the word schadenfreude - not for what it means, but for the fact that Germans so readily identify with the idea of taking pleasure from another's misfortune that they coined a word for the term.
For example "Viel Glück" can translate to "Good Luck" but what exactly is meant from this and how someone feels about me wishing it to them is quite different from Canada where I grew up.
At home it's a polite and kind of nice way to wish someone luck in what they're doing. Here it's often seen as a little sarcastic or teasing as there's a tiny culture implication that it means they didn't prepare enough.
There are massive amounts of this context or slight shading around the words which can completely change the contextural meaning of an exchange without changing anything about the literal translation.
Also, as to schadenfreude I really don't think German people identify with the idea of taking pleasure from another's misfortune. In fact most of the German speakers that I know would feel quite hurt or offended by the insinuation that they take pleasure from other's misfortune. It's more an acknowledgement that it happens, and a way to bring it into the conversation than something anyone would be proud of or want to do. Interestingly enough it's one of the most common borrowed words in English from German and is helpful to describe many situations. (Edit spelling)
I have always thought the same thing about "Good for you" which I think would commonly be translated as "Schön für dich". You cannot possibly say that without sounding sarcastic.
Regarding "Viel Glück", I usually use "Viel Erfolg" when I'm being sincere.
For what it's worth, "good luck" also has the sarcastic meaning in my mind, depending on context. I'm Canadian and only speak English.
That was meant as a joke, I suppose? If not, you might remember that it is very easy in German to coin a word. For example, I have just invented the word "Papierwurst" (paper sausage). A perfectly fine German word. Die Papierwurst (sing.), die Papierwürste (plural), der Papierwurst (sing. dative),...
"It's why I love the word Papierwurst - not for what it means, but for the fact that Germans so readily identify with the idea of having sausages made of paper that they coined a word for the term."
Papierwurst is a word you just made up that doesn't mean anything.
You're just here trying to let people know that you know German grammar. That's fine, but your example isn't comparable or relevant.
Genocide is an English word. Does that mean that Americans in particular "readily identify" with ethnic cleansing?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eskimo_words_for_snow
> Franz Boas did not make quantitative claims[6] but rather pointed out that the Eskimo–Aleut languages have about the same number of distinct word roots referring to snow as English does, but the structure of these languages tends to allow more variety as to how those roots can be modified in forming a single word.[1][note 1][note 2] A good deal of the ongoing debate thus depends on how one defines "word", and perhaps even "word root".
[snip]
> Languages in the Inuit and Yupik language groups add suffixes to words to express the same concepts expressed in English and many other languages by means of compound words, phrases, and even entire sentences. One can create a practically unlimited number of new words in the Eskimoan languages on any topic, not just snow, and these same concepts can be expressed in other languages using combinations of words. In general and especially in this case, it is not necessarily meaningful to compare the number of words between languages that create words in different ways due to different grammatical structures.
That kinda goes without saying, right? For the converse to be true there would have to be ideas that cannot be expressed in certain languages, as if they weren't "complete" analogously to Turing Completeness.
And yet there are many words in many languages that don't translate well or directly to/from English. French is a great example, where you have the word préciser which is a verb that, translated literally, means "to precise [something]" as in, to specify or to explain, but neither of those really capture the meaning of préciser. There really isn't a direct translation, but of course I can still make the same though understood in English or in French.
But just like Kolmogorov complexity the fact that you can technically translate anything and the change in length is finite - doesn't mean it's irrelevant in practice.
Every time one of these articles is published that talk about untranslatable concepts in foreign languages, it moves them closer to being loan words, and giving us a word to convey those concepts.
I can't speak for "Eskimos" and their languages but as a native Icelandic speaker I don't think you're quite grasping how specific jargon about everyday things like "snow" can be and how it can be wildly different from English.
For example, in Icelandic "words for snow" don't just encompass its properties, but also how it got there. E.g. "skafrenningur" is snow that's loose enough that it's being blown about by the wind in a certain manner, but such snow could be either wet or dry.
Of course you can explain concepts like that given sufficient time, but this also what it means for a language to not have a word for something, that its way of thinking about things doesn't align with another language.
Not to detract from your conclusion, but I think the current top comment, by jbay808, is a pretty good counterexample.
Of course, as per your point, they are able to offer a literal translation of what the word means. But without the cultural context, I can't actually use it. I'd have to explain what I meant so academically that the emotional weight would be lost to person I was talking to.
Note: Dutch does it worse (IMbiasedO, as a native English speaker learning it), where they're actually one word (like it were "upclean"), but the front part can break off and float to the end of the sentence much of the time.
I've noticed (although can't remember an example right now) that sometimes the sentence can have a slightly different meaning if the preposition goes to the end.
Another thing with English is that the word order is very important as it conveys a lot of meaning; in, for example, Slavic languages it is less critical as meaning relies heavily on various word forms.
The order is still important in individual phrases: e.g. in Croatian, "dobar dan" (good day, a common greeting) would sound strange if the order is reversed. On the other hand "danas je dobar dan" (today is a good day), "dobar dan je danas" and "dobar dan danas je" are pretty much the same, in the descending order of common usage and "correctness". In all three examples the emphasis would be on the word indicating the point being made: "danas" if it's a good day as opposed to yesterday or another day, "je" if pointing out that it really is a good day, "dobar" (most commonly) in opposition to a bad (or neutral) day, and "dan" in opposition to a night.
To be clear, the sentence order is not completely irrelevant: it is commonly used (like in English) to turn a statement into a question (in speech usually with the emphasis shift). In the example above, "is today a good day?" would be "je (li) danas dobar dan?"
Example: https://img.joemonster.org/mg/albums/userpics/10001/prefix.j...
There's over 30 different pre- and post- fixes that can be added to any version of "fuck" (and Polish has several levels of vulgar verbs for "to fuck" coming from different roots: jebać, pierdolić, pieprzyć), and they each have slightly different primary and secondary meanings, for example:
najebać/napierdolić (się) = to get completely drunk
najebać/wjebać/wpieprzyć/wpierdolić (komuś) = to beat (someone) up
jebnąć (w coś) = to hit (into something)
podjebać/podpierdolić/podpieprzyć (coś) = to steal (something)
podpierdolić/podjebać (kogoś) = to backstab (someone)
spierdalać/spieprzać = to escape
spierdolić/zjebać/spieprzyć = to fuck up something (you had a chance and wasted it in spectacular manner)
wypierdolić/wyjebać/wypieprzyć (coś) = to throw (something) out
wypierdolić/wyjebać/wypieprzyć (się) = to fall spectacularly
wpierdolić (coś w/do czegoś) = to put (something in something)
pierdolnąć (coś na coś) = to put (something on something)
napierdolić/napieprzyć = to put too much of something
nawpierdalać/nawpieprzać (się) = to eat too much
wpierdolić (coś) = to eat a whole dish at once
odjebało/odpierdoliło (mu) = (he) become insane
wjebać/wpierdolić/wpieprzyć (się) = to get into inescapable situation because of your mistake
odjebać/odpierdolić (coś) = to do (something) crazy/amazing/unbeliveable
rozjebać/rozpierdolić/rozpieprzyć = to destroy something violently
zapierdolić/zajebać (kogoś) = to kill (someone)
the list goes on and on :)
The root word determines the level of vulgarity and the pre/post fixes determine the meaning. These prefixes also work with nonvulgar words, but average word only supports several of them, not all at once.
Most Slavic languages have similar constructions (but the exact meanings are often swapped).
I can translate each of English vulgar fuck+sth into several versions of Polish fuck+sth. For example "fuck off" would be "odwal się" (mildly vulgar, but rude), "odpieprz się" (definitely vulgar) or "odpierdol się" (very vulgar). An in the meaning of "go out" "fuck off" would be "spieprzaj" or "spierdalaj".
But there's no direct equivalents in English for most of the examples I gave in my previous post. Yes you can say "I fucking ate too much", but that's the equivalent of "zjadłem, kurwa, za dużo", and not of any of these verbs. The nuance is lost :)
So I rest my case - cursing in English is very limited. Which isn't good or bad, just interesting how languages differ.
There's more than one way to skin a cat.
The whole nine yards.
Also, there was a thread where a lot of foreigner CS students use english words because many of the words don't have direct translations or sensible translations - like mouse.
"There are multiple valid solutions for a given problem"
Skinning a cat is not a common thing. It’s not a normal food for English speakers, so the phrase carries some sense that what you’re doing is unusual.
It’s usually applied to a situation completely unrelated to skinning or otherwise preparing food, so it carries some sense of absurdity.
Most people using the phrase have never skinned anything, so there’s (usually!) a sense of ignorance on both sides.
Your translation brings none of that.
If I were to translate that idiom back to English and aim for accuracy, it would be something like, “what you’re doing is unusual, and neither of us have experience doing it, and the way you’re doing it is different than the ways I have heard of, but I suppose there’s more than one valid way to do it.” Which, I think, fits the spirit of the other examples - a very short expression that carries tons of unspoken cultural context with it, to the point that there isn’t a direct translation.
This Economist article[1] posits that it is actually slang for sexual intercourse based on the phrase "skin the cat"[2] first recorded in 1837 being a euphemism for it. This interpretation would also fit with the above quote. The same article also points out that:
'And the rather violent act of skinning a cat is no easy thing, says John Youngaitis, a taxidermist in New York. “There is not more than one way to skin a cat.”'
From[0] we can also see that in 1678 English naturalist John Ray said in his “Collection of English Proverbs”: “There are more ways to kill a dog than hanging”.
So it seems it is possible that the contemporary phrase exists to change a less common activity for a more common one. In this case use of the idiom would not convey the sense of doing something unusual.
[0] https://www.bnd.com/living/liv-columns-blogs/answer-man/arti...
[1] https://www.economist.com/prospero/2013/10/09/shooting-skinn...
"There are multiple valid solutions for a given problem"
Many proverbs in different languages have a common meaning but a different way to "deliver" it, I always find amusing how a differnt language/culture gets to the same point with completely different means.
Edit: doh. I forgot there is a word for that: portmanteau.
FWIW, "situational comedy" is not something that a english speaking person would normally say (or even necessarily understand without context), and likewise the literal Portuguese translation ("comédia situacional") is extremely unlikely to evoke a mental image of "Friends" the way that "sitcom" does in English. If I had to attempt to explain what "sitcom" means to a brazilian person, I might instead say something like "série de comédia americana", which translates literally to "american comedy series".
In Japanese, there's the word "pasocon" (portmanteau of personal computer). Obviously here in the west, nobody would use that combination of words that way.
So I think which portmanteaus exist in a language is a function of the originating culture, which is an interesting phenomenon on its own.
The more interesting part of Japanese portmanteaus is the use of the first two mora from each word, where English speakers would try to fit head to tail, like “persoputer” or something. But I guess in an agglutinative language, the end of a word is a much fuzzier concept.
Hmm, I think abbreviations are more common. Case in point, personal computer is usually abbreviated to PC.
But PC nowadays has a connotation of a non-Apple computer. Just goes to show how much nuance culture bring into the picture!
For example, 'someone is doing something' would be like 'someone current do something' in Chinese. There's no 'ing' postfix, instead, you add 'current' or 'now' only when it matters.
There's almost no redundancy of information, thus there are fewer chances to specify illegal statements. When Chinese find out Finland or German native-speakers sometimes also make grammar mistakes when speaking their own languages, it was mind-blowing...
Sadly, I'm not sure if it is influenced by other languages, there are more and more classifiers in modern Chinese:
1. Though gender is not classified by oral Chinese language, it was classified in the modern written Chinese language.
2. The infamous quantity classifications as the article mentioned. Non-native speakers would find these pretty hard to remember. A 'tiao' of fish, A 'duo' of mushroom, doesn't really exist in the old Chinese, they were just a fish or a mushroom. It was only mandatory when it's needed, like a bunch of fish.
I'm not sure about those words specifically, but counters/classifiers in Chinese go back centuries and beyond. Linguists will often say Korean and Japanese are language isolates, but quite a bit of their grammar heavily inherits from Chinese in some way with little to no change. They use oftentimes identical classifiers in the same way even when referring to one object.
e.g., 個/个 is ge/gae/ko in Chinese/Korean/Japanese respectively. They're used for catch-all classifiers. 台 is tai/tae/dai and used to classify machines.
If there no classifiers there would be no straight forward way to specify if it's "a cup of water" or it's "a bucket of water".
With that being said, there's not many usages of catch-all classifiers, unless it is stretched to balance the number of characters in poems. Usually, there would be no classifier if there's no ambiguity:
"一人一桌一椅一扇一抚尺而已" --《口技》("a man, a table, a chair, a fan, a fuchi and that's all") -- 'The beatboxing'
The classifies usually are used in listing of things, and they would be postfixes, instead of being used as prefixes like in typical ways:
"...金碗二对，金抢碗二个，金匙四十把，银大碗八十个..." -- 《红楼梦》 ("...golden bowls: 2 pairs, golden qiangwan: 2 units, golden keys: 40 grasps, large silver bowls: 80 units...") -- 'The Dream of the Red Chamber'
The question is, if ancient Chinese had solved the problem in a more straightforward way, why did it then evolve to the more complex form where classifiers are mandatory?
Typically languages tend to evolve to be simpler.
> why did it then evolve to the more complex form where classifiers are mandatory?
Simple is not necessarily easy. The ancient Chinese is compact but not easy to learn.
The Chinese, especially the literary/classical Chinese[0] (as opposed to vernacular Chinese[1]) was very scholar oriented. It's pretty bizarre to the rest of the world because historically the government and scholars actually have strong influences and even controls over the language itself.
There were even many times like 'Hey, you know what? We believe the language is not good enough, and we're going to fix it!', and officers and scholars were assigned to refactor the language. The recent one leads to the traditional and the simplified Chinese diverse from each other. According to the legend, Cangjie[2] invented the Chinese characters, and it more or less becomes traditions, or at least the legend could help the government claims to refactor the language.
The ancients scholars tried to make the language compact and precise. However, the cost is the language is pretty cryptic. If you know a lot of idioms (usually 4 syllables), you would find they don't really make any sense unless you know the whole historical events/stories behind them.
Scholars from Korea, Japan, and Vietnam knew and love Chinese. Many of them tried to evangelize the language to their own people. But they never made it to the average people, though the were many strong influences till the modern days.
> Typically languages tend to evolve to be simpler.
Also, interestingly, the redundancy of the Chinese language actually largely increased over time. My personal take is it tends to be easier rather than simpler.
Some linguistics split Chinese into 3 periods: the old Chinese[3], the middle Chinese[4], and the old Mandarin[5] (the translation is 近代汉语 - is 'the near modern Chinese' if we translate it directly back to English). The middle Chinese period starts from the Northern and Southern dynasties (start from 420) to the Tang dynasty (end at 907).
In the beginning, during the old Chinese period, Chinese people tend to create new characters/syllables over new words (which might combined characters). And that's why the Chinese have so many characters nowadays. But the trend is not sustainable. To be frank, Chinese people may remember thousands of Characters, but they might not remember hundreds of thousands if the trends persist. Also from the syllables perspective, there would be not enough combinations.
So the middle Chinese period, the trend stopped and people started to combine two characters/syllables together for a word, this is especially common in vernacular Chinese. The vernacular Chinese during the middle Chinese period is actually pretty close to the old and modern Mandarin.
Also, Chinese people more or less having OCD on making characters/syllables in the same length so they would sound perfect, especially look perfect (Yes!) - poems usually have 5/7/9 syllables for each sentence. Words and idioms usually consist of 2 or 4 syllables. If a lot of words are made with 2 syllables, they rather make them all 2 syllables.
So the original common words would have a lot of redundancy, for example, 房(house)屋(room), actually refers to 房(house).
Back to the original question, my personal guess is there was no standard way of classify things, once classifier was more and more useful (because there were going to be more 'cup or bucket' issue as the society develops), the OCD Chinese people want to add fallback so it can make the expression balanced just like how they squeeze sentence 5/7/9 and words to 2/4 syllables. So it would be like 'two pairs of gold bowls, and forty grasps of golden keys'. But that's only my guess :)
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classical_Chinese [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Written_vernacular_Chinese [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cangjie [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Chinese [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middle_Chinese [5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Mandarin
Japanese has a really interesting piece of syntax in the ditransitive adversative passive, which is similar to the English passive construction but with a second object which can be used to denote that someone was adversely impacted by it.
There is an example on Wikipedia[1], it's definitely a difficult thing for native English speakers to get used to.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passive_voice#Adversative_pass...
My favorite piece of Japanese syntax is that adjectives can be conjugated for tense and conditionals, meaning that "It was delicious" has to be expressed as "It is delicioused" (oishikatta desu) and you can say "if it had not been red" with a single word (akakunakattara).
You put it on any phrase where you don't accept the burden of truthfulness.
"mom said dinner is at 6 daw"
If it's not at 6, that's too bad, not my fault.
It's so fascinating culturally and really fun to use.
We also have five named eating events, here with their times:
- Desayuno (8-9): breakfast
- Almuerzo (11-12): second breakfast? Normally a sandwitch or light snack.
- Comida (2-3): lunch
- Merienda (5-6): third breakfast? tea party? It's an evening snack, mostly eaten by kids
- Cena (9-10): dinner
In Sinhala[1], my mother tongue, there's a word for that. Povanava (poh-vur-nuh-var) පොවනවා.
I’d also add the Portuguese word “saudade”, which is a sense of yearning or of missing someone/something - often hard to convey in English.
Nostalgia is a distinct feeling of want for something in your past, often from your childhood. "His nostalgia for the video games of his youth coloured his perception of how bad they really were."
Since you brought it up, and now that I've thought about it for a while, "wistful" seems like it might be a better fit for "saudade", but I'm sure that that word has all sorts of meanings that wistful doesn't have.
English-speakers who try to translate the word usually try something like "courage" or "guts", which isn't quite right. "Sisu" is not really about daring; it's more about tenacity and capacity to endure hardship. "Grit" is better.
The Dutch term for the process is "poldermodel", and in English we use "polder model", and everyone here knows it. Basically, once you've told someone "people meet and hash things out until a consensus is formed" then the English term is stolen fair and square.
The actual Dutch term is pretty recent, from the 1980s or so I think.
"Non è questa la sede propria per parlarne"
The original source translated it as "This isn't the proper place to discuss it."
You could say this means "This is not the place that belongs to talk about it". That's stilted English, but in my opinion, better than proper or appropriate, it captures the relatedness of "own" with the different senses of something belonging. The word "proper" confuses things because it is spelled more like the Italian word, but functionally it's more specialized.
I went and read about this because "proprio" made me think of the English word "proprioception" which was coined in the early 20th century based on the Latin "proprius" meaning "own". And then French "propre" comes to mind.
But consider:
- "adesso" (now) vs. "proprio adesso" (literally right now)
- "Proprio così" (precisely)
I believe you can also use it like:
- "Where are you from?"
- "DC"
- "DC proprio?" (DC proper?)
- "No, technically I'm from a small town in Northern Virginia"
Nuances in languages are tough.
Though you can say that something (or even someone) "fa figura", if it looks better than what it is really made of.
So in Italy you have two different expressions that are rendered by the same one in English. But the two are very much not interchangeable. "Ti amo" has a romantic connotation, whereas "Ti voglio bene" does not. What's more, you can also use "Ti voglio bene" in a romantic context, to mean that you love the other person, but not only from the point of view of a romantic relationship though. In a romantic relationship, especially between younger people, it can happen that one says "Ti voglio bene" well before "Ti amo", which has a heavier implication. On the other hand, "Ti voglio bene" can be used with a sibling or a friend, often abbreaviated TVB, whereas "Ti amo" would not be used in this context. As you can see, it is quite difficult to even translate the difference, but it is something well present in the head of italian people.
https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691138701/di...
It's an updated translation of Vocabulaire Européen des Philosophies (2004)
And I think this is true even in words in the same language. For example “police” means something very different emotionally to a young, urban, black man than an older, suburban white woman.
I think there is a food analog as well. There are some foods that I don’t think anyone can cook as well my mother. Objectively, if you tested my mom’s version of the food against in taste test with - 100 people versus a professional chef, most people would pick the chef’s version as tasting better. But for me, the exact smell and taste of my mom’s version brings back those emotions of happiness and closeness from when we would eat the meal together as a family growing up.
So I don’t think it is so much differences in language, but differences in experience.
See for example the translation attempts at https://www.linguee.com/german-english/translation/sozialpar...
Often I hear English speakers use the answer "It depends." where an Italian would use "Ni."
Slightly different, french has "mouais", a sort of mmhokay, yeah i guess.
Funny enough, sometimes it's even hard to transate the untranslatability of something.
The difference is that "maybe" implied something is not known or can't be known or may or may not happen, as a matter of possiblity/probability.
"Ni" OTOH is a statement that the question has no definite answer. It's not just that either option can be true, but the question is I'll poses, or the problem is more nuanced etc.
oh and the exact translation is good impression, which can also can be used sarcastically in the same way.
so at least my language section was poorly written and poorly researched.
It's a cliché in UK. They correctly diagnose the Italian obsession with high standards of appearance, but they liberally use "bella figura" to describe it in contexts we would not consider as such.
For example: when dressing to go buy a bit of milk, we wouldn't describe it as an activity that requires "bella figura", we just don't want to look like homeless people and our "not looking homeless" is at a certain standard; but they would say that, by dressing appropriately, we are paying attention to "bella figura". That's because people here can go VERY low on standards of appearance in circumstances like that, while we just won't.
> Angela Giuffrida in Rome
which makes the whole thing extra weird because even if she might not be aware of a direct translation being available she should know how it's used in italy.
it's perfectly fine for a finely dressed gentleman to spill a drink on his wife's boss on a party, which is a perfect occasion for a "proprio una bella figura hai fatto" > "yeah, such a good impression you made" and it's so common of an usage I can't fathom how it got related to fashion in the article part she penned.
And a (negative) figura can be "brutta" (literally ugly) but also "caprina" (caprine).
My favourite is Yugen - a Japanese word that encapsulates awareness and appreciation for nature and the universe.
https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/424092.They_Have_a_Wo...
Some of my favourites are the Italian verb apparecchiare (setting up the table before a meal, adding cutlery etc) and its opposite sparecchiare. To have precise words for this activity signals a culture focused on food and urbanity, which the Italian one definitely is.
English -> French
Body 'A human body (alive or dead)' -> Corps
Corpse 'A dead body' -> Cadavre
Cadaver 'A dead body prepared for burial or medical research' -> ?
I'm glad "swaffelen" didn't end up on the list though.
Some times, it's possible to say a lot from one single word.
безнадежность->безысходность
Roughly translated as "endless despair"
Japan: yoroshiku onegaishimasu, tadaima, itadakimasu, genki, otsukaresama deshita, ganbatte ne, ...
Laughable subtitles for all these, every time.
quick web search says there might not be a native word?
“few pleasures are greater than sharing a table and then chatting nonsense for a hefty portion of what remains of the day.”
The author must be a masochist if they think this is pleasurable.
I'm not even Spanish either.
The US people suggested breakfast meetings at 7 in the hotel. The Spanish and Aussie people flatly refused.
The Spanish wanted lunch from 2 until 4, the Aussies preferred 1 until 2, the Americans 12-1.
Dinner was 7 for the Americans, 8-9 for the Aussies, and 9-12 for the Spanish.
We didn't win the bid, but as an Aussie, I much prefer the Spanish daily schedule.
I stand by "sort out", or even just "sort" as a good translation for załatwić, especially in British English, where I would use "sorted" as a single word sentence similar to "załatwione". There's other possible translations too, I could e.g. imagine using "score" when it's specifically about obtaining something physical, or "get it done" if it's about expediency or perseverance; if anything there's too many ways of translating it!
When someone sorts something out, he goes and solves something with available methods.
When someone goes "załatwić" something, it means he solves something that is impossible to solve or gets something that is impossible to get.
To sum it up, i think english vocabulary for sorting something out synonyms ends at some point english speakers can not pass. And than "załatwić" kicks in.