I’m reading John Beckman’s American Fun. He makes a distinction between “play,” the action and “fun,” the emotion that results. He also throws out a quote from an older book that claims that no other language has the exact equivalent of “fun.” What is fun? He steers between its use of mocking the ruling class’s strictness and morality and its use in perpetrating wild pranks and parties and merriment.
Since it’s hard to come up with a single definition in English, translating fun has to depend a lot on context and nuance. There’s still a good question underneath. Do other languages have a word for fun that is exactly transferable for the English word?
From what I remember of high school Spanish, there isn’t a noun that directly translates. Instead, they use the reflexive verb divertir (to amuse [one’s self].
So in English, we say “I’m having fun”; in Spanish they say Yo me divierto (“I’m amusing myself.”]
The noun for that verb is diversión, but it is true that the complete phrase “to have fun” is translated as divertirse; also, the word diversión is rarely seen outside of theme park advertisements and doesn’t have the same range of meanings as the English word “fun”, which can also be an adjective (“it’s fun”).
The concept can be a difficult one to translate, but I think that applies to emotions in general.
The Scandinavian languages have “sjov” in Danish, “rolig” or “kul” in Swedish, and “moro” or “gøy” in Norwegian.
They all have pretty much the exact same meaning as the English “fun”.
(It’s also one of those relatively rare words that the Scandinavian languages differ completely on. Don’t know what’s up with that. Anyway.)
Sure, the way the grammar works for these words and how you would use them differ slightly from “fun” in English, but not to an extent that’s worth getting one’s panties in a twist about. That’s just language for you. It sounds to me like your Mr. Beckman is talking out of his behind.
The Thai word สนุก /sanuk/ is used with most of the English meanings of fun or enjoy, including in sentences like ‘she likes to have fun’, ‘I didn’t mean it, I was just having fun’, ‘amusement park,’ etc.
When an author cites something from another book without backing it up, I’m always a bit suspicious. It’s handy CYA; don’t blame me - look at how good the cite was. Still, if it were that easy to prove you don’t go back to 1938 for a cite. Especially on such an extreme claim.
French is like Spanish there (big surprise) : to play is “jouer”, having fun while playing is “s’amuser” (i.e. amusing oneself). But sometimes that’s not enough, so we co-opted “fun” as a loanword anyway. C’est plutôt fun :).
There’s also “déconner” (slang, vulgar) which is also fun-related, and means something like “kidding”. The etymology of that word is pretty colourful.
In Paris last year, I spent an hour or so with a young woman. My French is passable, she had some English, we had a good time and laughed a lot. When we parted, I wanted to tell her what a fun time I’d had. I realized I had no idea how to say it in French.
I really didn’t want to get into any form of aimer, as there wasn’t any kind of personal thing going on and I, being 25 years older, didn’t want to appear creepy.
I tried, in English, “I had fun,” “This was fun,” and “You are fun.” She was bewildered.
Maybe it was my accent.
ETA: For “Just kidding,” I use taquiner.
The Hebrew word “kef” has, as far as I can tell, the exact same meaning as “fun” in English. It’s a modern (non-classical) Hebrew word, from the Arabic “kaif” - which I think also means fun, although I can’t vouch for its nuances.
What about amusant? Sure, it would only cover “fun” as an adjective, but that’s how you used it in your example sentence. And it’s the word I learned in French class for “fun.” Why wouldn’t someone say C’est plutôt amusant? Or what would be the difference in meaning, if they did?
Yes, *amusant *sometimes fits the bill, but it doesn’t quite cover all of the semantic ground that “fun” does.
Something is *amusant *when it makes you chuckle or smile, but say you’d spent an evening clubbing with your paramour and wished to convey the notion that fun was had, you wouldn’t really tell them “c’était amusant !” although you could, were you a bit old fashioned, say “je me suis bien amusé”.
*Amusant *is more about the “funny” side of “fun” rather than its “enjoyable” aspect IMO. If that makes any sense :o
And here is another one: lol. Yes. Real honest-to-Og fact: the Dutch word lol means fun. And again, in exactly the same way. Like, the result of play, you could use it to mock stick-in-the-mud types if you so wish, merriment, all that jazz.
I agree, “Tanoshii” is a good equivalent for “Fun”, but it depends on the context as it isn’t a straight 1:1 translation. The Japanese word “Omoshiroi” denotes “Fun” as well.
Sure it does. “Anata wa omoshiroi” literally means, “You’re fun”. The sentence you gave (although slightly grammatically incorrect), would mean, “He/She (a third party) seems like a fun person”.
