In Russian we have the word ‘Mirozdanie’, which means all that exists
In Russian we have the word ‘Mirozdanie’, which means all that exists, no matter do we know anything about it or not. The sense of this word includes you and me and every man, and every star, and every planet and all universes and all space (super) civilizations, if exist, and this world and any other worlds, if exist, and so on. Is any English word with the same sense? Or in other words, how correctly and adequately translate the Russian word ‘Mirozdanie’ in English? I have my web project (in Russian) “Dossier on Mirozdanie” ( http://www.mirozdanie.narod.ru ) To tell about it in English sometimes I use the word, that Google and other dictionaries recomend - ‘Creation’ (Creation Dossier), sometimes, when I am afraid of being accused of creationism, I use the word «Multiverse» (Multiverse Dossier), but I think, every of this words has a great shortage in the context—both of them are based on hypothetical conceptions.
For a European intellectual writing for an English-speaking audience, I would suggest that you cultivate a simple, down-to-earth style; try to avoid abstractions where concrete words will do, and stay away from anything that might sound mystical.
For this reason, I’d suggest that you stick with something like “universe” or “everything” unless you really, really need to emphasize the expansiveness of your definition. Bertrand Russell is an excellent guide. He was able to write serious works in philosophy and mathematics while sticking with a very approachable style.
Technically, this is what universe was supposed to mean, before people started using the word multiverse. You could try using universe if the readership of the Mirozdanie Dossier isn’t too familiar with the idea of the multiverse, or you could use something like ‘cosmos’ or ‘totality’.
I don’t think that’s something you need to worry about at all.
(As an aside, you should probably work to improve your english grammar; you’re understandable but there are a lot of mistakes. The sentence you wrote should be “when I am afraid of being accused of creationism”. “I’m afraid to X” means “I fear the consequences of me doing X, so I don’t want to do it”, “I’m afraid of X” means “I fear X”. This can’t be immediatly deduced from the “of” and “to”, and is the kind of rule native speakers don’t even notice until a foreigner asks about it (and even then, they may give a wrong explanation—maybe I just did). It can be confusing for foreigners—in French both are “peur de”.)
Thank you very much for your recommendations. I have corrected my text according to them.
Why not “existence”?
Seems like the correct translation to me.
This is what I would use if I was trying to describe “Creation” without the creator part- I’ll bet this is the right translation.
I have used ‘reality’ but sometimes needed to call it ‘undifferentiated reality’ or to introduce the map-territory metaphor and then refer to the ‘territory’. There is a problem with the right word for this in English. I suggest that you use the Russian word after a paragraph explaining its meaning—this would be interesting to your readers, allow you to define the concept you want to use very carefully and avoid any English language philosophical baggage.
Thank you very much for your advice, I think I will try to follow it.
Maybe just “Everything”?
The Whole Sort of General Mish-Mash.On further thought, I think any of the other suggestions in this thread might be best depending on the context. The context is everything. But the WSOGMM has a special place in my heart.
I love how we’ve managed to list like eight English words that would do the trick. What an amazing/preposterous number of synonyms.
I know our irregulars suck but you’ve got to give us credit for depth of vocabulary.
You should see French—we have even more exceptions to our rules. German manages a much more sane exception/rule ratio, but that’s mostly by having much more rules.
I think the biggest problem for foreign learners isn’t irregulars, but the preposition in phrasal verbs—the way say “give up”, “give in”, “give out” or “get up”, “get away”, “get about” etc. all mean different things that can’t just be deduced by what you know about the verb or the preposition alone.
Emile:
These are indeed very difficult, but in my experience (and also from my observations of other fluent non-native English speakers), by far the hardest problem is the definite article. With a lot of practice and experience, you learn to use it with perhaps 90% or 95% accuracy, but then your improvement stagnates and it’s impossible to ever get it 100% right like a native speaker.
Possible; most non-native spakers I know in “real life” are French, Chinese or German, and articles in French and German are close enough to English. If, as your name suggests, you know more people speaking Slavic languages, you might get a different impression. From Wikipedia (featuring a nice map!):
That fits with my impression that the most tell-tale sign of a Russian writing English is the lack of articles.
(I agree with your “100% is nearly impossible” bit; the equivalent in French would be the use of grammatical gender; my wife’s been living in France since she was 11 (she’s 30 now), and still makes mistakes a French eight-year-old wouldn’t make).
Of course an exception is just another rule that happens to have a small scope...
Although general rules and specific rules may be implemented differently in the human brain.
For “Norman” read “French-speaking” and for “Saxon” read “Germanic-language-speaking.” I’m told that English is now a Germanic language with a more-than-half Latinate (mostly French) vocabulary. Here’s a quote which evokes a time in which the two languages had not fully mixed, at least not in every context—it is a record from a court of criminal law:
P.S. Originally copied and pasted this quote from the web. Later, looked it up in a dead trees copy of “The Language of the Law” by Mellinkoff. The book cited a passage with spelling that was further from standard French...updated to reflect.
Costanza:
That’s true only for highbrow written English (and even then, I’m not sure if French words would outnumber those coming directly from Latin). Everyday spoken English still overwhelmingly consists of Germanic words.
Also, that sample you cite is Law French, a very peculiar historical sort of formal legal language. Nobody ever used anything like that as everyday spoken language.
Is the meaning temporally limited? Does it constrain itself to the specific point in the time dimension at which the word is used?
“Cosmos” is probably the most common version. I have also seen “Reality.” Both are frequently capitalized.
Thanks a lot to everyone, who gave the comments. They are very helpful to me.
Eliezer seems to like the term thingspace (see also).