Thinking in various languages
Dec. 2nd, 2011 10:12 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
keyan_bowesI just read with great interest ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
aliettedb's Minor Rant on Gendered Languages. Aliette's way ahead of me in the language department (among others); she speaks French, English, Chinese and Vietnamese. She's writing in response to a theory that in languages in which objects are given a linguistic gender, the culture attributes gender characteristics to those objects. A feminine table, for instance, or a manly computer. She says that's bunk.
I agree. I speak only two languages myself, English (I hope) well, and Hindi reasonably fluently but not grammatically. Hindi is a gendered language (and it's one reason I don't speak it grammatically -- I can never remember what gender something is supposed to be). I believe there's some relationship to which vowels are used, but now I'm getting out of my depth.
The point is, linguistic gender attaches to a *word*, not to the object it represents. In Hindi, tasveer means picture, and it's feminine. Chitr also means picture, but it's masculine.
The post also set me to thinking about another attribute of language, and I'm not sure I can express this properly: Complexity and connotation. English has a huge vocabulary, with shades of meaning. Even if the word means the same thing, the connotation can differ. Pig doesn't mean exactly the same thing as swine. Word choices are extremely large. For a writer, this means that a lot of nuance can be achieved by deciding how to say it. It's a wonderful thing.
But it also means that, in translation, it's almost impossible to avoid connotations that might not even have been put there by the original author. If in the original language, a word means, simply "unmarried woman," it makes a huge difference in English whether she's called a spinster, a virgin, a maiden, a girl, an old maid, or just a woman.
I was taking a look at the Bible in Hindi.Why the Bible? Only because it exists in so many versions and languages. The Hindi translation I found online seems closest to "The Good News Bible" -- but even so, it's *simpler* in its language.
There's no way, of course, for someone like me to read the Bible (or pretty much anything else) in its original language. But I can't helping thinking, How much has been gained in translation?
aliettedb's Minor Rant on Gendered Languages. Aliette's way ahead of me in the language department (among others); she speaks French, English, Chinese and Vietnamese. She's writing in response to a theory that in languages in which objects are given a linguistic gender, the culture attributes gender characteristics to those objects. A feminine table, for instance, or a manly computer. She says that's bunk.I agree. I speak only two languages myself, English (I hope) well, and Hindi reasonably fluently but not grammatically. Hindi is a gendered language (and it's one reason I don't speak it grammatically -- I can never remember what gender something is supposed to be). I believe there's some relationship to which vowels are used, but now I'm getting out of my depth.
The point is, linguistic gender attaches to a *word*, not to the object it represents. In Hindi, tasveer means picture, and it's feminine. Chitr also means picture, but it's masculine.
The post also set me to thinking about another attribute of language, and I'm not sure I can express this properly: Complexity and connotation. English has a huge vocabulary, with shades of meaning. Even if the word means the same thing, the connotation can differ. Pig doesn't mean exactly the same thing as swine. Word choices are extremely large. For a writer, this means that a lot of nuance can be achieved by deciding how to say it. It's a wonderful thing.
But it also means that, in translation, it's almost impossible to avoid connotations that might not even have been put there by the original author. If in the original language, a word means, simply "unmarried woman," it makes a huge difference in English whether she's called a spinster, a virgin, a maiden, a girl, an old maid, or just a woman.
I was taking a look at the Bible in Hindi.Why the Bible? Only because it exists in so many versions and languages. The Hindi translation I found online seems closest to "The Good News Bible" -- but even so, it's *simpler* in its language.
There's no way, of course, for someone like me to read the Bible (or pretty much anything else) in its original language. But I can't helping thinking, How much has been gained in translation?
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Date: 2011-12-04 08:19 pm (UTC)From talking with someone who spoke Hebrew, I suspect rather a lot has been added when the Bible was translated into English--Hebrew sounds much, much more straightforward than English.
(and I speak a little Ancient Greek, enough to take a look at some of the Gospels, and to see that there, too, a lot has been added...)