Recently in my Intro to Linguistic Anthropology class we discussed how words from different languages often have different meanings when translated to a new language. When doing this we attempt to summarize the complexity of certain words and attempt to give it an English meaning that makes sense universally. However, in attempt to do so this translation often fails and in turn generates a separate meanings that represents the given word or words as closely as we can translate it to. A good example of this would be when English speakers translate color. For most languages colors are fused together to simplify the meanings and is often found that one word could represent a variety of colors.
For example the language of Acehne’s color for Blue and Green is the word Prana. Then when you look at the English language we have a separate word for each color that exists so therefore Prana is separated as blue and green and is not the same thing. As some languages fuse these colors together the English language usually does not. There is no word for both Blue and Green in the English language but rather it has a single word for each.
Colors is also not the only case where this happens masculine, feminant, and neutral words exist in some languages while it doesn’t exist in others. For the English language. English has words for each of these tenses such as he, she, they, etc. Overall languages all have interesting words that describe various amounts of different things. Whether one word means multiple objects or colors or where each word represents one single thing all languages have there own variation of given words.
Work Cited
Ager, S. (1998). Colour words in many languages. Retrieved November 5, 2016, from Omniglot: http://www.omniglot.com/language/colours/multilingual.htm
The classification of colors is a good example of differing meaning between languages. This might reflect the environment in which the language developed. For example, a language spoken in the Amazon might have a large variety of words to describe what we would call "green" and fewer words for other colors.
ReplyDeleteAnother example that I find interesting is the concept of "untranslatable" words. For instance, the Dutch word "gezelligheid" is difficult to translate into English. Depending on its context, it can mean a nice, cozy environment, or the warm feeling resulting from a general togetherness. This word describes a very abstract concept which does not easily correspond to an English word or phrase.