Are there no instances in Russian which reveal a poorly categorized concept in English, or vice-versa?
I’m surprised ESR didn’t bring up the difficulty of talking about “free software” in a language that doesn’t distinguish “libre” from “gratuit”, for example.
My own favorite example is how stunningly ambiguous the word “why” seems after learning about finer distinctions like the “por que” vs “para que” distinction in Spanish. How many creationists are subconsciously confused by the fact that “from what cause?” and “for what purpose?” are treated in English as identical questions?
You can always translate the ambiguity logically (into any sufficiently “complete” language?), but the increased awkwardness of the translation may have an effect. For an example from today’s news commentary: even some ardent feminists are surprised to learn that “Banksy” might be a woman, possibly because even if you know intellectually that English uses “he” as a neutral pronoun for a person of unknown gender, that’s not always enough to prevent prose references to an unknown person as “he” from affecting you subliminally.
For an example from today’s news commentary: even some ardent feminists are surprised to learn that “Banksy” might be a woman, possibly because even if you know intellectually that English uses “he” as a neutral pronoun for a person of unknown gender, that’s not always enough to prevent prose references to an unknown person as “he” from affecting you subliminally.
Or possibly because the prior for the gender of the kind of person who’d the kind of things Banksy does is heavily in favor of him being male.
Are there no instances in Russian which reveal a poorly categorized concept in English, or vice-versa?
Oh yes, there are. My personal pet peeve, there is no way to distinguish “difficulty” and “complexity” in Russian. There is even no simple way (or, at least, I don’t know one) like “difficult as in how hard it is to do, not as in how hard it is to describe”). However, hard way (spending a minute explaining the difference and then using some shorthand) works perfectly with Russian-only speakers, even not very intelligent ones. They do seem to have that distinction in their maps, and sometimes even comment on how weird it is that it is impossible to spell it properly. I never saw anyone being confused by it.
My own favorite example is how stunningly ambiguous the word “why” seems after learning about finer distinctions like the “por que” vs “para que” distinction in Spanish.
BTW, Russian does have that distinction. Question words is one area in which Russian is superior, in my opinion.
For an example from today’s news commentary: even some ardent feminists are surprised to learn that “Banksy” might be a woman, possibly because even if you know intellectually that English uses “he” as a neutral pronoun for a person of unknown gender, that’s not always enough to prevent prose references to an unknown person as “he” from affecting you subliminally.
Oh, that reminds me. In Russian, every noun has a grammatical gender. Cabinet is male, keyboard is female and window is neuter. It DOES carry a lot of connotations that affect me in introspectively noticable ways.
Curious note: when rereading this post last time before posting, I noticed that in the very first paragraph, when I talked about distinction between complexity and difficulty, I used words “simple” and “hard” as literal antonyms without even noticing.
Lots of other words seem to be used in similar contexts, e.g. ‘prikol,’ ‘klyevo’, maybe even ‘pizdyetz’ (some may be archaic, it’s been a while since I had been immersed in Russian), but none of them seem to be exactly right. I think it’s weird that there is no exact isomorphism from such a basic English concept.
Nobody uses the word Веселье in colloquial Russian in this sense, but people use “fun” in colloquial English all the time.
I came to realise, that I use the word ‘fun’ in its original English pronounciation (фан) quite a lot in Russian speech, as do my peers. It seems that we have just adopted it.
That’s interesting, thank you. Russian has adapted a lot of English vocabulary in the internet age.
There is actually a bit of sneaky cultural warfare in this. After all, it’s not just language that is being adopted. Language is just the audible tip of a cultural iceberg.
I think that “прикол” is closer to “amusing” than to “fun”. “клёво” is more like “cool”. And I always thought that “пиздец” was universally bad, something akin to “game over, man ! game over !”—but words do change over time...
I have seen the word пиздец used after surviving a near miss, or witnessing a particularly daring and successful stunt (?as an exclamation of relief?). As I said, none of them are exactly right.
There a lot of distinctions that English doesn’t make, such as singular second person or gerund versus present participle, and some that it makes that aren’t really necessary, such as clock versus watch.
More like the first definition. I meant, you can perform some linguistical acrobatics and say “complexity, but not difficulty” in a compact way, but that wouldn’t be a proper way to say it from the perspective of strict Russian grammar, and you are not guaranteed to be universally understood.
You said “More like the first definition.” The first definition is “to name, write, or otherwise give the letters, in order, of (a word, syllable, etc.)”. Thus, I conclude that you are saying that it is impossible to name, write, or otherwise give the letters, in order, of the word “complexity”. I have repeatedly seen people in this community talk of “verified debating”, in which it is important to communicate with other people what your understanding of their statements is, and ask them whether that is accurate. And yet when I do that, with an interpretation that looks quite straightforward to me, I get downvoted, and your only response is “no”, with no explanation.
How many creationists are subconsciously confused by the fact that “from what cause?” and “for what purpose?” are treated in English as identical questions?
Interesting. I was going to point to “how come?” and “what for?” as examples of this distinction being made in English, but after a bit of thought they don’t actually work as such: “how come you gave me a dollar?” is a linguistically valid question and could be validly answered by something like “so you can buy a candy bar”. Using “what for” to point to a cause rather than a purpose is more dialectical, but I have heard it.
I remember a quote along the lines “Different languages don’t restrict what you can say, they restrict what you can not say”. For instance, in a gendered language, you can’t not say the gender, or at least draw a lot of attention to the fact that you aren’t saying the gender.
You can always translate the ambiguity logically (into any sufficiently “complete” language?), but the increased awkwardness of the translation may have an effect.
You don’t only add awkwardness. You nearly always also add additional meaning or lose meaning.
If you for example want to translate the English “Dear students,” into German you can either say: “Liebe Schüler,”, “Liebe Schüler und Schülerinnen,” or “Liebe Schülerinnen und Schüler,”. In German the words have a gender and if you want to be gender neutral you need both the male and the female form. Then you have to decide which one of those you write first and which one last.
Oh good point! And if you don’t know the context when performing the translation (perhaps it’s an announcement at an all-girls or an all-boys school?), then the translation will be incorrect.
The ambiguity in the original sentence may be impossible to preserve in the translation process, which doesn’t mean that translation is impossible, but it does mean that information must be added by the translator to the sentence that wasn’t present in the original sentence.
Sometimes I do small contract translation jobs as a side activity, but it’s very frustrating when a client sends me snippets of text to be translated without the full context.
Here’s a differently categorised concept that you might like: the colour blue. English has just one basic colour term than encompasses everything from dark blue to light blue (obviously, we can distinguish them by adding descriptors like dark and light, but still fall under blue). Russian has the separate basic colour terms sinii (dark blue) and goluboi (light blue). There’s a neat paper in which the analogous distinction in Greek is shown to affect Greek speakers’ perception of colours in comparison to English speakers on a pre-conscious level (measured using EEG), so your language-map really can affect your perception of the territory, even when language isn’t directly involved.
Interestingly, most of the arguments against language influencing thought that I’ve seen wind up showing the grammar doesn’t influence thought. Basically the biggest effect language has on thought is via vocabulary, which must be really disappointing news to all the grammar nerds obsessing over the perfect grammar to give their conlang.
Yes, this is true. Consensus is largely that language can certainly influence thought in language-specific domains, and that it can influence aspects of cognition in other domains, but only to the extent of shifting probabilities and defaults around—not to the extent of controlling how speakers think or preventing some types of thought according to languages spoken.
Most “grammar nerds” I know are linguists, who think this is neat because they’re more interested in how language works on a more fundamental level than individual grammars (though of course those are interesting too). I guess it’s possible that conlang types have the opposite view! I was just amused by the distinction between what we think of when thinking “grammar nerd”.
It’s not exactly a poorly categorized concept, but in English you usually need one word to come from ‘basic form of adgective’ to ‘comparative form of adjective’, (wide—wider), but you need two words for adverbs ( to come from ‘widely’ to ‘more widely’). In Russian you need one word to say ‘more adverb’
Are there no instances in Russian which reveal a poorly categorized concept in English, or vice-versa?
I’m surprised ESR didn’t bring up the difficulty of talking about “free software” in a language that doesn’t distinguish “libre” from “gratuit”, for example.
My own favorite example is how stunningly ambiguous the word “why” seems after learning about finer distinctions like the “por que” vs “para que” distinction in Spanish. How many creationists are subconsciously confused by the fact that “from what cause?” and “for what purpose?” are treated in English as identical questions?
You can always translate the ambiguity logically (into any sufficiently “complete” language?), but the increased awkwardness of the translation may have an effect. For an example from today’s news commentary: even some ardent feminists are surprised to learn that “Banksy” might be a woman, possibly because even if you know intellectually that English uses “he” as a neutral pronoun for a person of unknown gender, that’s not always enough to prevent prose references to an unknown person as “he” from affecting you subliminally.
Or possibly because the prior for the gender of the kind of person who’d the kind of things Banksy does is heavily in favor of him being male.
Oh yes, there are. My personal pet peeve, there is no way to distinguish “difficulty” and “complexity” in Russian. There is even no simple way (or, at least, I don’t know one) like “difficult as in how hard it is to do, not as in how hard it is to describe”). However, hard way (spending a minute explaining the difference and then using some shorthand) works perfectly with Russian-only speakers, even not very intelligent ones. They do seem to have that distinction in their maps, and sometimes even comment on how weird it is that it is impossible to spell it properly. I never saw anyone being confused by it.
BTW, Russian does have that distinction. Question words is one area in which Russian is superior, in my opinion.
Oh, that reminds me. In Russian, every noun has a grammatical gender. Cabinet is male, keyboard is female and window is neuter. It DOES carry a lot of connotations that affect me in introspectively noticable ways.
Curious note: when rereading this post last time before posting, I noticed that in the very first paragraph, when I talked about distinction between complexity and difficulty, I used words “simple” and “hard” as literal antonyms without even noticing.
Трудный. Although a related word that is hard to translate into Russian is “challenge”.
вызов
Is there a russian word for “fun?”
Веселье. It’s a bit closer to “joy” or “merry-ness”, though. Why?
Lots of other words seem to be used in similar contexts, e.g. ‘prikol,’ ‘klyevo’, maybe even ‘pizdyetz’ (some may be archaic, it’s been a while since I had been immersed in Russian), but none of them seem to be exactly right. I think it’s weird that there is no exact isomorphism from such a basic English concept.
Nobody uses the word Веселье in colloquial Russian in this sense, but people use “fun” in colloquial English all the time.
I came to realise, that I use the word ‘fun’ in its original English pronounciation (фан) quite a lot in Russian speech, as do my peers. It seems that we have just adopted it.
That’s interesting, thank you. Russian has adapted a lot of English vocabulary in the internet age.
There is actually a bit of sneaky cultural warfare in this. After all, it’s not just language that is being adopted. Language is just the audible tip of a cultural iceberg.
I think that “прикол” is closer to “amusing” than to “fun”. “клёво” is more like “cool”. And I always thought that “пиздец” was universally bad, something akin to “game over, man ! game over !”—but words do change over time...
I have seen the word пиздец used after surviving a near miss, or witnessing a particularly daring and successful stunt (?as an exclamation of relief?). As I said, none of them are exactly right.
In Russia, state has fun with you.
There a lot of distinctions that English doesn’t make, such as singular second person or gerund versus present participle, and some that it makes that aren’t really necessary, such as clock versus watch.
I’m a bit confused by the word “spell”, and wonder whether you mean the fourth definition given here: http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/spell?s=t
More like the first definition. I meant, you can perform some linguistical acrobatics and say “complexity, but not difficulty” in a compact way, but that wouldn’t be a proper way to say it from the perspective of strict Russian grammar, and you are not guaranteed to be universally understood.
So, you are saying that it is impossible to say what letters are in the word?
No.
You said “More like the first definition.” The first definition is “to name, write, or otherwise give the letters, in order, of (a word, syllable, etc.)”. Thus, I conclude that you are saying that it is impossible to name, write, or otherwise give the letters, in order, of the word “complexity”. I have repeatedly seen people in this community talk of “verified debating”, in which it is important to communicate with other people what your understanding of their statements is, and ask them whether that is accurate. And yet when I do that, with an interpretation that looks quite straightforward to me, I get downvoted, and your only response is “no”, with no explanation.
Interesting. I was going to point to “how come?” and “what for?” as examples of this distinction being made in English, but after a bit of thought they don’t actually work as such: “how come you gave me a dollar?” is a linguistically valid question and could be validly answered by something like “so you can buy a candy bar”. Using “what for” to point to a cause rather than a purpose is more dialectical, but I have heard it.
I remember a quote along the lines “Different languages don’t restrict what you can say, they restrict what you can not say”. For instance, in a gendered language, you can’t not say the gender, or at least draw a lot of attention to the fact that you aren’t saying the gender.
You don’t only add awkwardness. You nearly always also add additional meaning or lose meaning.
If you for example want to translate the English “Dear students,” into German you can either say: “Liebe Schüler,”, “Liebe Schüler und Schülerinnen,” or “Liebe Schülerinnen und Schüler,”. In German the words have a gender and if you want to be gender neutral you need both the male and the female form. Then you have to decide which one of those you write first and which one last.
Oh good point! And if you don’t know the context when performing the translation (perhaps it’s an announcement at an all-girls or an all-boys school?), then the translation will be incorrect.
The ambiguity in the original sentence may be impossible to preserve in the translation process, which doesn’t mean that translation is impossible, but it does mean that information must be added by the translator to the sentence that wasn’t present in the original sentence.
Sometimes I do small contract translation jobs as a side activity, but it’s very frustrating when a client sends me snippets of text to be translated without the full context.
Here’s a differently categorised concept that you might like: the colour blue. English has just one basic colour term than encompasses everything from dark blue to light blue (obviously, we can distinguish them by adding descriptors like dark and light, but still fall under blue). Russian has the separate basic colour terms sinii (dark blue) and goluboi (light blue). There’s a neat paper in which the analogous distinction in Greek is shown to affect Greek speakers’ perception of colours in comparison to English speakers on a pre-conscious level (measured using EEG), so your language-map really can affect your perception of the territory, even when language isn’t directly involved.
Interestingly, most of the arguments against language influencing thought that I’ve seen wind up showing the grammar doesn’t influence thought. Basically the biggest effect language has on thought is via vocabulary, which must be really disappointing news to all the grammar nerds obsessing over the perfect grammar to give their conlang.
Yes, this is true. Consensus is largely that language can certainly influence thought in language-specific domains, and that it can influence aspects of cognition in other domains, but only to the extent of shifting probabilities and defaults around—not to the extent of controlling how speakers think or preventing some types of thought according to languages spoken.
Most “grammar nerds” I know are linguists, who think this is neat because they’re more interested in how language works on a more fundamental level than individual grammars (though of course those are interesting too). I guess it’s possible that conlang types have the opposite view! I was just amused by the distinction between what we think of when thinking “grammar nerd”.
I was thinking of the people involved in things like lojban. Who were you thinking of?
Academic linguists. (I am one—or, a psycholinguist, anyway.)
It’s not exactly a poorly categorized concept, but in English you usually need one word to come from ‘basic form of adgective’ to ‘comparative form of adjective’, (wide—wider), but you need two words for adverbs ( to come from ‘widely’ to ‘more widely’). In Russian you need one word to say ‘more adverb’