The City Gate

Heretic

Mon, 23 Jan 2006 21:46:11 -0500

I submit an interesting etymological tidbit for your contemplation: the word heretic has its roots in the Greek word haireô which means to choose.

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Synesis

Sat, 22 Oct 2005 16:25:31 -0500

I just learned a new grammatical term: synesis. You can find definitions of it here or here. When a sentence does not have subject/verb or noun/pronoun agreement, but the sentence is still correct because the words chosen fit its sense, that is a synesis. An example from the KJV of the Bible is Romans 6:23. “For the wages of sin is death; but the gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord.”

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Eskimo Words for Snow

Tue, 11 Oct 2005 22:03:52 -0500

You may have read an article at one time or another that talked about the large number of words that the Eskimos have for snow. It probably said that this shows how important snow is to their culture. I recently read an essay by Geoffrey Pullum called The Great Eskimo Vocabulary Hoax that deals with this topic. It turns out that these claims are based on shoddy research and a misunderstanding of languages. Inuit is a synthetic language (you can combine words to form new words). Since it is a synthetic language there is not really any limit to the number of words one can make about snow. Snow that fell last week could be a single word in Inuit as could snow that sounds crunchy when you walk on it. Using the reasoning that Pullum derides in his article, anything and everything is important to the Eskimos except maybe refrigerators.

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Paucity of Pronouns

Fri, 16 Sep 2005 23:09:37 -0500

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.

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Willy-Nilly

Mon, 25 Jul 2005 22:43:17 -0500

Maintaining the style of the author is one mark of a good translation. There will always be limitations to this as literary style is very nuanced. I would expect a scholarly work to still sound scholarly in translation and similarly with a work that is more informal.

This brings me to the translation of Confessions by Augustine that I am currently reading. Given Augustine's education and his original profession as a rhetorician, I assume that his Latin would definitely fit in the scholarly category. In reading this version, there have been two times when I have come across a word that did not sound like it belonged in Augustine's writings. The second was the term "willy-nilly." Much of the text flows beautifully as he seamlessly integrates quotes from the Bible into his thoughts on his life and then I come to a clunker like "willy-nilly." I cannot imagine Augustine using slang like that if he were alive today and writing in English. I suppose I could try to dust off my Latin education and see what could be substituted there, but it is much easier to just complain about it.

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Pease

Wed, 20 Jul 2005 09:27:09 -0500

You know those green spheroid vegetables you chase around your plate...they were originally called pease in English. You'd say pease if there were only one and pease if there were many. Some thought pease referred only to multiple peas on your plate or in a pod so English got a new word - pea. If you're interested in more ways English has changed, take a look at this page on the Linguistic Society of America website.

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