Another Language Question

Factual Questions
1

Hi again Straight Dope.

I’ve been thinking for a couple of weeks how to phrase this two-part question.

Can we assume that certain languages are more complex than others?

Let’s start with any sentence in English. Can we assume that every language on earth has the capability to translate that sentence to a decent approximation of its meaning?

I was considering less common languages (Native American types, or Inuit, perhaps?) Again, my question revolves around whether all languages are able to translate meaning. What happens when a speaker of Xhosa (a “click” language) in Africa tries to translate, say, a scientific paper on Einstein or an Edgar Allan Poe story? My guess is they would do the best they can given the vocabulary of their language.

If it’s the case that some languages can convey more nuance and feeling than others, whether it be because of a larger vocabulary or some other reason, can we make assumptions about the capabilities of the population based on that? Do native speakers of Hawaiian or Samoan, for example, suffer a disadvantage in commerce or general interaction with other cultures because of the insular nature of the language? Does every language possess a way to say everything that can be said? If not, why not? Isn’t it to one’s detriment not to be able to access the full range of what can be communicated or put into words?

I’m not trying to insult anyone with this line of questioning, or claiming English as a superior language. I just want to know if all languages can convey nuance and meaning to the same extent as English, and if not, if languages that do not have this capability are indeed suffering a disadvantage.

I hope someone can enlighten me. Am I missing something essential?
Thanks, Dave

2

As I understand it, the latest thinking is that no language is inherently more or less complex or more less capable of communicating concepts than others.

Obviously, some languages have evolved technical vocabularies that other languages have not. That’s a different issue. Over time, those languages should be able to acquire new vocabulary. They very well might have technical vocabularies for local conditions (animals, weather, landscape) that the other language lacks. Navaho codetalkers during WWII managed to express modern technology with analogous words, e.g.

I’m sure, knowing the Dope, that someone will bring up Pirahã, a language supposedly without usual concepts. Maybe. That’s the subject of a lot of controversy.

Overall, however, languages can handle whatever is thrown at them. Look at the way that Israelis have modernized Hebrew.

3

What about those languages which have fewer differentiations in colors? I’m not talking about “puce” “ecru” kinds of colors, but those languages where there is only one word for several different colors, as far as English hue names are concerned?

This explains it better than I do:

4

There’s a rule of thumb that when you translate from one language to another, the translated text is longer than the original, whichever direction you go, because some things just need to be clarified in the second language. (Edit: not always true, of course.)

So any language is capable of rendering any distinction possible, but sometimes it takes rather a lot of effort. Each language has domains (areas of thought) it specializes in, and other not so much.

To take the color example, you’d probably have to use a lot of adjectives that make little sense to convey cerulean (“cloudless summer sky on a warm afternoon red” or what have you), but you could do it.

5

And russians are better than english speakers at differentiating shades of blue because they break the spectrum we call blue into goluboy (light) and siniy (dark).

Complexity is a difficult thing to objectively measure and while the standard response from the linguistic community is that all languages are equally capable of expressing a given idea, that often feels less like an actual scientific fact and more as a response to the antiquated notion of “primitive language, primitive people” What ends up happening is usually people just start defining complex as being “harder to learn” which is subjective and useful for very little except small talk.

Here’s a guy describing an ipod in Navajo.

6

Russian has more words for the basic colors than English does. Which is basically a so what? They see the same spectrum as we do; they just divide it up in a slightly different way. And individuals might look at a color and some say green while others say blue. (Me and my wife, as a matter of common dispute.)

So, yes, this could cause some confusion in translation. But many, many things cause confusion in translation. Slang, jargon, puns, metaphors, allusions, concepts. As we see on the boards every day, the English that comes out of one poster’s keyboard is misunderstood by another English-native poster. That’s the nature of all language and all languages.

7

In Maya we say “Yuum bo’otik” which translates into “Thank you” in English.

However, “Yuum bo’otik” literally translates as “god pays you”. I wouldn’t say that Maya is more complex than English, but it is definitely more symbolic.

8

What if it works the other way around? Maybe some languages allow for ambiguity where others require precision, like not having “person” so you need to say “man” or “woman”. That could be limiting.

Of course languages aren’t set in stone and can invent or borrow new words, so any deficiencies will tend to go away as needed over time.

But as someone who speaks two languages well and has dabbled in four others, I’d say the differences aren’t so much that something can’t be said at all in a language (you could always replace word A in language X that doesn’t exist in language Y with a translation of the dictionary entry of A), but rather that each language has certain expressions that capture a concept very well while others devolve into tedium or blandness trying to express the same thing.

9

In English when someone sneezes we say “Bless you”, which translates into ‘Good health’ in Spanish.

However literally it is short for “God bless you”.

I’m not sure that’s really an argument that English is more symbolic than Spanish, just that short little expressions like that can vary in their levels of symbolism, both within and across languages.

10

Absolutely. French translators (and presumably those of other romance languages) have a problem much like this. For example, in English I can write, “That doctor may be well-educated, but the plumber I met yesterday is much more clever.” If I send that to a French translator, I’ll get the question back, “are the doctor and plumber men or women?” In this case, the adjectives and the past participle of the verb must match the nouns, so there’s four different ways of writing the sentence depending on the genders.

11

nm

12

While most anything is translatable, translating can be a real bitch when you take colloquialisms and style into account. As any language student can tell you, one of the most difficult homework assignments is translating newspaper articles, particularly headlines. I’m always amused by headlines, as I automatically wonder what a French student studying English must make of something like this recent one from the Anchorage paper: “Road Whalers: Barrow boys rack up games, mileage on epic road trip”; or “Warriors shut down Thunder in rout” on ESPN.

13

This is true in Hebrew also. That is why English translations of the Bible, in trying to preserve the original meaning, often specify “man-servants” and “maid-servants” and “he-oxen” and “she-oxen” and so forth.

It may be that the language actually reflects how the people think, or that the language determines how people think. I had a discussion with a he-Israeli once about this. I asked him why it was important to specify gender in every word, even if that is not relevant. The example at hand was “doctor”, which in Hebrew must either be “doctor(m.)” or “doctor(f.)” He pointed out that in Hebrew, and thus in a Hebrew speaker’s view, a “doctor(m.)” and a “doctor(f.)” are two distinctly different things, and therefore necessarily have two different words.

14

That’s not really a translation. It’s a case of taking the phrase which most English speakers use in a situation and substituting the phrase which most Spanish speakers would use in that same situation.

We don’t always say “bless you”, sometimes we say “gesundheit” and that literally does mean health (implying good health, as opposed to illness). But people who speak English don’t think about the meaning of either phrase, they just use them in the appropriate situation.

15

Yes, the language indeed reflects how people think. In Hebrew, I can offer some examples. The word for anger is “af” which is also the word for nose or nostril. The image is therefore of someone’s nose getting red or nostrils flaring when they are angry.

Also, the word “sameach” in Hebrew means “happy,” but it has its roots in the word “tzamach” which means to grow or sprout, or flourish. So the image is one of happiness being a visceral thing that can be visualized, conceptualized, and sensed (i.e. your body welling up with a flourishing, growing feeling of well-being, like a plant that’s growing). I postulate that this has something to do with Israelis being a people more connected to the physical; rather than abstract concepts, their language draws upon what connects humanity–the visual, tactile world that we all share and experience.

That being said, thanks for the responses. Here’s my line of thinking.

Is English the most efficient language for business/economic/cultural interaction? Mandarin and Spanish outrank it in terms of the amount of people who speak it, according to Wikipedia, but if I’m not mistaken all countries where English is not the most common language have translations in (sometimes broken) English. You see Spanish translations more commonly here in the USA then how it used to be, I guess coinciding with the influx of Spanish speakers to the country, but you don’t see Mandarin nearly as much. And it’s certainly not mandatory. But in other countries, don’t you frequently see English translations? (For example, at airports). Can we then assume that because English is used in these instances and more that it is the most efficient language when it comes to globalization? You also see English as a Second Language Courses in school; they wouldn’t do that if they didn’t acknowledge the utility (above all other language choices) of English in the world of business and other cultural interactions around the world.

So then if that’s the case, wouldn’t it follow that the languages into which it is harder to translate English would suffer a measurable disadvantage?

It’s going to be easier to translate Harry Potter into Spanish, or French, than it will be into Xhosa or Hawaiian, right? I’m not saying it can’t be done, but that it would take longer, and would be more labor intensive…am I correct?

I will grant that every language has the capability to express the same infinite range of communications possible. But can we assume that it takes longer for some than for others, and English is the language you’re going to need most to succeed when it comes to being a global citizen?

If that’s the case, then is there a measurable detrimental effect on these native speakers (more so in languages unrelated to English) when it comes to trying to do business with English speaking entities or companies?

Dave

16

English is everywhere because it’s a common first language and a common second language, not because it has some innate quality of conciseness or utility that other languages lack.

17

I’ve read that it was problematical to translate the story “Snow White” into various languages of Equatorial Africa because there is no word for “snow” in their languages, and furthermore, most people had never seen or heard of the stuff and had no concept of it.

This may or may not actually be apocryphal. In the book “Anna And The King of Siam”, Anna Leonowens is shown trying to teach the king’s wives and children about the outside world, and she had difficulty getting them to understand the concept of snow.

18

One thing about English which I believe is objectively an advantage is it has an unusually large vocabulary. This is because modern English is a combination of the vocabularies of old English, a Germanic language, and old French, a Romance language.

19

When I was a Peace Corps volunteer, it was tough trying to explain to people in a tropical African village what snow was. (It occasionally snowed in the very highest altitude parts of the country, but nowhere near the tropical coastal village where I was).

Many or most people had occasionally been to the regional capital, 20 miles away, and had seen ice (or had seen ice used by local fishermen to keep fish cold) so they sort of knew what ice was, so I generally started from there.

20

Maybe, but I don’t think because of the grammar of any of the languages. It would, I think because

  1. Xhosa and Hawaiian may not yet have some vocabularly that would be useful. If Xhosa is used as a real conversation language, then I’m pretty sure by now that it has a word for cell phone (not sure if any really converses in Hawaiian), but for both Xhosa and Hawaiian there’s probably a dearth of words to describe English winters. But this is pretty minor; it’s just a case of using five words instead of one. There’s the slight advantage in Harry Potter that the quasi-Latin spell words would feel about the same to Spanish and French speakers without any translation, wheras trying to get the same effect in Xhosan would be a challenge.
  2. More importantly, one can assume that the average French or Spanish reader shares a lot of cultural ideas and references with an English one, that a Xhosan may not. A person translating Harry Potter into French probably wouldn’t bother explaining what what English camping is like or what a magic wand is; maybe the Xhosan translator might ponder how much they have to explain.
  3. There are a lot more people who speak/read/write English and French well than English and Hawaiian. Therefore it’s much easier to find a competent English-French literary translator than English-Hawaiian.

I’m not sure whether you’re trying to ask about things inherent to the language (grammar, maybe range of vocabulary), or things relating to it’s place in various cultures. Right now, it is pretty efficient for international interaction because so many people speak at least a moderate amount of English, and additionally a lot of internationally-influential industries (entertainment, information tech, to a moderate degree banking) are centered in English-speaking areas.

As far as language-specific, I think English has some advantages in that the near-absense of inflections makes it slightly easier to learn at an intermediate level; on the other hand, the excessive duplicative vocabularly and wildly inconsistent spelling makes it harder to master than many others.