8 ms·

The article seems to think that a word is untranslateable if there is no single word in the target language. If I'm not misreading the article, then this is com

• drivebyhooting 10mo ago
  That isn’t a proof. Synonyms can bolster the enumeration sans augmenting novelty.
  • manwe150 10mo ago
    That is the crux of the article premise: each synonym conveys similar denotations (principle component is I think what the article called it), but usually with some difference in connotations (the off axis contributions). You can nudge the languages vectors towards each other by adding enough synonyms and modifiers together, but they are always a little bit off even still
    • nomel 10mo ago
      So, really, this can be simplified to the question "can written text fully convey all human concepts", some of which having labels in only some languages, which is an obvious "no".
  • James_K 10mo ago
    I think the reasonable reader will conclude it's unlikely for any two languages to share exactly the same vocabulary, accounting for synonyms.
  • mannykannot 10mo ago
    True, but many languages now have words that were absent from their earlier vocabularies. Shakespeare did not have the option to use 'telephone', 'semiconductor' or 'entropy'.
  • sjducb 10mo ago
    Synonyms rarely have identical meanings for example: Happy: Joyful, cheerful, merry, delighted Or Beautiful: Lovely, pretty, attractive The only truly identical synonym I can think of is flammable and inflammable
    • drivebyhooting 10mo ago
      Perhaps perhaps. But what joyful means to you likely differs from what it means to me, simply because we haven’t read the exact same literature and had the same conversations.
      • dvfjsdhgfv 10mo ago
        True true.
    • Izkata 10mo ago
      I thought there was a difference between those two in how they start burning, like one needs an external flame to start while the other can burst into flame without an obvious ignition source.
  • nyeah 10mo ago
    It kind of is a proof if we assume that single words can be translated at all. Translate a single word from Language X (more words) to language Y (fewer words) and back. I can't uniquely recover all the words in Language X that way.
    • drivebyhooting 10mo ago
      Does translation have to be a bijection? I don’t think so.
      • nyeah 10mo ago
        I don't know about that. For many practical purposes probably not? I'm just on the thread following this idea: "The article seems to think that a word is untranslateable if there is no single word in the target language" So we're talking about "translatability" of single words. Mapping multiple words of language X to one word of language Y is going to have some effect on translation.
      • plumeria 10mo ago
        Nope, because of synonyms as well.
• cortesoft 10mo ago
  Yeah, I was interpreting 'untranslatable' to mean what it says, but they meant 'untranslatable with only a couple words', which is a very different claim.
• seanhunter 10mo ago
  Not sure this approach really accounts for the difference between a language like German where you have one compound word for a concept that would require multiple words in English. For one good example, the German "Nomenkompositum" is "compound noun" in English.
  • suddenlybananas 10mo ago
    That's just a difference in orthography. English could easily have had an orthographic standard where we write "compoundnoun" for compounds. This is in contrast with a language like French, where compound nouns are relatively rare. Compare English "Olive oil" and German "Olivenöl" with French "huile d'olive". In French you need to have a preposition to combine the two nouns, whereas English and German do noun-noun composition.
    • adrian_b 10mo ago
      You are right but neither yours nor those of the previous posters are good examples of compound nouns. These examples have just the meanings of a noun + adjective or of a noun + noun in genitive case, where some languages are lazier than others and omit the markers of case or of adjectival derivation from noun, which are needed in more strict languages. There are also other kinds of compound nouns, where the compound noun does not have the meaning of its component words, but only some related meaning (usually either a pars pro toto meaning or a metaphorical meaning). Those are true compound nouns, not just abbreviated sequences of words from which the grammatical markers have been omitted. Such compound words were very frequent in Ancient Greek, from where they have been inherited in the scientific and technical language, where they have been used to create names for new things and concepts, e.g. arthropod, television, phonograph, basketball, "bullet train" and so on. This kind of compound words are almost never translatable, but they are frequently borrowed from one language to another and during the borrowing process sometimes the component words are translated, but the result is not a translated word, it is a new word that is added to the destination language.
      • seanhunter 10mo ago
• bpt3 10mo ago
  You're correct. In another blog post where he uses "shibui" as an example of an untranslatable word, he says, "Saying shibui like that, in a mere second, conveys what would otherwise make a clunky and unnecessarily long digression." At the root of nearly all the blog posts like this one (basically explaining why they don't agree with a widely held belief) is a redefinition of a term or word into something very specific that contradicts the common definition.
• godelski 10mo ago
  There's a real irony that the examples are coming from Japanese since it is an agglutinative language. I think people don't realize how weird language is. Like you could look at Chinese and call each sentence a "word" as there are no spaces. What's the difference between that and a compound word like "nighttime" or the whole German language where you got words like Krankenwagen ("patient" + "car"). Now this doesn't mean there aren't words or phrases that aren't translatable. But the thing is we can always translate the words themselves. What we can't always translate is the meaning behind them. I think the best example of this comes from Star Trek and the Tamarian Language[0,1]. "Sokath, his eyes open!" The problem with communication is not that the words don't translate, it is that the meaning behind them doesn't. Just as people struggle with idioms when learning American English or why someone might be confused about why someone "shit in the milk" or "fucked the dog". Words are an embedding. A compression. The thing people are constantly forgetting, but is more important than ever in a globally connected world, is that words are not perfect representations of thoughts. We compress our thoughts into them and hope the person on the other side can decompress them. It is why you can more easily communicate with your close friends who have better context than you can with another person that natively speaks your language and is why someone that learns a new language can speak perfectly well but still struggle to communicate. Language is not just words, it is culture[2]. So in a much more connected world today we have these disconnects in culture and thus interpretation of what people say. I know every one of you has been told to "speak to your audience" but how do you speak to your audience when your audience is everybody and when you don't know who your audience is? The new paradigm requires us to be much better interpreters than we were before. Least everyone is going to sound crazy, other than those you frequently talk to and have that shared understanding. [0] https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Tamarian_language https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Tamarian_language [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3-wzr74d7TI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3-wzr74d7TI [2] This is, btw, why people argue for embodied AI being so critical. Not because LLMs can't appear to grasp the language, but because we as humans have embodied our language so deeply you probably didn't even realize that I used the word "grasp" to refer to an abstract concept and not something you can actually touch with your hand.
• ErroneousBosh 10mo ago
  > It is now clear that there exist English words that don't correspond to a single word in the other language. But that's true of any language. Not only that, but English uses loanwords heavily which are often Anglicisations of words from other languages, which may not in themselves be just one word. "Ho ho ho", the flag-waving Little Englander types say, "Gaelic is such a stupid language, they don't even have a word for 'television', they just say 'television' in a stupid accent!" But English also has no word for "television". Worse, the word "television" isn't even just a loanword, it's two words from two different languages, "tele" from Greek and "vision" from Latin. What a bodge job! Imagine letting something like that slip through to production use! The hypothetical Catalan-Hungarian inventor of it in another leg of the trousers of time may have called it llunylátás, and then where would we be? Well, most languages would have some variant of that word to mean "television", as they do now, I expect. The English word "galore" (meaning "sufficient" shading towards "more than enough") comes from the Gaelic words "gu leòr", (goo lyaawr, the grave accent above the o makes the vowel sound longer). What a silly language English is, doesn't have a word that means "more than you're ever likely to need", has to steal one from Gaelic and then spell it wrong. Oh, they use this word "whisky". You know what that means? It means "uisge beatha" but they only say the first word, in a silly accent because they can't pronounce it properly. Quite often there's no single word for a thing you're trying to translate but that doesn't mean it's untranslateable. English has only one single word for rain, for example, but Gaelic has about half a dozen of which the only ones I can reproduce here are "uisge" (that word again) which just means "water", and "fras" which is more like a gentle shower. The rest of the words in the Gaelic of the North-West of Scotland that refer to rainy weather are, of course, profane in the extreme.
  • realusername 10mo ago
    Not to mention that the English dictionary is stuffed with legacy words that no natives understand. Is it even part of the language if no native use it? It's another debate.
    • nyeah 10mo ago
      It's stuffed with unusual and rare words, and no native speaker understands all of those. But I think most of those words are in use somewhere, for something.
• bloak 10mo ago
  But perhaps all languages have a countably infinite number of words, in which case that proof doesn't work. (In English we have: legless, leglessness, leglessnessless, leglessnesslessness, ... It's not a great example, but it's good enough.) Even if the number of words in a language were finite we wouldn't have a reasonable way of counting them. There are too many kinds of fuzziness involved in deciding what counts as a "word" and you can't ignore the borderline cases because the borderline cases vastly outnumber the straightforward cases.
• mcswell 10mo ago
  "...there are more English words than the other language" There might be more words in some English dictionaries than in some dictionaries of other languages, but that may just be due to a lot more effort having gone into English lexicography than X language lexicography. I doubt that most native speakers of English know more English words than equally educated native speakers of some other language know words of their language.
• naijaboiler 10mo ago
  I think he’s rather arguing that no language is perfectly translatable to another. He only uses “untranslatable word” an instance of that claim
• crazygringo 10mo ago
  > and you will find that there are more English words than the other language. It is now clear that there exist English words that don't correspond to a single word in the other language. You're forgetting about synonyms. The common adage that English has the largest vocabulary stems from the fact that it often has multiple words for the same thing. Sofa, couch. Autumn, fall. Etc etc. Other languages generally don't do this. I've never heard anyone suggest that English has words for more concepts.
  • dodobirdlord 10mo ago
    There are relatively few cases of true synonyms in English (or any language). There are subtle differences in meaning, register, etc that are recognized by native speakers.
    • crazygringo 10mo ago
      I don't what you mean by a "true" synonym, but that is false. There are historical reasons there is a lot of word-doubling. The fact that synonyms might carry additional subtle connotations -- i.e. maybe you find "autumn" more poetic than "fall" -- doesn't change the fact that they are synonyms.
      • hansvm 10mo ago
        One of the main points of language is to evoke ideas in others' minds. "Autumn" and "fall" will normally evoke different ideas in US english (the former bringing about views of the cozier parts of the season, and the latter being more sterile, used to refer to a particular region of time). Maybe we disagree about what a "true synonym" is, but that distinction seems important to me.
        • crazygringo 10mo ago
          Then by your logic no words can be true synonyms, because sounds themselves inherently evoke meaning [1]. And then the concept itself becomes pointless. So I'd prefer to stick to concepts that actually do mean something, where "synonym" is two words that have the same primary functional meaning. Splitting hairs over whether autumn is "cozier" than fall does not change the fact that they are synonyms by any reasonable definition, or change the point that English has a hugely larger number of synonyms than any other language, for certain historical reasons. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bouba/kiki_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bouba/kiki_effect