Different languages with different qualities?

[fantasus]

Since man is extremely dependent on language(it may be an inevitable part of being human), and since there are so many different tongues, we may ask if there may not be different qualities of languages too. Perhaps some languages have advantages over others in certain respects - and are "better tools" for some purposes? Could some insights be easier or harder depending on what language one use? Are there either some research or personal experience on this?

[mathman]

The vocabulary of a language is a factor in determining which language is better. For example it would be much harder to learn mathematics if there weren't names for numbers.

[Fraggle Rocker]

I find it easier to think in Chinese because it has been stripped of all its Stone Age paradigms. No singular/plural, present/past/future, masculine/feminine, nominative/genitive/accusative. You don't have to decide whether you mean all dogs eat all fish, two dogs ate one fish, or one dog will eat six fish tomorrow. "Dog eat fish." If context is important, then add one extra word for the specific number or time.

You're not stuck with a pathetic set of two dozen prepositions to describe all possible relationships, you express them with nouns and verbs. You don't have to decide whether to use "a," "the," or no article, because there aren't any articles.

English isn't really too bad since it has also been stripped of many of its paradigms, although not all. I find it very hard to think in German, since you have to plan your entire sentence in advance and stick the verb infinitive at the end, and you have to nest your prepositional phrases. I always get hung up in Spanish trying to choose between the conditional and the subjunctive.

Languages that have entirely different syntax surely shape the speakers' thoughts in a different way. We're used to thinking in terms of actors, actions and objects since English syntax is subject-verb-object. Japanese syntax is topic-description.

[FelixC]

The vocabulary of a language is a factor in determining which language is better. For example it would be much harder to learn mathematics if there weren't names for numbers.

M: just out of curiosity, since you brought it up but are there any languages that do not at least have names for 1 to 10?

[FelixC]

1. I find it easier to think in Chinese because it has been stripped of all its Stone Age paradigms. ... "Dog eat fish."
2. I find it very hard to think in German, since you have to plan your entire sentence in advance and stick the verb infinitive at the end, and you have to nest your prepositional phrases.
3. Languages that have entirely different syntax surely shape the speakers' thoughts in a different way.

FR: a few questions on your points?
1. do you feel that Chinese is richly expressive? poetic, romantic, double ententes?
2. I had heard that German was a very exact language, that you could express something without any ambiguity, no double ententes?
3. does that mean that some people may be incapable of grasping concepts like abstract math, democracy & art as examples?

[mathman]

M: just out of curiosity, since you brought it up but are there any languages that do not at least have names for 1 to 10?

I am not an expert on languages, but I remember reading about primitive languages (New Guinea ?) which don't have any words for numbers greater than 2, just "many".

[Fraggle Rocker]

FR: a few questions on your points? 1. do you feel that Chinese is richly expressive? poetic, romantic, double ententes?English is not to be scoffed at. Its grammar has been stripped down tremendously, although not to the extent of Chinese, but still it's less of a handicap to expression than, say, Russian or Spanish grammar. What specifically impresses me about Chinese is that relationships--between objects, people, actions, ideas, conditions, anything--can be expressed much more precisely than in any other language I know of. I think this gives Chinese speakers a great advantage when a new type of technology, philosophy, government, entertainment, biology, weather condition, social order, etc. is discovered/developed/mandated. I also like the fact that by almost completely divesting itself of nearly meaningless noises like articles and inflections, it takes fewer syllables to express a thought in Chinese than in other languages, and therefore it can and is spoken more slowly. This makes it much more suitable for a community that contains non-native speakers than, say, Italian, which comes at you a mile a minute and you can't figure out where one word ends and the next one begins.

As for poetry, romance, word games, etc., I think every language community eventually finds (or invents) the resources for those things in their own tongue.
2. I had heard that German was a very exact language, that you could express something without any ambiguity, no double entendres?That sounds like something a German would say. :) In some languages precision is easier to achieve with fewer qualifying words, but every language that has adapted to civilization over the past several thousand years is perfectly capable of rendering the expressions required by civilized life. Obviously if you pick the language of a Neolithic tribe in New Guinea, they might be at a disadvantage, but it's only because they've never needed those kinds of expressions, not because their language isn't adaptable enough to eventually handle them by all the usual methods ranging from evolving to borrowing words from other languages.
3. does that mean that some people may be incapable of grasping concepts like abstract math, democracy & art as examples?As I said, any member of a society that has made the transition from the Neolithic Era through through the invention of the technologies of civilization (literally "the building of cities"), bronze metallurgy, writing, iron metallurgy, the city-state, industry, etc., already has a language that can express the concepts that civilization requires.
I am not an expert on languages, but I remember reading about primitive languages (New Guinea ?) which don't have any words for numbers greater than 2, just "many".I don't think there are any living languages that are that primitive. However, in most of them the coinage of the words for larger numbers is obvious. Even in proto-Indo-European, the ancestor of most of the languages our members speak, the word penqwe for "five" was obviously taken from the word for "finger." Beyond "ten" we all use constructions like "two tens," showing that we hadn't lost the concept of counting on our fingers. Although the French, bless their hearts, call 91 "four twenties plus eleven."

The entertaining book The Meaning of Tingo by Adam Jacot de Boinod has a whole chapter on numbers. I don't see any people in there who can't count beyond two, but there's a Peruvian tribe with the word tobaiti that means "more than four" and one of the central African languages has a word for any number greater than ten. I'm not sure if that's the only word they've got, because after all we say "umpteen," which the Turks translate as birkacinci.

There is one tribe whose word for "eleven" is something like "oops, got to use my feet now."

The Basque word for "six" is sei, almost surely Spanish seis, making us wonder how primitive their grasp of numbers was before the Indo-European occupiers arrived. The Basques are the only surviving pre-Indo-European people in Europe so our knowledge of their prehistory and relationships to other tribes is frustratingly incomplete.

[S.A.M.]

I find that Urdu does not translate well to English, English appears to lack many words that describe shades of meanings.

e.g if I said
[I]
bik jaate hain hum aap mataa-e-sukhan kih sah
lekin ayar-e tabaa-e kharidar dekh kar [Ghalib]

it would translate in English as

I sell myself with my poetry, a commodity
but only after looking at the standards of the buyer.

that sounds just awful in English! :p

[Fraggle Rocker]

I find that Urdu does not translate well to English, English appears to lack many words that describe shades of meanings. e.g if I said [in Urdu]. . . .

it would translate in English as:
I sell myself with my poetry, a commodity
but only after looking at the standards of the buyer.

That sounds just awful in English!That's because every pair of languages has enormous differences in a number of characteristics, such as syntax, metaphors, cliches and rhetorical conventions. It's extremely difficult to translate an expression from one language into another, even if you're a master of both. Notice that the people who translate novels are not just accomplished professional translators: they are also novelists themselves! They can take a sentence and dig down to discover the thoughts beneath the words, then choose new words in the second language that express those thoughts comfortably and interestingly in the idiom of the reader, not just accurately.

Look at the way songs are rendered into foreign languages. As often as not, very little of the original sentence material is retained. Yet the song often captures the feeling of the original, which is what music is all about.

Vernacular speech is not just about feelings, but neither is it just about denotative meanings. Connotations are important, and a perfect translation would also carry over the spirit of the original.

It's especially difficult to translate your own words into another language, because you're too close to the words you so brilliantly crafted, so you have difficulty getting back in touch with the ideas that were in your head before they were rendered into words.

The English words "sell," "commodity" and "standards" have a great many shades of meaning, and these days they've been co-opted into the domain of business. Business has a different place in the lives of your people, it's often a family endeavor; I doubt that it stands in contrast to "real life" the way it does for us.

"Look at" is a fairly informal term that can describe a great variety of actions, both physical and mental. To see it in a sentence that, to us, is all about business, is jarring. Why not "examine," "review," "familiarize with," or even "check out," all of which are commonplace in business meetings?

Why "commodity"? A commodity is a product that has been manufactured for so long that everyone makes it the same way. Bread, tin cans and underwear are commodities. Tires and hamburgers are very nearly so, and the advertising industry depends on us even treating products like automobiles and cola as commodities, otherwise they'd have to appeal to something besides our brand loyalty in their multimillion-dollar efforts to get us to switch. The only differences between two samples of the same commodity from different suppliers are going to be quality standard and price, not character, ergonomics or fitness for purpose.

Calling poetry a commodity is what you'd do in a thesis on the greeting card industry, or perhaps even Saturday morning cartoons, where the rhymes are heard once and thrown away, replaced next time by other rhymes that fulfill the same need.

And to "sell yourself with poetry"? What exactly do you mean by that? Do you mean that you advertise yourself as a poet rather than any of your other identifiers such as a Muslim or a biologist, hoping that people will want to "buy" you--presumably give you a job as a full-time professional poet? Or perhaps a man will "buy" you and take you home to his mom, saying, "Look Ma, I done brung home a lady who rites pomes, just like you wanted, so I kin marry her an our fambly can git smarter!" To sell yourself means, even metaphorically, that there will be an exchange of some sort. The other person collects you--or at least the part of you that is poetic, if not your inspiring academic speech then perhaps your breathtaking fashion sense or your endearing way of making children smile or just your flair for tossing around beakers and test tubes without ever dropping one--and in exchange you collect... well what? What are you selling yourself for? What's your price?

A job? A husband? A group of ladyfriends who know how to travel cheaply and would love to have you join them for a week in the parts of Hawaii the rest of us don't even know exist? A rich man who will dote on you and boost your career and take you to all the best conferences? A new Prius? An evening over a reasonably-priced dinner discussing poetry and other literature, arts, and academia? Membership in an informal group of people who share some of your interests and are also creative in whatever line of work your "poetry" metaphor refers to? Or maybe just the companionship and camaraderie of someone who won't take up your time with discussions of a sport that's foreign to you and sitcoms whose gags aren't funny to you?

Your poem doesn't sound awful in English. It just doesn't convey a lot of meaning, at least denotatively, because most of the important words don't connect in relationships whose relevance to your point is easy to find. And that's probably because you haven't quite mastered all the chiches, rhetorical tricks, etc., of vernacular English.

I'm sure you will, so just be patient. You're young, you're immersed in a community that speaks almost exclusively English (I'm assuming that after learning that 90% of the time Indians even talk to each other in English because they don't all speak the same language), you are well-studied in the concepts of linguistics so you can approach this endeavor technically and academically in addition to practically, and you're motivated.

Not to mention your English is pretty good already. As an editor and occasional English teacher, I can assure you that you write better in English than at least 3/4 of the monolingual Americans I've worked with. The problem is that the kind of writing we see here on SciForums isn't the only kind of writing that has to be done.

You've just learned a valuable lesson. When you venture out into a new topic, you may find that you haven't got as much practice, so the vocabulary and cadence don't just pop into your head like they do when you're writing about religion and chemistry. The best thing I can do is point that out to you, on the chance that you don't already know it. Spend more time reading this kind of writing--more personal, more the off-duty Sam with her lab coat folded up in the corner.

Try again. Dig beneath the words. Tackle it scientifically. You can do this!

[S.A.M.]

You've hit on all the points that I have problems with in translating Urdu to English. The problem with Urdu is that it is the language of literature and poetry and ghazal. Urdu is evocative and emotional. The [I]words emote. The way the words flow together [mataa-e-sukan, or the "poetic commodity"] just cannot be got at in English without losing all essence. It has to be commodity, because he is selling himself as one, except that he will only allow himself to be sold to a buyer of some taste. This poem for example, is a response to the complexity of Ghalib's poetry, which many protested was hard to understand and had dual and sometimes multiple layers of meaning. His response is that its not just a poem, its his soul that he is bargaining here [but as a commodity, a trade, there has to be an input from the buyer, he will not give it away].

Now this is all "understood" in reading the poem, but requires a composition to "explain" in English.

[iceaura]

I doubt English poetry translates into Urdu any more easily.

What's the quote: "Poetry is what is lost in translation". Something like that.

[draqon]

well there is no point in me defending Russian language.

[S.A.M.]

I doubt English poetry translates into Urdu any more easily.

What's the quote: "Poetry is what is lost in translation". Something like that.

Hmm, I shall have to dig up Shakespeare in Urdu to see how that goes. :p

[iceaura]

Hmm, I shall have to dig up Shakespeare in Urdu to see how that goes. Not fair. Good translators exist. Do it yourself.

[Bricoleur]

I don't know how relevant this is, as I only speak one language. When I worked for a company selling and servicing German machinery, there was talk that there is a technical version of that language, and it was little understood by many Germans. It seemed to be more than the inclusion of newer technical terms, but from what I gather it was like an academic version? Perhaps more formal, I know there were letters that had no English equivalents.
I did learn German phrases from hydraulic and electrical circuit diagrams, because that's all we had to work with!

Regards,
Bric

[Ophiolite]

I am not an expert on languages, but I remember reading about primitive languages (New Guinea ?) which don't have any words for numbers greater than 2, just "many".
Given the current global financial crisis it appears this is also true of the language of bankers.

[Fraggle Rocker]

You've hit on all the points that I have problems with in translating Urdu to English. The problem with Urdu. . . . is that it is the language of literature and poetry and ghazal. Urdu is evocative and emotional. The words emote.Exactly the same things have been said about English. Also Italian, German, Russian, Japanese and probably every other language, at least every other written language.

BTW, ghazal originated in Arabic and it's been successfully adapted to a number of unrelated languages such as Urdu, which kind of weakens your point.
The way the words flow together [mataa-e-sukan, or the "poetic commodity"] just cannot be got at in English without losing all essence. It has to be commodity, because he is selling himself as one, except that he will only allow himself to be sold to a buyer of some taste.It's always difficult to translate poetry. Not because the target language is lacking in poetic expressive ability, but because the target culture does not have the same referents. As I already pointed out, your problem with this passage is that there is a major disconnect between your culture and ours. In anglophone culture, business is considered "dirty" and using its terminology as metaphors for personal life sends a completely different message. A person who regards himself as a "commodity" is lost in the system, an interchangeable drone, struggling to hang onto his identity. Read Death of a Salesman, The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit, or any of our language's huge library of fiction about the business world. It's quite possible to be poetic about business in English, but it's not the same type of poesy you'd get from your culture.
This poem for example, is a response to the complexity of Ghalib's poetry, which many protested was hard to understand and had dual and sometimes multiple layers of meaning. His response is that its not just a poem, its his soul that he is bargaining here [but as a commodity, a trade, there has to be an input from the buyer, he will not give it away]. Now this is all "understood" in reading the poem, but requires a composition to "explain" in English.No disrespect intended, but you're not a poet. It takes a poet to translate poetry, just as it takes a novelist to translate a novel or a technical writer to translate an instruction manual. You have to be an expert, not just in the subject matter, but in that style of the language. Especially if you're working from a poem that even native speakers say is hard to understand! How would you like the assignment of translating William Faulkner into another language? :(

You also have to understand the target culture, and I don't think you've spent enough time here to understand our love-hate relationship with business.