My native language is Russian (and was also the only language I could speak before my teens). I can also speak English, and it is my primary language for thinking now (it is MUCH easier to think in English, than in Russian—Russian is horrible). The two languages do not feel like different maps. I do have some problems in conversing with Russian-speaking individuals, mostly with expressing myself (English offers so many useful features not present in Russian that I feel like an amputee when I can’t use them), but I do not think that knowing the distinction helped me with rationality much. They are not different ways of seeing the world, but different ways of describing what you see. Not different maps, different map colorings, maybe.
Hmmm. I have a slightly different experience to you. I am bilingual—English/Afrikaans—though my Afrikaans was never a language I used a lot and I have a very poor grasp of it in comparison.
This has led to something interesting—if I try to think in Afrikaans, I notice a distinct difference in my thoughts. Normally, my thoughts take the form of an internal monologue (almost, but not quite, exclusively). If I try to think in Afrikaans, which has a different grammar (and importantly, a different word order) to English, then I get the distinct impression of parts of my thoughts queued up and waiting for their part of the sentence to happen. This tells me that there are more complicated things going on inside my head than I had previously thought.
...though interesting, I have not as yet found any practical use for this knowledge.
I don’t know Afrikaans, but Russian is very much unlike English in a lot of things—most notably, the order of words in a sentence usually plays next to no role whatsoever in terms of actual meaning (you may sound somewhat posh or dramatic if you randomize it too much, but Yoda still sounds pretty normal in all Star Wars Rusian translations I know). Given all that, I don’t feel anything like you describe when I think in Russian.
Hmmm. Looking it up, I see that English and Russian are both broadly categorised as subject-verb-object languages, while Afrikaans is a subject-object-verb language.
Hence, if I were to translate directly word-for-word from grammatically correct Afrikaans to English, without changing the word order, the result would be something along the lines of “He did to the shops go” or “He did a bit of milk at the shop buy”.
I’ve never come across an Afrikaans translation of Star Wars to listen to Yoda in (to be fair, I’ve never really looked, either).
You can probably get a similar effect without needing to learn another language if you convolute your grammar to the point of putting the verb at the end of each and every sentence.
I think I wouldn’t. It is the way that questions are asked in Russian in the most widespread version (“Did you take my gun?” → “You my gun take?” (there is nothing like ‘did’ in this sentence)), and I sometimes speak affirmatives that way just as a habit (nobody makes a deal out of it).
Say, is Afrikaans an easy language to learn the basics of? Just out of curiosity.
Say, is Afrikaans an easy language to learn the basics of? Just out of curiosity.
I think it depends where you start from. I grew up in a place where both English and Afrikaans are widely spoken (South Africa—to my knowledge, still the only country where Afrikaans is widely spoken) and so I had some idea of the basics of both from a very young age, which helped me immeasurably.
Afrikaans is also very close to Dutch (to the point that a Dutch and an Afrikaans speaker can communicate using their respective languages with only minor difficulty, and I’ve managed to leverage my knowledge of Afrikaans to be able to understand most of an article written in Dutch) - so if you know Dutch, it’ll probably be fairly trivial to learn Afrikaans.
Starting with Russian and English… I have very little idea of what Russian is like, so I don’t know what sort of starting point that gives you.
But I think I can safely say that, all else being equal, English would be significantly more difficult to learn than Afrikaans.
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’
I, too, sometimes find that it is easier for me to express certain ideas in English than in my native language. However, I guess, in my case the reason seems to be analogous to the reasons mentioned in Steven Pinker’s article “Why Academics Stink at Writing”. Although it mainly talks about why academics find it difficult to express their ideas in simple words, it seems to me that if one uses predominantly English in certain settings or talking about certain subjects, then the reasons (chunking and functional fixedness) why ideas about these subjects are difficult to express in one’s native language are probably similar.
Scholars lose their moorings in the land of the concrete because of two effects of expertise that have been documented by cognitive psychology. One is called chunking. To work around the limitations of short-term memory, the mind can package ideas into bigger and bigger units, which the psychologist George Miller dubbed “chunks.” As we read and learn, we master a vast number of abstractions, and each becomes a mental unit that we can bring to mind in an instant and share with others by uttering its name. An adult mind that is brimming with chunks is a powerful engine of reason, but it comes at a cost: a failure to communicate with other minds that have not mastered the same chunks.
The amount of abstraction a writer can get away with depends on the expertise of his readership. But divining the chunks that have been mastered by a typical reader requires a gift of clairvoyance with which few of us are blessed. When we are apprentices in our chosen specialty, we join a clique in which, it seems to us, everyone else seems to know so much! And they talk among themselves as if their knowledge were conventional wisdom to every educated person. As we settle into the clique, it becomes our universe. We fail to appreciate that it is a tiny bubble in a multiverse of cliques. When we make first contact with the aliens in other universes and jabber at them in our local code, they cannot understand us without a sci-fi universal translator.
[...]
The second way in which expertise can make our thoughts harder to share is that as we become familiar with something, we think about it more in terms of the use we put it to and less in terms of what it looks like and what it is made of. This transition is called functional fixity. In the textbook experiment, people are given a candle, a book of matches, and a box of thumbtacks, and are asked to attach the candle to the wall so that the wax won’t drip onto the floor. The solution is to dump the thumbtacks out of the box, tack the box to the wall, and stick the candle onto the box. Most people never figure this out because they think of the box as a container for the tacks rather than as a physical object in its own right. The blind spot is called functional fixity because people get fixated on an object’s function and forget its physical makeup.
Now, if you combine functional fixity with chunking, and stir in the curse that hides each one from our awareness, you get an explanation of why specialists use so much idiosyncratic terminology, together with abstractions, metaconcepts, and zombie nouns. They are not trying to bamboozle their readers; it’s just the way they think. The specialists are no longer thinking—and thus no longer writing—about tangible objects, and instead are referring to them by the role those objects play in their daily travails. A psychologist calls the labels true and false “assessment words” because that’s why he put them there—so that the participants in the experiment could assess whether it applied to the preceding sentence. Unfortunately, he left it up to us to figure out what an “assessment word” is.
While scholars package their ideas and abstractions into chunks, in everyday language we package the connotations of words/idioms/expressions into similar implicit chunks that are hard to separate from the word/idiom/expression itself. Direct translation might not preserve all these connotations. It seems to me that while we could try to preserve some connotations that are most relevant in a given situation, we might feel uncomfortable doing so, because losing connotations feels like losing accuracy and precise meaning of what we tried to convey, even in situations where a simple paraphrase could preserve connotations that are actually relevant.
In a professional setting, functional fixedness becomes very important. It is probably the reason why so much professional jargon (outside the Anglosphere) is based on other languages, especially English.
Articles. Not only there are none in Russian, but there is nothing that serves their function.
Happens all the time:
-- I just put my towel to laundry.
-- Okay.
-- But I just realised that I need towel again. Could you go fetch towel for me?
-- Here, I brought you towel.
-- This is another towel.
-- Oh, so you needed that very towel that you put into laundry?
-- Oh. (switching to English) I wanted to say “I need the towel”, not “I need a towel”!
Next, Russian often requires you to specify a lot of extra info, compared to English. Example:
-- Why is that thing a fish?
-- It isn’t. (because it’s a dolphin)
“It is a fish” = “Это рыба” (it fish). No ‘is’ in this sentence in Russian. So, instead of “it isn’t” you must say “it isn’t a fish”. There is no easy way to say this sentence without using the word “fish” or some extra clumsy wording like “not the thing you are asking about”. That makes it very hard to make stuff like chatbots in Russian, or write generic lines for RPG games where the same line can be used in different circumstances.
Same thing with grammatical genders. When you say “X does Y”, you must specify gender of X in Y’s form. A lot of media was botched in translation, when one character thinks that another character is a girl when he’s actually a guy (and is not trying to deliberately deceive). In Russian, it is hard to say more than a couple of sentences without revealing your gender in the process.
Is that enough? There is more where that came from.
Thanks! I didn’t mean to have you produce a small essay - ‘definite/indefinite articles’ and ‘gender ambiguity’ would have covered me on the first and third.
I remain curious, but not to the extent I’m asking you to put in significant effort.
“It depends”. I have never been able to get away with just saying “it depends”—Russian version prompts you to either specify what it depends on, or explicitly refuse to, begging the question of why I am being so sneaky.
There is no word that means “complexity”, but can not be alternatively understood as “difficulty”. When I tell someone I want a complex challenge, they ask why I am not carrying heavy things around, as that is quite difficult.
In same vein, no word for “challenge” that doesn’t also mean “ordeal”. The distinction seems to be also missing from Russian brains, a very peculiar phenomenon that Russian culturologists are always upset about.
No different words for ‘accuracy’ and ‘precision’.
No word for ‘awesome’ that is both strong enough and can be shown on TV. But, on the other hand, the obscene word for ‘awesome’ is much more awesome that ‘awesome’.
English tenses are more flexible and consistent. Russian only has three, plus the standalone “have been”-like form. They don’t distinguish between “I do things” and “I am doing things”, for instance.
In English, you can put an emphasis on ‘am’ or ‘is’. In Russian, to do that, you need to throw in a few extra words.
Context-independency. Russian has a small basic vocabulary, and compensates it with insanely complex syntactic structures that makes it harder to pull a couple of words from a sentence and understand what it is about.
To even things a bit, here are some advantages of Russian over Englsh:
Phonetics. If you know how to write a word, you automatically and unambiguously (with a single notable exception) know how to pronounce it. It works a little less perfect the other way around, but good enough that Russian spelling bees do not exist and don’t even make sense.
English has a ridiculously huge amount of words that sound the same or similar, like ‘to’, ‘two’ and ‘too’, or ‘bot’ and ‘bought’. The last one is just horrible—you insert three new letters, doubling word’s length, and it still sounds the same. No such thing is possible in Russian.
Word formation. It is much more flexible than in English. You can easily say things like “недоперепрыгнул”, which means “tried, but not succeeded, to jump over something”.
Distinction between singular and plural “you”.
Mat. English swearing pales in comparison to this.
I have never been able to get away with just saying “it depends”
I have: “Зависит.” Everyone understands that very well.
There is no word that means “complexity”, but can not be alternatively understood as “difficulty”.
Kinda. “Запутанный”, “навороченный”, etc. Besides, just as any language, Russian depends on the context. In some context the word “сложный” will be understood as “complex”, and in other context—as “difficult” and that’s fine.
But to your complaints about expressing certain concepts in Russian I would add the observation that the Russian language has no word for “privacy”—none at all.
In same vein, no word for “challenge” that doesn’t also mean “ordeal”. The distinction seems to be also missing from Russian brains, a very peculiar phenomenon that Russian culturologists are always upset about.
This actually seems to be an argument in support of the original quote, to some degree.
I guess the grandparent means “охуительно”. The fact the Russian has flexible word formation combined with a well-developed swearing vocabulary means that you can express quite complicated concepts using nothing but swear words and it works wonderfully well.
As a non-Russian-speaker, I would need more details to make sense of that. I gather that “охуительно” (1) is obscene and (2) means something like “awesome”, but what’s its obscene meaning and what’s the link between that and meaning something like “awesome”?
A bit of googling suggests that the word is somehow derived from a word meaning “penis”, but it’s a lot longer than that word so presumably there’s some other stuff going on.
Okay, instead of making myself feel better by professing myself of possessing knowledge mere mortals do not, I will at least try to describe what is going on in this word (it is going to be very simplified and with some omissions, because I am no linguist and am operating from instinct).
Let’s start with хуй, that means “dick”. “Хуеть” is this word transformed into a verb, which can get a lot of different meanings as it goes, but we’ll just focus on one—“becoming progressively more and more surprised/daunted”. “Охуеть” transforms it from continuous form into “have become” form, with a touch of “all over” or “completely” meaning added in. Then goes “охуить”, which is the same verb in a sort of passive involuntary form, from “become” to “having been made to become”. Note that “охуить” is not usually used on its own. At this point we have “forcibly make one dauntingly surprised enough that 1) you usually can become that surprised only by progressively becoming more and more surprised for a very long time 2) it is totally all over you, as in, it is now a dominant feeling”. From “охуить” we get “охуительный”, which is a standard way to transform a verb into adjective, so the meaning specified above is now used as adjective. From “охуительный” we get “охуительно” which looks like adjective being transformed into adverb, but that’s optical illusion (although you can potentially use it as an adverb “awesomely”). What actually happened, is that we just stripped the word from its referent. So, it’s just very generalized version of “охуительный”.
So, you can use “охуительно” as an adverb “awesomely”, or as a generalized “awesome” without a referent, like a cheer (Awesome!!!). The adverb version can alternatively just amplify the “all over” meaning, so you can use it as a strong “very”, or “so much that it it daunting”.
You can use “охуительный” as an adjective “awesome”, like in “awesome thing”.
Compared to “awesome”, “охуительно” is much easier to use in a negative form, as a sarcasm (“My car just broke, that is just awesome”), because nowhere it is specified that the surprise must be positive. That one helps to combo it with all the other profanity to complicate and refine its meaning even further, abusing this ambiguity.
Правда, охуительно?
Edit: I forgot about one more factor: “хуеть” does get a couple of additional meanings as it goes in this case, namely “be nuts/asshole”. “Ты что, охуел?” == “Are you nuts?/How do you dare?/You must be an asshole if you are doing this”. I am not going to elaborate how exactly this meaning adds to the final word.
I agree: that is all distinctly more awesome than the English “awesome”.
(A rough parallel might be the exclamation “Fuck me!” which, at least if said with slight stress on both words, means something like “well, that is very surprising and maybe impressive” for reasons a bit like the ones you give for “охуить”. But it doesn’t have an adjective or adverb form.)
Perhaps I misunderstood what timujin meant about that being “a sort of passive involuntary form”, then. (But I remark that “fuck” is also a transitive verb, to put it mildly, so I’m not sure I understand what the problem is.)
Охуеть! would be Fuck me! Охуить would be Fuck [somebody] … though I don’t recall hearing that form, there are synonims that are just much more natural. Sorry, this is bizarre...
You can, of course, create a verb охуить, but I do not think that it exists in “normal” Russian speech. The adjective охуительный is formed from the verb охуеть and the fact that a vowel has changed is completely normal for Russian (compare зреть и зримый).
I wasn’t claiming it was anything like an exact translation! Only that there’s a certain commonality between that English way of expressing awedness, and the Russian one we’d been discussing.
Yeah, well. Maybe there are suspiciously many differences in expressions of awesomeness in the two languages. I was concerned rather of an opposite mistake. I have read somewhere that in one of S. King’s novels, a man was heard having sex in the next room and crying out, Der’mo! Der’mo! etc. Now, in Russian, der’mo doesn’t have an ‘awesome’ connotation, the way shit seems to in English. It was as if he was crying, Poop! Poop!..
You forgot that an adjective хуевый means bad, for example instead of saying “I am feeling sick” u say мне хуево, but as parent points it out, the adjective formed from the same root “охуительный” means exactly the contrary - мне охуительно is the russian equivalent of “I am super fine”
As you can see it is quite complicated, but even people who never went to school are the great masters of the skill
ahahaahahahaha as a native russian speaker I can say for sure that u can define ANY concept just by slightly transforming words derived from “penis” or “cunt”. There is almost infinite set of variations, each having particular meaning; u have no choice rather than to beleive me or dedicate lifetime into learning Russian filthy language
I would argue with you, if someday I ever happen to write fanfiction named something like HP and the Methods of Russian Profanity as you put it, there would be prophecy suggesting “and he has the power of which the other does not know”
Yep, doesn’t it sound awesome (or охуительно?) Your masters will be all kinds of rednecks, prisoners and other honorable authorities of the craftsmanship
Really fascinating! But my russian brains can’t grasp this one thing, could you please at least try to explain what is this mysterious additional meaning of the word ‘challenge’ that can’t be translated into Russian, and doesn’t mean “summon to contest” or “high degree of difficulty”
In same vein, no word for “challenge” that doesn’t also mean “ordeal”. The distinction seems to be also missing from Russian brains, a very peculiar phenomenon that Russian culturologists are always upset about.
to paraphrase, what is the meaning of challenge except “вызов” or “испытание”
There is no extra meaning in “challenge”. “Вызов” and “испытание” cover the English word “challenge” more or less completely. The problem is that they also accidentally cover the English word “ordeal” as well. Challenge is not something bad or painful, but ordeal is. When you say you want “испытание”, you can potentially be understood as “I want more pain in my life”, which is not what English “I want a challenge” means.
That seems like a bug in English, not in Russian, that you can’t say “испытание” without specifying whether you mean “challenge” or “ordeal”. What if you’re not interested in making that distinction?
It seems like half your complaints are that Russian doesn’t make some distinction that English does and the other half are that Russian forces you to make distinctions that English doesn’t. It strikes me that you’re simply more comfortable thinking in English.
It strikes me that you’re simply more comfortable thinking in English.
Which begs the question: why is it so that my native language that I spoke since I was two and everyone in my circle understands, is less comfortable for me than a foreign language I am not even confident in my skill with, possess a limited vocabulary (compared to Russian), and have much less practice in?
It seems like half your complaints are that Russian doesn’t make some distinction that English does and the other half are that Russian forces you to make distinctions that English doesn’t
Not being able to make a distinction and forcing you to make a distinction, are both bad. Look at the “It isn’t a fish” example. In English you can distinguish between “It isn’t a fish” and “It isn’t a mammal”, or you can leave it ambiguous (“It isn’t”). If you can make a distinction, but don’t have to, it gives you a lot more flexibility than both “not able to” and “can and must”. Russian is inflexible exactly because of that.
I think Russian is just worse at carving reality at its joints. Accuracy and precision and two very different things, down to the point that more precision = less accuracy and vice-versa. That’s a good distinction. Forcing you to specify a noun’s gender when you’re talking about it, with said genders distributed mostly randomly/historically (dare you to say why “mechanism” is male, “machine” is female, and “device” is neuter?), makes no sense, because different-gendered items do not have different behaviour. That’s a bad distinction.
Which begs the question: why is it so that my native language that I spoke since I was two and everyone in my circle understands, is less comfortable for me than a foreign language I am not even confident in my skill with, possess a limited vocabulary (compared to Russian), and have much less practice in?
The comfort a language brings comes with it’s associations. If you are introverted you likely had a lot of negative social experiences in your native language.
If you learned English in a more comfortable enviroment it likely brings other associations with it.
I’m personally more light and make jokes when dealing in English than in German. I got my verbal English via Toastmasters and the rest via the internet.
Okay, a valid hypothesis, but I don’t think it is actually the case. I learned English for 2 years with a teacher, and then via books, internet and video games. I certainly did have negative social experiences in Russian. But the comfortableness doesn’t feel like being more light and effortless. More like more powerful, less unwieldy, more precise and compact. As a programmer, I often have the same set of feelings with programming languages, and I assure you, I wasn’t bullied in school in C++.
Internet, books and video games don’t produce lightness. You might feel powerful while playing a video game but you don’t joke around.
The Toastmasters social enviroment on the other hand does produce that vibe.
When I was socially inconfident, I did very often choose English over German. As I personally got more confident I started using German with people who don’t speak it (I’m living in Berlin, it happens) to have them tell me to switch to English.
As a programmer, I often have the same set of feelings with programming languages, and I assure you, I wasn’t bullied in school in C++.
C++ education is still very dry. A language like Python with it’s Zen has values like “There should be one—and preferably only one—obvious way to do it.”
A lot of the python tutorials are written more lively than c++ tutorials.
I’m not saying that languages are the same when you ignore personal conditioning. I know a few people with strong NLP background where effects of language really matter who say the can’t simply translate things one-to-one.
Compactness however is relative. If you translate a single German sentence into English the English one is often shorter.
On the other hand one author I know with an NLP background said she probalby would need halve the text write a book in German than in English you don’t say things as directly in English than you do in German.
There is less hinting around.
I recently watched the Liar’s game with subtitles and it contained a bunch of instances where forms of politeness were used to express meaning that simply don’t exist the same way in English.
Kinship terms are also very intestesting. English doesn’t distinguish between cousins on the mothers side and on the fathers side. Other languages do.
I’m sure essay was already on timujin’s mind. Articles in Russian are big problem for us all.
(Though if I were asked that question, I would have gone on a rant about how unreasonable it is to have to write using a completely different alphabet from just about everybody else.)
This is also the same reason I like Alan Perlis’s quote on programming languages. Paraphrased it reads “There’s no point in learning a new language that doesn’t teach you a new way of thinking.” I equate “the new way of thinking” with maps here.
--Eric Raymond on the value of bilinguilism
My native language is Russian (and was also the only language I could speak before my teens). I can also speak English, and it is my primary language for thinking now (it is MUCH easier to think in English, than in Russian—Russian is horrible). The two languages do not feel like different maps. I do have some problems in conversing with Russian-speaking individuals, mostly with expressing myself (English offers so many useful features not present in Russian that I feel like an amputee when I can’t use them), but I do not think that knowing the distinction helped me with rationality much. They are not different ways of seeing the world, but different ways of describing what you see. Not different maps, different map colorings, maybe.
Hmmm. I have a slightly different experience to you. I am bilingual—English/Afrikaans—though my Afrikaans was never a language I used a lot and I have a very poor grasp of it in comparison.
This has led to something interesting—if I try to think in Afrikaans, I notice a distinct difference in my thoughts. Normally, my thoughts take the form of an internal monologue (almost, but not quite, exclusively). If I try to think in Afrikaans, which has a different grammar (and importantly, a different word order) to English, then I get the distinct impression of parts of my thoughts queued up and waiting for their part of the sentence to happen. This tells me that there are more complicated things going on inside my head than I had previously thought.
...though interesting, I have not as yet found any practical use for this knowledge.
I don’t know Afrikaans, but Russian is very much unlike English in a lot of things—most notably, the order of words in a sentence usually plays next to no role whatsoever in terms of actual meaning (you may sound somewhat posh or dramatic if you randomize it too much, but Yoda still sounds pretty normal in all Star Wars Rusian translations I know). Given all that, I don’t feel anything like you describe when I think in Russian.
Hmmm. Looking it up, I see that English and Russian are both broadly categorised as subject-verb-object languages, while Afrikaans is a subject-object-verb language.
Hence, if I were to translate directly word-for-word from grammatically correct Afrikaans to English, without changing the word order, the result would be something along the lines of “He did to the shops go” or “He did a bit of milk at the shop buy”.
I’ve never come across an Afrikaans translation of Star Wars to listen to Yoda in (to be fair, I’ve never really looked, either).
You can probably get a similar effect without needing to learn another language if you convolute your grammar to the point of putting the verb at the end of each and every sentence.
I think I wouldn’t. It is the way that questions are asked in Russian in the most widespread version (“Did you take my gun?” → “You my gun take?” (there is nothing like ‘did’ in this sentence)), and I sometimes speak affirmatives that way just as a habit (nobody makes a deal out of it).
Say, is Afrikaans an easy language to learn the basics of? Just out of curiosity.
I think it depends where you start from. I grew up in a place where both English and Afrikaans are widely spoken (South Africa—to my knowledge, still the only country where Afrikaans is widely spoken) and so I had some idea of the basics of both from a very young age, which helped me immeasurably.
Afrikaans is also very close to Dutch (to the point that a Dutch and an Afrikaans speaker can communicate using their respective languages with only minor difficulty, and I’ve managed to leverage my knowledge of Afrikaans to be able to understand most of an article written in Dutch) - so if you know Dutch, it’ll probably be fairly trivial to learn Afrikaans.
Starting with Russian and English… I have very little idea of what Russian is like, so I don’t know what sort of starting point that gives you.
But I think I can safely say that, all else being equal, English would be significantly more difficult to learn than Afrikaans.
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’
I, too, sometimes find that it is easier for me to express certain ideas in English than in my native language. However, I guess, in my case the reason seems to be analogous to the reasons mentioned in Steven Pinker’s article “Why Academics Stink at Writing”. Although it mainly talks about why academics find it difficult to express their ideas in simple words, it seems to me that if one uses predominantly English in certain settings or talking about certain subjects, then the reasons (chunking and functional fixedness) why ideas about these subjects are difficult to express in one’s native language are probably similar.
While scholars package their ideas and abstractions into chunks, in everyday language we package the connotations of words/idioms/expressions into similar implicit chunks that are hard to separate from the word/idiom/expression itself. Direct translation might not preserve all these connotations. It seems to me that while we could try to preserve some connotations that are most relevant in a given situation, we might feel uncomfortable doing so, because losing connotations feels like losing accuracy and precise meaning of what we tried to convey, even in situations where a simple paraphrase could preserve connotations that are actually relevant.
In a professional setting, functional fixedness becomes very important. It is probably the reason why so much professional jargon (outside the Anglosphere) is based on other languages, especially English.
I empathize with this. But, still, it’s not like those communicational biases actually affect beliefs about reality (aka maps).
Which features of English do you miss?
Articles. Not only there are none in Russian, but there is nothing that serves their function.
Happens all the time:
-- I just put my towel to laundry.
-- Okay.
-- But I just realised that I need towel again. Could you go fetch towel for me?
-- Here, I brought you towel.
-- This is another towel.
-- Oh, so you needed that very towel that you put into laundry?
-- Oh. (switching to English) I wanted to say “I need the towel”, not “I need a towel”!
Next, Russian often requires you to specify a lot of extra info, compared to English. Example:
-- Why is that thing a fish?
-- It isn’t. (because it’s a dolphin)
“It is a fish” = “Это рыба” (it fish). No ‘is’ in this sentence in Russian. So, instead of “it isn’t” you must say “it isn’t a fish”. There is no easy way to say this sentence without using the word “fish” or some extra clumsy wording like “not the thing you are asking about”. That makes it very hard to make stuff like chatbots in Russian, or write generic lines for RPG games where the same line can be used in different circumstances.
Same thing with grammatical genders. When you say “X does Y”, you must specify gender of X in Y’s form. A lot of media was botched in translation, when one character thinks that another character is a girl when he’s actually a guy (and is not trying to deliberately deceive). In Russian, it is hard to say more than a couple of sentences without revealing your gender in the process.
Is that enough? There is more where that came from.
Thanks! I didn’t mean to have you produce a small essay - ‘definite/indefinite articles’ and ‘gender ambiguity’ would have covered me on the first and third.
I remain curious, but not to the extent I’m asking you to put in significant effort.
No, it’s actually fun. Brief examples:
“It depends”. I have never been able to get away with just saying “it depends”—Russian version prompts you to either specify what it depends on, or explicitly refuse to, begging the question of why I am being so sneaky.
There is no word that means “complexity”, but can not be alternatively understood as “difficulty”. When I tell someone I want a complex challenge, they ask why I am not carrying heavy things around, as that is quite difficult.
In same vein, no word for “challenge” that doesn’t also mean “ordeal”. The distinction seems to be also missing from Russian brains, a very peculiar phenomenon that Russian culturologists are always upset about.
No different words for ‘accuracy’ and ‘precision’.
No word for ‘awesome’ that is both strong enough and can be shown on TV. But, on the other hand, the obscene word for ‘awesome’ is much more awesome that ‘awesome’.
English tenses are more flexible and consistent. Russian only has three, plus the standalone “have been”-like form. They don’t distinguish between “I do things” and “I am doing things”, for instance.
In English, you can put an emphasis on ‘am’ or ‘is’. In Russian, to do that, you need to throw in a few extra words.
Context-independency. Russian has a small basic vocabulary, and compensates it with insanely complex syntactic structures that makes it harder to pull a couple of words from a sentence and understand what it is about.
To even things a bit, here are some advantages of Russian over Englsh:
Phonetics. If you know how to write a word, you automatically and unambiguously (with a single notable exception) know how to pronounce it. It works a little less perfect the other way around, but good enough that Russian spelling bees do not exist and don’t even make sense.
English has a ridiculously huge amount of words that sound the same or similar, like ‘to’, ‘two’ and ‘too’, or ‘bot’ and ‘bought’. The last one is just horrible—you insert three new letters, doubling word’s length, and it still sounds the same. No such thing is possible in Russian.
Words “себя” and “авось”.
Word formation. It is much more flexible than in English. You can easily say things like “недоперепрыгнул”, which means “tried, but not succeeded, to jump over something”.
Distinction between singular and plural “you”.
Mat. English swearing pales in comparison to this.
I have: “Зависит.” Everyone understands that very well.
Kinda. “Запутанный”, “навороченный”, etc. Besides, just as any language, Russian depends on the context. In some context the word “сложный” will be understood as “complex”, and in other context—as “difficult” and that’s fine.
But to your complaints about expressing certain concepts in Russian I would add the observation that the Russian language has no word for “privacy”—none at all.
I think the more proper translation of “it depends” would be “как сказать”.
Also, while it is true that the Russian language has no word for “privacy”, note that it also has no word for “gun” :-)
Стрелковое оружие (firearm) (?)
That doesn’t cover artillery, unlike the word “gun”.
This actually seems to be an argument in support of the original quote, to some degree.
Yes, it is.
Come on, you can’t just say something like that without giving details.
I guess the grandparent means “охуительно”. The fact the Russian has flexible word formation combined with a well-developed swearing vocabulary means that you can express quite complicated concepts using nothing but swear words and it works wonderfully well.
As a non-Russian-speaker, I would need more details to make sense of that. I gather that “охуительно” (1) is obscene and (2) means something like “awesome”, but what’s its obscene meaning and what’s the link between that and meaning something like “awesome”?
A bit of googling suggests that the word is somehow derived from a word meaning “penis”, but it’s a lot longer than that word so presumably there’s some other stuff going on.
Okay, instead of making myself feel better by professing myself of possessing knowledge mere mortals do not, I will at least try to describe what is going on in this word (it is going to be very simplified and with some omissions, because I am no linguist and am operating from instinct).
Let’s start with хуй, that means “dick”. “Хуеть” is this word transformed into a verb, which can get a lot of different meanings as it goes, but we’ll just focus on one—“becoming progressively more and more surprised/daunted”. “Охуеть” transforms it from continuous form into “have become” form, with a touch of “all over” or “completely” meaning added in. Then goes “охуить”, which is the same verb in a sort of passive involuntary form, from “become” to “having been made to become”. Note that “охуить” is not usually used on its own. At this point we have “forcibly make one dauntingly surprised enough that 1) you usually can become that surprised only by progressively becoming more and more surprised for a very long time 2) it is totally all over you, as in, it is now a dominant feeling”. From “охуить” we get “охуительный”, which is a standard way to transform a verb into adjective, so the meaning specified above is now used as adjective. From “охуительный” we get “охуительно” which looks like adjective being transformed into adverb, but that’s optical illusion (although you can potentially use it as an adverb “awesomely”). What actually happened, is that we just stripped the word from its referent. So, it’s just very generalized version of “охуительный”.
So, you can use “охуительно” as an adverb “awesomely”, or as a generalized “awesome” without a referent, like a cheer (Awesome!!!). The adverb version can alternatively just amplify the “all over” meaning, so you can use it as a strong “very”, or “so much that it it daunting”. You can use “охуительный” as an adjective “awesome”, like in “awesome thing”.
Compared to “awesome”, “охуительно” is much easier to use in a negative form, as a sarcasm (“My car just broke, that is just awesome”), because nowhere it is specified that the surprise must be positive. That one helps to combo it with all the other profanity to complicate and refine its meaning even further, abusing this ambiguity.
Правда, охуительно?
Edit: I forgot about one more factor: “хуеть” does get a couple of additional meanings as it goes in this case, namely “be nuts/asshole”. “Ты что, охуел?” == “Are you nuts?/How do you dare?/You must be an asshole if you are doing this”. I am not going to elaborate how exactly this meaning adds to the final word.
I agree: that is all distinctly more awesome than the English “awesome”.
(A rough parallel might be the exclamation “Fuck me!” which, at least if said with slight stress on both words, means something like “well, that is very surprising and maybe impressive” for reasons a bit like the ones you give for “охуить”. But it doesn’t have an adjective or adverb form.)
Not охуить (that would be a… transitive verb, to put it mildly). ОхуЕть. And it’s a bit like ‘I never!’
Perhaps I misunderstood what timujin meant about that being “a sort of passive involuntary form”, then. (But I remark that “fuck” is also a transitive verb, to put it mildly, so I’m not sure I understand what the problem is.)
Охуеть! would be Fuck me! Охуить would be Fuck [somebody] … though I don’t recall hearing that form, there are synonims that are just much more natural. Sorry, this is bizarre...
As I said, охуить is not usually used on its own, and its meaning is only relevant when you derive things from it. And it is a transitive verb.
Also, this thread gives me giggles.
You can, of course, create a verb охуить, but I do not think that it exists in “normal” Russian speech. The adjective охуительный is formed from the verb охуеть and the fact that a vowel has changed is completely normal for Russian (compare зреть и зримый).
I wasn’t claiming it was anything like an exact translation! Only that there’s a certain commonality between that English way of expressing awedness, and the Russian one we’d been discussing.
Yeah, well. Maybe there are suspiciously many differences in expressions of awesomeness in the two languages. I was concerned rather of an opposite mistake. I have read somewhere that in one of S. King’s novels, a man was heard having sex in the next room and crying out, Der’mo! Der’mo! etc. Now, in Russian, der’mo doesn’t have an ‘awesome’ connotation, the way shit seems to in English. It was as if he was crying, Poop! Poop!..
You forgot that an adjective хуевый means bad, for example instead of saying “I am feeling sick” u say мне хуево, but as parent points it out, the adjective formed from the same root “охуительный” means exactly the contrary - мне охуительно is the russian equivalent of “I am super fine”
As you can see it is quite complicated, but even people who never went to school are the great masters of the skill
Хуевый is not derived from (о)хуеть, but directly from хуй. It has nothing to do with the word in question.
ahahaahahahaha as a native russian speaker I can say for sure that u can define ANY concept just by slightly transforming words derived from “penis” or “cunt”. There is almost infinite set of variations, each having particular meaning; u have no choice rather than to beleive me or dedicate lifetime into learning Russian filthy language
As another native Russian speaker, I can say that Russian profanity is indeed powerful, but is not as precise as the parent post puts it.
I would argue with you, if someday I ever happen to write fanfiction named something like HP and the Methods of Russian Profanity as you put it, there would be prophecy suggesting “and he has the power of which the other does not know”
I would be delighted to read it. Please, do happen to write it.
That sounds like quite an enjoyable lifetime, actually.
Yep, doesn’t it sound awesome (or охуительно?) Your masters will be all kinds of rednecks, prisoners and other honorable authorities of the craftsmanship
Really fascinating! But my russian brains can’t grasp this one thing, could you please at least try to explain what is this mysterious additional meaning of the word ‘challenge’ that can’t be translated into Russian, and doesn’t mean “summon to contest” or “high degree of difficulty”
I have some trouble understanding what you want. Try to rephrase, or expand.
to paraphrase, what is the meaning of challenge except “вызов” or “испытание”
There is no extra meaning in “challenge”. “Вызов” and “испытание” cover the English word “challenge” more or less completely. The problem is that they also accidentally cover the English word “ordeal” as well. Challenge is not something bad or painful, but ordeal is. When you say you want “испытание”, you can potentially be understood as “I want more pain in my life”, which is not what English “I want a challenge” means.
That seems like a bug in English, not in Russian, that you can’t say “испытание” without specifying whether you mean “challenge” or “ordeal”. What if you’re not interested in making that distinction?
It seems like half your complaints are that Russian doesn’t make some distinction that English does and the other half are that Russian forces you to make distinctions that English doesn’t. It strikes me that you’re simply more comfortable thinking in English.
Which begs the question: why is it so that my native language that I spoke since I was two and everyone in my circle understands, is less comfortable for me than a foreign language I am not even confident in my skill with, possess a limited vocabulary (compared to Russian), and have much less practice in?
Not being able to make a distinction and forcing you to make a distinction, are both bad. Look at the “It isn’t a fish” example. In English you can distinguish between “It isn’t a fish” and “It isn’t a mammal”, or you can leave it ambiguous (“It isn’t”). If you can make a distinction, but don’t have to, it gives you a lot more flexibility than both “not able to” and “can and must”. Russian is inflexible exactly because of that.
I think Russian is just worse at carving reality at its joints. Accuracy and precision and two very different things, down to the point that more precision = less accuracy and vice-versa. That’s a good distinction. Forcing you to specify a noun’s gender when you’re talking about it, with said genders distributed mostly randomly/historically (dare you to say why “mechanism” is male, “machine” is female, and “device” is neuter?), makes no sense, because different-gendered items do not have different behaviour. That’s a bad distinction.
The comfort a language brings comes with it’s associations. If you are introverted you likely had a lot of negative social experiences in your native language.
If you learned English in a more comfortable enviroment it likely brings other associations with it. I’m personally more light and make jokes when dealing in English than in German. I got my verbal English via Toastmasters and the rest via the internet.
Okay, a valid hypothesis, but I don’t think it is actually the case. I learned English for 2 years with a teacher, and then via books, internet and video games. I certainly did have negative social experiences in Russian. But the comfortableness doesn’t feel like being more light and effortless. More like more powerful, less unwieldy, more precise and compact. As a programmer, I often have the same set of feelings with programming languages, and I assure you, I wasn’t bullied in school in C++.
Internet, books and video games don’t produce lightness. You might feel powerful while playing a video game but you don’t joke around.
The Toastmasters social enviroment on the other hand does produce that vibe.
When I was socially inconfident, I did very often choose English over German. As I personally got more confident I started using German with people who don’t speak it (I’m living in Berlin, it happens) to have them tell me to switch to English.
C++ education is still very dry. A language like Python with it’s Zen has values like “There should be one—and preferably only one—obvious way to do it.” A lot of the python tutorials are written more lively than c++ tutorials.
I’m not saying that languages are the same when you ignore personal conditioning. I know a few people with strong NLP background where effects of language really matter who say the can’t simply translate things one-to-one.
Compactness however is relative. If you translate a single German sentence into English the English one is often shorter. On the other hand one author I know with an NLP background said she probalby would need halve the text write a book in German than in English you don’t say things as directly in English than you do in German.
There is less hinting around.
I recently watched the Liar’s game with subtitles and it contained a bunch of instances where forms of politeness were used to express meaning that simply don’t exist the same way in English.
Kinship terms are also very intestesting. English doesn’t distinguish between cousins on the mothers side and on the fathers side. Other languages do.
I’m sure essay was already on timujin’s mind. Articles in Russian are big problem for us all.
(Though if I were asked that question, I would have gone on a rant about how unreasonable it is to have to write using a completely different alphabet from just about everybody else.)
Nitpick: I believe you meant “X did Y”.
Yeah.
This is also the same reason I like Alan Perlis’s quote on programming languages. Paraphrased it reads “There’s no point in learning a new language that doesn’t teach you a new way of thinking.” I equate “the new way of thinking” with maps here.
Every map is also a part of the whole territory—don’t forget this complication!