Fierce Invalids Home from Hot Climates by Tom Robbins has a character who knows the word for vagina in many languages. He says that Vietnamese has two words for it, depending on whether a man is going in, or a baby is coming out. As a feminist, I find it offensive that the assumption is the vagina exists only for other people’s use, never mind the woman who owns it. But as a beatnik, I find the irreverent humor amusing, and in the course of the novel the guy learns to be less male chauvinist.
I looked it up in a Vietnamese dictionary. I found two terms: am vat and am ho. Maybe Robbins gave accurate information, I can’t tell. Anyone know Vietnamese?
Actually, it’s “l’esprit d’escalier” (wit of staircase).
My prefered is still the portuguese “saudade” (besides, I also find that the sound of the word conjures its overal meaning), that I will let to be translated by somebody clearly understanding what it refers to. It’s a specific feeling of melancholy.
It’s not just words that have no translation, either. In a country like the US, where rugged individualism is the norm, addressing your female sibling as “Sister” sounds oddly formal instead of affectionate. (Although I guess “Sis” might be an acceptable substitute.)
And don’t even get me started about idioms. One of my pipe dreams is to build a complete Chinese - English / English - Chinese idiom dictionary, but I still can’t figure out how to explain the large majority of them into English.
(As an easy example, there’s an idiom that translates literally as “the frog at the bottom of the well”, meaning a person whose lack of experience makes him narrow-minded. What would be an equivalent English idiom for that?)
“Wearing blinders,” perhaps? It gets the narrow-mindedness across much more than the inexperience part, though.
Hm, that is tricky. There are plenty of idioms in English for being inexperienced and plenty for being narrow-minded, but I can’t think of one that indicates both.
So the Dutch get credit for using a term two syllables longer than the English equivalent? “Skipping stones” is a perfectly good term for that, if you can get over the fact that it happens to have a space in the middle.
Y’know, it’s actually worse than that because “skipping” alone conveys the action. If you’re not skipping stones, you might be skipping bottle caps or sea shells. A speedboat can skip across rough waves, When Jesus was young he didn’t walk across water but skipped -er, oops. So we DO have one word for the action. It just has several other meanings as well. English does that a lot.
Very often these words and phrases (e.g. “lightbulb moment”) reflect on the richness and spread of memes in the underlying culture. They begin as well-recognized metaphors and a choice few endure long enough and spread widely enough to be classed as “words”. It can be tough call for an experienced lexicographer, but a visiting tourist may make that call ten seconds after learning a term.
Would that be a variant on the frog at the bottom of the well? Or is it more like the man with only a hammer (to whom everything looks like a nail).
A play on words in another language: I went to an event on Indian civilization at the Sackler Gallery of the Smithsonian, the one with the Asian collection and all the Asian art happenings. The show’s title was Purva Uttara, a Sanskrit phrase, which was translated in English as “Past Forward.” The theme was connecting ancient Indian civilization with the future. It’s a pun in English, but they found a Sanskrit phrase that exactly matches it.
Actually, with proper Sanskrit sandhi the phrase should read Purvottara, but sometimes people’ll keep the words separate and unsandhied to make them easier to recognize.
But it doesn’t take an entire sentence. If you had a box under your arm and someone asked you what it was, a German could respond, “drachenfutter.” An English-speaker could respond, “peace offering” (same # of syllables) or “make-up gift” (one less syllable) or “preemptive present” or any number of other short phrases that would get the point across well.
Technically, “prophylactic gift” would explain it perfectly (a gift intended to prevent problems – look up “prophylactic” as an adjective in the dictionary), but it could be easily misinterpreted
