Why can't anything be 100% clearly translated?

Some words have few associations other than their simple meaning.

"The boy was sitting on the chair"
would be easy to translate into most languages.


"The lad was resting on the stool"
would be a little harder.

Lad implies an apprentice, eg stable lad, and a male approaching manhood.
Resting implies that the lad had been working, but now isn't.
A stool is a very simple chair, with little ornamentation.


There is much more information in the second sentence.


Harder still would be something like this:


She was dressed in the mourning clothes of a
widow. Her companion, also in black, appeared as a well-
formed young woman about eighteen, completely possessed of
that ephemeral precious essence youth, which is itself
beauty, irrespective of complexion or contour.

From "The Mayor of Casterbridge" by Thomas Hardy

Try translating that into Czechoslovakian.

Or Czech even.
I made another mistake on this, which resulted in the odd third quote.
I misremembered that it was Hardy who used a striking use of the word lad in a poem, but I couldn't find a single use of the word lad in all his works.
It was actually Wilfred Owen, where the word lad is the hinge of the metaphor.

Parable of the Old Man and the Young

So Abram rose, and clave the wood, and went,
And took the fire with him, and a knife.
And as they sojourned both of them together,
Isaac the first-born spake and said, My Father,
Behold the preparations, fire and iron,
But where the lamb for this burnt-offering?
Then Abram bound the youth with belts and straps,
and builded parapets and trenches there,
And stretchèd forth the knife to slay his son.
When lo! an angel called him out of heaven,
Saying, Lay not thy hand upon the lad,
Neither do anything to him. Behold,
A ram, caught in a thicket by its horns;
Offer the Ram of Pride instead of him.
But the old man would not so, but slew his son,
And half the seed of Europe, one by one.
 
Last edited:
Castillian Spanish has this magical way of squeezing Broca's area til all the beautiful language dancing around in there gets a hernia, sounding as stilted and empty as the typical Spaniard.

Perhaps its the whole European thing?

Castillian is a bit much for me. Ceceo annoys me. I learned my Spanish in Tenerife, so my usage is more Caribbean/Venezuelan/Colombian.

~String
 
That's right-- forgot that you traveled.

Sodomite.

Anyway, love the way that little neckbreather iceaura hasn't shown back up to substantiate his claims of Pinker knowing less about language than, of all people, those middle classed nobodies we call Grade School Teachers.

*pokes iceaura*

BOO!!!!
 
gedanken said:
And you-- are actually-- claiming the average grade school teacher knows more about language than Pinker,
- - - - -
Anyway, love the way that little neckbreather iceaura hasn't shown back up to substantiate his claims of Pinker knowing less about language than, of all people, those middle classed nobodies we call Grade School Teachers.
Where did you find that in my post? Or does such ornate invention just come so naturally to you that you read it everywhere, holistically, with the saccade of your eyeballs?
gedanken said:
tell me how she knows more about the Hopi conception of time - {invented stuff about "language" edited out} - - than Pinker does.
She would have first hand dealings with the children involved. That trumps ivory tower, pending further info. If Pinker wanted to learn about the Hopi conception of time, he would do well to consult - in his investigation - the teachers of Hopi children, or spend considerable time in Hopi classrooms among those children of all ages.

fraggle said:
These idiomatic phrases do not all mean the same thing, but in most of them the contribution of the preposition to that meaning is minimal.
All of the difference in meaning in those examples comes from the preposition - it's the only difference in a two word phrase, each time.

Nor are they strictly or universally "idiomatic" - the separate meanings of the words contribute a great deal, and major progress toward a reasonable translation is often possible by stringing the word by word literal translations together.
fraggle said:
I'm the writer and editor on a project staffed almost entirely by Indians. I spend an inordinate amount of my time giggling over their choice of prepositions, and then giggling some more because about 95% of the time they would cause no misunderstanding.
Tech writing, obviously.

And even in such restricted and deliberately simplified circumstances, you get by only because they are embedded in redundant sources of inference, and competent speakers can make allowances - much as they can for problems with number and gender and first/second/third person confusions. Isolated errors of almost any kind can be handled without confusion in slack, simplified, "business" communication - a kind of prose designed to exclude complexity of reference.
fraggle said:
My point is that the majority of prepositional phrases aren't like that.
In your world, maybe - I doubt it, but it's possible.

Change a preposition in a Shakespearean sonnet or a Jane Austen novel, screw around with them in one of O Henry's or Mark Twain's or David Foster Wallace's stories, or even change "for" to "from" in a short command memo, and see what happens.
 
She would have first hand dealings with the children involved.
These children are being taught English, genius.

That's why there's a menagerie of poorly funded organization with the express purpose of preserving dying cultures.


That trumps ivory tower, pending further info. If Pinker wanted to learn about the Hopi conception of time, he would do well to consult - in his investigation - the teachers of Hopi children, or spend considerable time in Hopi classrooms among those children of all ages.
You do realize that not only does Pinker-- personally-- consult with anthropologists and philologists and ethnolinguists like Malotki-- who's not only exhausted the entire spectrum of the Hopi language, but has created foundations to preserve the entire culture as well, he also collaborates with philosophers and linguists like Chomsky, who also teaches at MIT, and Hoffstader, another language wizard, but has ALSO sat, and eaten, and spoken with NOT Hopi children but adults as well?

Where is this "ivory tower" but in the pristine walls of your chamber echoing the sound of you posting intellectually arrogant excrement?

Where did you find that in my post? Or does such ornate invention just come so naturally to you that you read it everywhere, holistically, with the saccade of your eyeballs?
Want me to quote you to you?

Do you or do you not state the average grade school teacher knows more about the Hopis than Pinker?
 
A short paragraph from the NY TImes; the first I came to.

A car bomb near a Shiite mosque in a village north of Baghdad exploded among crowds of people on Wednesday, killing at least 13 and wounding 24 others, the police said.

The prepositions in blue provide information. The one in red, arguably, is a placeholder.
How amusing. Some prepositions are so utterly useless that we don't even notice them. Here's your paragraph, with the highlighting corrected:

A car bomb near a Shiite mosque in a village north of Baghdad exploded among crowds of people on Wednesday, killing at least 13 and wounding 24 others, the police said.

The three instances of of are just placeholders, and the at is a meaningless component of an idiomatic expression.

Now bear in mind that this paragraph is A) writing, not speech, and B) written by a professional writer, not a citizen of average communication ability. The sentences you hear at the bus stop are not so well crafted.
I see the Constitution as the greatest man made [non-scriptural] document in existence. But those sublime laws do not come from any place else but the Hebrew bible - as declared by the Presidents of America's early history. The notion of Freedom, inalienable human rights and equal justice for all, comes from nowhere else but the Hebrew bible, and is antitheised in most other scriptures. The Hebrew bible declares that all humans are born equal and stem from one family, and each must be judged on their individual deeds, namely: EQUAL RIGHTS FOR THE STRANGER AS THE INHABITANT. The US Constution is Hebrew derived. No kidding.
I just happened to come across this letter in yesterday's newspaper, which speaks directly to this point:
Ed Doerr said:
In his letter, Newt Gingrich [a Republican who was Speaker of the House of Representatives during Bill Clinton's presidency] erred on where our basic rights come from. . . . When Thomas Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence . . . .[he] invoked the deity to challenge the prevailing European idea of the divine right of kings.

If our rights come from the Deity, then why was this discovered only in 1775, why were these rights confined to [less than half of] white men, and why has the Deity been so stingy about spreading rights throughout the world?

We have rights because we conceived them, asserted them, fought for them and created the machinery for protecting them. Our basic document of government, the Constitution, begins with "We the People," not "We the Worshipers."
Almost everything about religion annoys me, but some of it makes me downright angry, and this is an example. You give an imaginary supernatural creature the credit for something that we human beings did for ourselves! Something people fought and died for! Something they have been working on for more than 200 years, still trying to get it right!

That is an insult to all humans and as a representative of this species I demand an apology. You should be ashamed of yourself for posting this religious crap in a place of science and scholarship. You are neither a scientist nor a scholar and you don't belong here.
 
As I said, it's easy to craft an example that makes your point. My point is that the majority of prepositional phrases aren't like that. The preposition is a noise word, like articles. Our prepositions were developed by Bronze Age or even Stone Age tribes; they are designed primarily to describe physical relationships, and they do a decent job of that. But in the modern world most of our communication is about abstractions, and prepositions that are mostly about location, movement, possession and purpose aren't the right tools for the job.

I have wondered how to respond to you posts. Your way of talking is so political and so emotional, that I think the most fitting way to describe it is "linguistic agitation and propaganda".
I quit.
 
How amusing. .
I really don't need to tolerate your patronising tone directed at anyone on this forum who has the temerity to disagree with you. I understand that since you are a moderator I am unable to put you on ignore, but there are other ways of achieving the same objective.

Your points were accurate: I missed some of the prepositions. If you had restricted your post to that observation we could have continued the discussion. You might even have convinced me of your thesis.

Instead, your snide little remark demonstrates that you are here not to educate, inform and discuss, but to brandish your intellect and your alleged academic qualifications. You had me fooled for a time. Thank you for showing your true colours. I'll leave you to play your little boy games.
 
Here you go: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoenician_alphabet. You really need to improve your scholarship skills. Anyone could have found that in less than five minutes. It's actually an abjad, not a true alphabet, because it has no vowels. As I explained, they're not necessary in the Semitic languages (or any of the Afroasiatic family) because there's no such thing as two words that are the same except for the vowels.

The Aramaic abjad and the Greek alphabet were both derived from the Phoenician abjad. The Hebrew and Arabic abjads were derived from the Aramaic.

I know of these links. The Phoenecian were older than the Hebrew, and lasted for a 1000 years after the Hebrew emerged - where are their alphabetical books? All that your link shows is a small stone ethching of a few words, which contain no dates or verifiable historical references, and we are told this is a pre-Hebrew alphabetical writing. Further, if you examine the charts, the Phoenecian and Canaanite possess no 'V' - while the Hebrew does. The margin of datings here are so small, centuries only, which cannot be reliable which came first. I would gladly accept those references if they were backed by at least a similar display of writings as the Hebrew - but this is not the case. Europe has a doctrinal and historical track record for negating all that is Hebrew - so one should thread with caution here.



It appears that all phonetic alphabets, abjads and abugidas (a syllabary in which the symbol for the consonant is modified to show the vowel, rather than a separate symbol for every combination as in Japanese) except Korean are ultimately traceable to Egyptian writing, often by way of Phoenician.

So how do you account for the total vacuum of alphabetical books in comparison to the Hebrew ancient archives, from nations far older, and which have never been subject to dispersals? Don't you see hard copy proof as more superior proof to such opinions?

The Phoenicians were a widely-traveled people, just at the time when the Bronze Age was in full glory in Eurasia and civilizations were in need of a writing system. Even the Devanagari script appears to be an offshoot of the writing systems of Mesopotamia, although I haven't studied it enough to explain the details.They weren't doing fancy math with the census, just basic arithmetic.

The Phoenecians were allys of the Israelites, employed in the building of the
1st temple, and worked for King's Solomon's navy: where are their alphabetical books?

The Greeks managed to calculate pi,

Yes, this was perhaps the best forerunner to math - but this was at a later well developed time.



so with determination and plenty of time, such calculations can be done without a positional decimal system or a symbol for zero. But mathematics as we know it could not be developed until Fibonacci brought the Indo-Arabic system to Europe; the calculations were too cumbersome to do very many.

I agree the zero had no real mathematical significance in Arabia - it just stood for nothingness or none. It became a legitimate math factor later, in Europe.


you're confusing it with a numbering system. The choice of symbols doesn't matter, it's how you organize them that makes the difference. The Hebrew, Greek and Roman numbering systems do not have positional significance. In Roman numerals, a V is five, no matter where it appears in a numeral. In our system, the symbol "5" can stand for five, fifty, five hundred, or five decillion; or five tenths, five hundredths or five decillionths; depending on its position in the numeral. And a positional numbering system doesn't work very well without a symbol for zero. They tried just leaving a blank space, but that was very unsatisfactory and easily misinterpreted. It doesn't matter whether you're using the Indo-Arabic symbols, letters of your alphabet, or new symbols you just made up for the purpose. It's the organization that matters, not the particular symbols.

Math developed as time evolved. But for its time, the Cencus of 3 million, with cross-checking ability, is a remarkable thing. This was 3,500 years ago, when there were no alphabetical books. It also shows that the numbers and calculation systems in the Hebrew were not wanting - not necessarilly as advanced math - but well advanced for its time.



y got it directly from the Phoenicians. The Phoenicians were great sailors and had a huge trading economy all over the Mediterranean. Everyone from the Egyptians to the Iberians traded with them and picked up bits of their culture.

What we have from this period is only bits of commercial reciepts of sales and transactions - which cannot be deemed alphabetical. Here, we also have an ancient book which claims, incidently, that they were written by the Hebrews [Moses] before re-entering Canaan. What reason do we have to disregard this - there is no proof to contradict it - canan was not Monotheistic?

The Greeks had already developed their written language by the time they came in contact with the Jews.

The Greeks never had alphabetical writings before 300 BCE, the date of the first trabnslation of the Hebrew bible. This took 70 years, and the Josephus docs says they got their alpha beta from the Hebrew. You win if you can produce a Greek alphabetical writings before 300 BCE - bit I cannot accept opeinions made 100's and 1000's of years later, with no proof at all.




Besides, the early civilizations didn't do that much writing. After all, only a tiny percentage of their population could read and write. The more recent civilizations had more written works so more of them have been discovered. With the earlier writing systems we're often limited to inscriptions on stone. Sometimes there are clay tablets, but they're pretty fragile.

I'm not sure what you mean by early civilizations, but let's just regard the period 3ooo years ago - here, we find a host of Hebrew books issued every 100 years - what is the problem with other civilizations of this period? I conclude there is none now because there was none at any time then.

Consider that the Etruscans had a major civilization contemporaneously with Greece and Rome, and they had a written language. Yet so few examples of their writing have survived that we can't even figure out what family their language belonged to.Read that entire article about the Phoenician abjad (although they call it an "alphabet"), it explains all of this.

Contemporary with Rome does not mean much. How do you know this is even true - they are stated by writings from about 1,500 CE.



You keep trying to make a shortcut. No one said that the Hebrew writing system was derived directly from Egyptian. It is descended from Phoenician, which is descended from an earlier Proto-Canaanite abjad. As the article explains, that earlier set of symbols is clearly derived from Egyptian.

The article 'says' so - but it does not offer any proofs.

You're talking to the wrong guy. I've studied Chinese and, to a lesser extent, Japanese. All of the kana symbols are stylized forms of Chinese characters.You're not paying attention. I already told you that in the Afroasiatic language family it is not necessary to write vowels, because for any combination of consonants, there is only one word. It's not like English, where bat, bait, bet, beet, bit, bite, boat, bought, but, bout and butte are all different words.I'm not even sure what you mean because I can't understand that sentence. You seem to keep interchanging the word "alphabet" and "letter," which is very confusing.

My position on the Japanese is limited to the alphabets being some 90% the same as the Hebrew with regard their design. With regard the Indian writings, there is a similar equivalence in ancient word 'meanings'.

In any case, how much Hebrew have you studied? More than I have? I can read a little of it; on my own powers-of-three fluency scale I'm about a 3.5 in Hebrew. But you give me a page without the vowel markings (which are used for instruction and in the liturgy) and I'm lost.

I studied Hebrew and Indian. The Hebrew does not need seperate vowels - this occured by the Greeks. The ancient Hebrew did not have seperate vowels or numerals, and this is not required today. Here, the english discarded the Greek/latin mode and adopted the ancient Hebrew mode - where the vowels are alphabets again. Otherwise the english would have a seperate list of the vowels, which have to be attached to the alphabets to result in a sound. Now it is placed adjacent to the alphabets - same as the ancient Hebrew. Like, A and Alef are vowels and alphabets in the Hebrew and the English, while in the Greek - the A was a seperate letter, like a symbol [a dash -] which is imposed on the alphabet.

Is slavery and exile the only way that members of one nation travel to another nation? Egyptian civilization went through many periods of prosperity, and Jewish migrants traveled there to find work. Duh?

This was to negate any reason for the vacuum of Egyptian alphabetical books as a possible reason. I stand by it.

I know at least twenty Christians who would call you a heretic and a blasphemer and start praying for your soul, for doubting their literal interpretation of the Book of Genesis. They insist that all non-aquatic animals on the entire planet drowned and were repopulated from Noah's menagerie. There used to be one here; I don't remember his name so I don't know if he's still around. Probably not, we were not very kind to him because he kept breaking the forum rules and using the bible as evidence for his assertions.I'm not well-versed in biblical lore. When exactly was Noah's time? The Hebrew people differentiated from the Canaanites around 2000BCE, IIRC.

Anyone who does not follow the Gospels or Quran is a heretic. Why would you determine European Christian views the right source for explaining anything of a book they at no time observed, cannot read, and which predates the Gospels by 1000's of years? That is a good way to go astray: Europe does a stratch job of anything it cannot connect to the Gospels.



Nonetheless, we have to bear in mind that names are subject to fashion. You can't always expect the people who lived a thousand years ago to give their babies the same names that their descendants use today. Today there are Jews named Robert, Craig, Keith and Stewart.Of course they used them. But Shakespeare created far more figures of speech than he borrowed from biblical sources. He singlehandedly enriched our language.

Names are the primal factor for determining their datings. All of the names listed in the Noah genealogies are regarded authentic.
 
I just happened to come across this letter in yesterday's newspaper, which speaks directly to this point:Almost everything about religion annoys me, but some of it makes me downright angry, and this is an example. You give an imaginary supernatural creature the credit for something that we human beings did for ourselves! Something people fought and died for! Something they have been working on for more than 200 years, still trying to get it right!

That is an insult to all humans and as a representative of this species I demand an apology. You should be ashamed of yourself for posting this religious crap in a place of science and scholarship. You are neither a scientist nor a scholar and you don't belong here.

If our rights come from the Deity, then why was this discovered only in 1775, why were these rights confined to [less than half of] white men, and why has the Deity been so stingy about spreading rights throughout the world?

I've no idea with your confusion. There are sober, historical reasons why it took till 1775 to come to fruition in America. This was close to medevial Europe at its worst, when Popes ruled by dogma and a total suppression [fullfilling away] whatever never suited it. At this time, the majestic Hebrew laws were flaunted. America emerged when Columbus got lost, and these were a mix of Christians, Jews, Blacks, Chinese and other peoples. It was established as a Christian country - which did the reverse of Europe - it took the laws embedded in the Hebrew bible for its constitution.

There is nothing in the Gospels that can apply to the Constitution - no equal rights for all, no Liberty, no inaleianble human rights. Medevial Europe claimed anyone who does not sign the dotted line of the Gospels is damned to a very hot place for a very long time. Europe did not accept, ONLY THE SOUL THAT SINS WILL PAY. America rebuffed medevial Europe - and this kool battle persists today. America won - Europe followed suit later with a grudge.
 
The Greeks never had alphabetical writings before 300 BCE, the date of the first trabnslation of the Hebrew bible. This took 70 years, and the Josephus docs says they got their alpha beta from the Hebrew. You win if you can produce a Greek alphabetical writings before 300 BCE - bit I cannot accept opeinions made 100's and 1000's of years later, with no proof at all.

That's some claim. I'm beginning to enjoy this thread.
Do you agree with this Fraggle?
 
Last edited:
gedanken said:
You do realize that not only does Pinker-- personally
No, I did not.

That puts him close to the same level as a grade school teacher, as far as personal info, and much better than "ivory tower"

about which, note, I did leave myself a side hatch - "pending further info".

So I will no longer simply assume Pinker is much less well informed than said teacher, and admit the possibility he may be almost on an equal footing regarding the Hopi sense of time.
gedanken said:
Where is this "ivory tower" but in the pristine walls of your chamber
One of its lesser turrets is at MIT. As you well know.
gedanken said:
These children are being taught English, genius.
Uh, probably - your point?
gedanken said:
Do you or do you not state the average grade school teacher knows more about the Hopis than Pinker?
No, I didn't. That's your third or fourth try at restating what I posted, and it's the closest one yet - you've almost got it.
gedanken said:
Want me to quote you to you?
Try quoting me to you - maybe that will get you over the hump.
fraggle said:
The three instances of of are just placeholders, and the at is a meaningless component of an idiomatic expression.
The "of" in "north of Baghdad" is meaningful - north of Baghdad is a different place than north Baghdad. The "at" in "at least" is solidly meaningful - in the idiom, "the" has been dropped, but "at" is necessary, as it is in "at the end" and "at the top" and "at the most", which are not idiomatic. There is no third "of". So that's two out of three for your additions (not "of" your additions, which would be different), and overall 5/7 necessary for the meaning, one merely helpful, and one useless (the "on" should have been omitted).
fraggle said:
Now bear in mind that this paragraph is A) writing, not speech, and B) written by a professional writer, not a citizen of average communication ability
Significantly, well, and necessarily employable by the best writers (and speakers) of a language is not the same thing as superfluous.

"Average ability" is a moving target - remove capabilities inherent in the language, and the "average" may well approach more closely the high end abilities, in actual performance, at the differential expense of both - compressing the range. That does not make those capabilities superfluous in human communication within that language. Human culture may have as much use for superior language capabilities as it does for superior tool use, no?
 
Last edited:
Back
Top