There’s a set of pronouns in Swedish (and I think German, Dutch, Danish and Norwegian as well) that doesn’t exist in English. Let’s start with the following persons:
Peter / George (Peter’s dad) / Steve / Andy(Steve’s dad).
When talking about these people, in an everyday sentence, it would come out like this in English:
Steve told Peter to call Andy.
Replace a name with a pronoun:
Steve told Peter to call his dad.
Now, is Peter going to call George or Andy?
In Swedish, there’s a distinction in pronouns:
Steve sa till (told) Peter att ringa (to call) sin pappa (his father). “sin” in this case refers to George. But:
Steve sa till (told) Peter att ringa (to call) hans pappa (his father). “hans” refers to Andy.
I find it interesting that so many neologisms come from American English, as well as colloquial phrases and I’m wondering if this has anything to do with the wide range of nationalities that make up Americans. A wide use of metaphors might make the language more accessible to one just off the boat.
If so, this would be quite odd. The Native Americans, like all human peoples, have always had dogs, but did not have horses until the Europeans brought them over. I’ve heard, in fact, that many native tribes referred to horses as “big dogs” or something equivalent, dogs being previously the only domesticated animals they had. If a tribe instead described dogs in terms of horses, what would that tribe, or that tribe’s linguistic ancestors, have called dogs before the advent of horses?
It’s plausible that, with the arrival of horses, dogs became “shit-eating dogs” and horses became “big dogs” or some such; each might have had a modifier attached to them to make a clearer distinction.
No offense, but it’s just a completely implausible anecdote; it’s not very nice to go around sharing ‘knowledge’ that you don’t have. And I for one am slightly offended by the popularity of the concept of Indians as something of a simple, happy, spiritual people - it comes across to me at least as pretty condescending.
But I’ll bet that after “borrowings” English has “more words for it” than nearly any other language. Look at the French with their sisyphean battle to keep English out of their language. (and there’s a great word for you which i doubt many other languages have- ture, we borrowed it from a Greek myth, but still…)
One other thing to remember- that as soon as you should stop putting the word in italics (we all do know that a foreign word is put into italics, right?)- it becomes an English word with our pronuciation. For exampkle “guillotine”, which now being an English word really is pronounced “gil-oteen” not (as the snobs would correct) “gee-a-teen”.
Yeah, that quote’s cute except for the bit about it being completely untrue. That’s my point - English, being in obviously a pretty culturally dominant position in the world, has borrowed a lot of words, since our culture has been in direct contact with virtually every other culture.
And yet despite all that, English is far less than many, perhaps most languages the product of borrowing. English, grammatically speaking, is pure, straight-up Germanic; in contrast to the sprachsbunds you’ll find in Eastern Europe, Southeast Asia, and other areas with lots of languages in close contact, English has remained true to its roots.
That quote is like nails on a blackboard to me because it perpetuates this notion that English is somehow uniquely mixed in origins, when it assuredly is not. Unlike the grammatically and vocabularically promiscuous languages of the Balkans, or Southeast Asia, English has a remarkably pure grammar, and its borrowing of vocabulary is by no means unusual.
I think there’s two major reasons why a given concept might not have a word in English:
The speaker simply doesn’t know the English word. Remember that most ‘there’s no word in English’ examples are typically given by a native speaker of another language. Perhaps it’s true in many cases that there’s no simple Anglo-Saxon word for it (though many ideas that can’t be expressed with a non-borrowed, Germanic-derived must have had words in Old English that didn’t survive). Or perhaps the word being sought is an obscure one like ataraxia for someone who can’t express in English a word in another language for a deep sense of peace.
English expresses the concept with a phrase. One of the lexical strengths of English is the way it tends to easily form various phrases that serve the purpose of a single word. Maybe English doesn’t have a polite transitive verb referring to sex (aside from archaic ones like ‘to bed’ and ‘to know [carnally]’), but it has all sorts of polite phrases that have the same purpose. There’s ‘to have sex with’ (essentially just a phrasal verb and noun), ‘to make love with’, ‘to perform an act of <insert act> upon’; all of these have different shades of meaning. English doesn’t have separate words for different types of love like eros, philodelphos and agape in Greek, but it does have ‘fraternal love’, ‘romantic love’, ‘puppy love’, ‘unrequited love’, and so on. Schadenfreude might be rendered as a phrase as well.
Many other languages render concepts as phrases. If it happens that English renders a concept with a phrase and another has a single word, the word might be a good vocabulary-builder, but it doesn’t expose a flaw in English. Similarly, if another language expresses an idea with a single word that another language uses a phrase for, that doesn’t mean the other language is unable to express that idea. It certainly doesn’t expose some vast Sapir-Whorf failing of the culture that speaks that langage. If a language spoken in a totalitarian state doesn’t have a word for ‘freedom’, it doesn’t mean that the people that speak the language don’t know what freedom is. Or, if French didn’t have a word for victory as I think has been claimed, it doesn’t mean that the French wouldn’t be familiar with the concept of winning battles or that Napoleon wouldn’t have created his empire. (It would’ve meant that English would have used a different root, since ‘victory’ comes to English through French.)
One complication – and it’s one that arises in words like schadenfreude – is that some languages, such as German, tend to form compound words instead of phrases. Thus, they get to cheat at having words for things that phrase-preferring languages don’t. It’s more common in German to form a new word out of two existing words rather than to make up a phrase. English could use ‘harm-joy’, but it’d more likely use ‘taking joy in someone’s suffering’.
Perhaps the most extreme example of this is the idea that Inuktitut has something like 200 words for snow. (This is apparently Whorf-of-the-Sapir-Whorf-Hypothesis’ own idea – they must have a lot of words for snow because it’s so important in their culture.) But Inuktitut is an agglunative language, which forms words (and sentences, sometimes) by combining several smaller words into single ones. So all of its terms for snow are inherently ‘single words’. Imagine if English speakers said ‘wetsnow’, ‘mushysnow’, ‘flakysnow’, ‘powderysnow’, ‘meltingsnow’, ‘hardtoshoveloffthedrivewaysnow’, or ‘goodforskiingsnow’ instead of expressing these ideas as phrases.
As Spanish is my native language I sometimes find English lacking. For example, I think that English has too few pronouns, which sometimes makes it hard to convey what could be easily done in Spanish. However, Spanish also lacks in some areas, specially those having to do with technology and entertainment. YMMV though.
Maybe I’m kind of biased, but “brother” and “sister” in English to me doesn’t have the same impact as being called their Chinese equivalents. It’s probably more of a cultural thing, though, since in America siblings call each other by name (or nickname) instead of by title.
And of course there’s the contention that Japanese don’t have real swear words, they just withhold politeness (which apparently is still just as insulting). So a word like “shimatta” translates literally as “oops”, but in certain contexts could mean, “I’ve just totally screwed myself over”.
The Navajo word for “dog” is “lha-cha-eh”, meaning “dog”. The Navajo word for “horse” is “lin”, meaning “horse”.
Like most people, Navajo (and other Native Americans) are in fact capable of distinguishing between different animals and coming up with unique words for them.
