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From: gbergman@ucbtopaz.CC.Berkeley.ARPA
Newsgroups: net.nlang
Subject: Re: natural language deficiencies?  (Vocabulary)
Message-ID: <598@ucbtopaz.CC.Berkeley.ARPA>
Date: Sat, 3-Nov-84 01:33:23 EST
Article-I.D.: ucbtopaz.598
Posted: Sat Nov  3 01:33:23 1984
Date-Received: Sat, 3-Nov-84 22:49:32 EST
References: <12582@sri-arpa.UUCP>
Organization: Univ. of Calif., Berkeley CA USA
Lines: 95

Without trying to play "Your language more deficient than my
language!", it is nonetheless interesting to list some ways that
languages differ in what they can easily express.  Here are some
examples I have noted:

Vocabulary:
     The English word "quaint" does not seem to have an equivalent in
any language I have encountered.  Most English/foreign-language
dictionaries mistranslate it as "queer, old-fashioned".  The one
nearly acceptable translation I found was in an English-French
dictionary: "pittoresque a l'ancienne mode".  (This is the situation
in which it is most commonly used, but I think that the "ancienne mode"
is not necessary; most anything that we both enjoy and can look at in a
patronizing way can be called "quaint".)  I once asked a
German-English bilingual friend for a translation.  He thought for
a moment and said "The quaint old street -- Das entzu"ckende Ga"sschen";
so the same feel can be achieved without reproducing the exact meaning
of the word.  "Quaint" is often used sarcastically or euphemistically
to mean "old-fashioned" in a negative sense.  But the speaker of English
(unlike the writers of the dictionaries referred to above) is generally
aware that this usage IS sarcastic or euphemistic.
     The history of the word is interesting:  It comes from Old French
"coint", a past participle which in modern French is replaced by
"connu", and it went through a series of meanings including "cunningly
contrived".  So I guess that what was cunningly contrived to one
generation was quaint to the next....

     English does not have a word to render the combination of
meanings shared by French "bonneheure", German "Glu"ck", Russian
"shchastye" etc., which includes "well-being", "happiness" and "luck".
It is not clear to me to what extent the word expresses a unified
concept in those languages, nor whether each of those words translates
the others perfectly.  (The varied meaning of "happy", "happen" and
"perhaps" in English suggest that the root "hap-" may have expressed
a similarly broad collection of concepts.)

    The English word "privacy" seems hard to translate into most
languages (not to be confused with "private property" which of course
EVERY modern language can render.)  However, I'm told that in (South
American?) Spanish "intimidad" means "privacy" as well as "intimacy";
and a German said that "Privatspha"re" ("private sphere", with "private"
in the sense of "private property" contributing the modifier) does it
reasonably well.

     Some French colleagues who had invited me to speak and arranged
reservations in a small hotel asked me the next day whether the people
who ran it were "kind people".  I realized that they were
translating French "gentils" ("nice") and explained that one couldn't
tell whether someone was kind without observing them in a situation
where another person needed help, etc..  After some discussion of the
English word, they were unable to come up with any French equivalent.
(I mentioned this some time later to a French Canadian whose comment was
that the French had no use for the concept.)

     I've been told that "lonely" is very hard to translate into
Italian; maybe other languages as well.  One has words meaning "alone",
"solitary", which can *imply* loneliness, but not a word that explicitly
expresses the discomfort coming from lack of contact with others.

     As a speaker of English, I've had more opportunity to observe
English words that are hard to render into other languages than vice
versa.  Occasionally I've asked speakers of other languages for words
in their language that are hard to translate.  The one answer I recall
was from a Rumanian: "dor" (I assume from Latin "dolor" "pain") means
"anguished longing for things of one's past".

     Finally, for deficiency in the most extreme sense that participants
in this discussion have referred to -- I generally find myself
completely at a loss for words when trying to describe a person's
personality!  The words that our language gives us describe stereotypes,
moral judgements, pet theories -- but not the very rich nature that
I perceive when I observe a person.  Actually, I have no idea whether
the ways I perceive people's personalities are the same as the ways
others do.  Perhaps to try to create a general vocabulary for
personality would be like having someone who is red-green color-blind
and someone who is blue-yellow color-blind trying to create a vocabulary
for color....  But maybe it is possible, and the deficiency of our
language prevents us from organizing our perceptions in this area.
(Of course, every theory, from the astrological to the Freudian to
the personality-testing approach will have a vocabulary for the
categories it posits; but I am skeptical of the validity of such
theories.)

     "Vocabulary" is just the first of three or four categories I
meant to include, but it could take me forever to finish this
if I tried to get them all in.  Maybe I'll get to some of the others
another time.

     Re "gezelig" -- I suppose it is from the same root as
German "Gesellschaft", which suggests that "friendly" or "companionable"
might be reasonable translations -- in many contexts, at least?

			George Bergman
			Math, UC Berkeley 94720 USA
			...!ucbvax!gbergman%cartan