When I consider the English language, I think of it as a rich language — well, at least lexically rich. It's in the Germanic family of languages but also has inherited a significant number of words from French (Norman conquest) and from Latin (language of education and law). Somewhere along the line it lost its pronouns. This can cause confusion in every day communication as everyone has probably experienced. It is even more of a problem when translating from a language that has plenty of pronouns. (See my last post for an example.)
Recently, I came across an interesting case of this latter problem being examined in an article in the journal Babel. (Great name for a linguistics journal.) You can read the abstract here. Basically, a short story by Anton Chekhov requires two different second person pronouns that exist, of course, in Russian but not in English. The author of the article claims that this prevents a reader from appreciating the story when read in translation. He says that the English reader loses information about the relationship between the two main characters. I am fascinated by the concept of text that is untranslatable.
And if the current lack of pronouns in English wasn't bad enough, grammarians tell us we are losing another one: whom.
Comments
You are absolutely right about English being lexically rich — your title is a perfect example (paucity instead of scarcity).
I was playing a game with my Spanish students where they had to give me the Spanish equivalent of an English verb (in its correct form). I would say, "he draws" and they would say, "dibuja". That got really awkward because of the pronoun problem. It just doesn't go as quickly when you must say, "You informal, plural teach!" The Spanish was just fine — "¡enseñáis!"
Posted by: Shannon Costello on Saturday, September 17, 2005
Credit for finding the Babel article goes to Nathan Bierma in his post at Inflections.
Posted by: CJ Costello on Sunday, September 18, 2005