Recently, as I said, I bought a great new book on words. In it the author, who has degrees in modern languages and linguistics, has edited a major anthology of Gaelic oral poetry, and has lived in a number of countries, talks about intriguing words in other languages, as well as differences. I found these 4 differences very interesting, though Shu questions the veracity of # 1 & 2:

1) The Japanese have no word for "water." "Mizu" means "cold water" and "oyu" means "hot water," but there is nothing for general water. For example, I wonder what they'd call the water in the ocean.

2) The Hopi Indians and Chinese languages have no concept of tenses. Shu says they must. If they don't, how do they know that something already occurred, or that it will occur?

3) The word for "dream" and "sleep" is the same for the Italians and the Spanish. Do you think that they dream every night...or not at all?

4) I wonder about this one. The Irish language doesn't have a word for "yes" and "no." They say things like, "It is" or "I do" or "I am not." Strange.

Oh-oh.

* finds large red emergency release switch *

* sound of steam escaping from real linguist's ears *

The Japanese for water is always given as mizu, no qualification. English has no word for water. We have separate words 'steam' for vaporized water and 'ice' for solidified water. Japanese appears to have a separate word for hot water.

All languages have tense or its related property aspect. (Not having a concept of it is actually bizarre.) All people not only have a concept of it but mark it linguistically. Some languages change the form of the verb, others don't. Some languages mark aspect (completeness, continuation) rather than time: both possibilities are common. Chinese has a separate clause-final particle la for perfective. Malay has adverbs akan 'future' and sudah 'already'. Biblical Hebrew had perfective and imperfective verbs related in a still poorly understood way by time sequence and background/foreground. It is very common for languages not to have a future tense (e.g. Finnish). The one combination I have never come across in any language is having just three tenses, past, present, and future. Never seen it.

The business about Hopi is nonsense that was propagated by Leonard Bloomfield in the 1930s as part of his claim that some North American peoples, in particular the Hopi, had a completely different world-view encoded in their language. This is no longer held in polite circles of linguists, and Hopi is described with a normal tense/aspect system like any other language.

Not having words for yes and no is very common. Classical Latin had none.

Quote "...The Irish language doesn't have a word for "yes" and "no." They say things like, "It is" or "I do" or "I am not." Strange..."

I can't ever remember an Irishman saying "yes" in English conversation! They always seem to say, "...T'at's roight..." or, "...To be sure..."

Of course, it's not something I have ever listened out for.

I'm not a trained linguist or (and you'll see the relevence later) a trained mental health specialist but I always view statements like "Klingon has no word for mercy" (I've intentionally chosen a nonsense example) with deep suspicion as to me they show a fundamental misunderstanding of what language is all about. When they are made by trained linguists or people whose opinions I would normally respect I make the charitable assuption that they are intentionally trying to simplify difficult concepts for the lay audience.

To follow that up for a moment I lie all the time to my students when I'm teaching tenses. I tell them there are twelve tenses. Three simple ones, three continuous ones, three perfect ones and three perfect continuous ones.
It's a lie. It all depends on what you mean by a tense.
Come to that by what you mean by a voice and and aspect as well.

Then I have to point out that we can jetison the future versions of those tenses without losing anything.

"I will go tomorrow." could be replaced by any of the following depending on your whim and the degree of your pomposity.

I am going tomorrow.
I intend to go tomorrow.
It is my intention that I should go tomorrow.
I go tomorrow.

In fact the present tenses - in speech - can be used to refer to past, present or future.

"So like,it's last Saturday see, I'm going into the bank, when I see this geezer with a sawn-off shotgun. 'Allo', I say to myself, 'What's this all about, then?'"

"What are you doing?"
"I'm cooking the dinner."

"When are you going?"
"I'm going next Tuesday."

So the things we nominally call "tenses" may or may not relate to the time that the events we describe happen.

Languages do not have concepts (of tenses or anything else), people have concepts. Languages have ways of expressing those concepts. We all have concepts of time -time passed, time passing, time yet to come - but how those concepts are communicated varies from language to language. The one thing I am sure of is that all human languages will have some way of expressing these things - however unfamiliar to us that way is.

Now to the mental health bit.

A human being who had no concept of time would be unable to function in society. For him everything would take place in a permanent "now". The future would not exist at all (how could it?) and the past would either not exist or it would be indistinguishable from the present. Others will know more about this than I do but I think this kind of disassociation can occur with certain injuries to the brain. If it occurred without injury it would certainly be seen as some form of mental illness. At the very least a person who had no time sense at all would need constant supervision to ensure that those functions such as eating and sleeping which need to be done at fairly regular intervals, were done.

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As for the "no word for" statements they are the flip side of the "Eskimos have twenty words for snow" statements.
Words are just symbols which we attach to concepts. The map should not be confused with the terrain.
Let me suggest a concept for which English has no specific single word.

"The deep sense of satisfaction that is felt on removing one's boots after a long day hiking in the mountains."

If there's a word for that I don't know it. Now it's perfectly possible that Klingon (or Chinese or Icelandic or whatever) has a single word expressing that concept. I don't speak Klingon so I wouldn't know.

However while English may not have a single word we can express the concept just as well with the phrase
"The deep sense of satisfaction that is felt on removing one's boots after a long day hiking in the mountains."

We are just using a longer label built up from smaller labels.

The Eskimo may have words for describing different forms of snow - again I don't speak the language so I don't know - but we too can say "wet, slushy snow", "crisp, white, fresh snow", "snow frozen until it's almost ice" or "don't eat yellow snow."

The labels are still there, they are just longer.

One last point.
Five minutes research has given me

Italian dream- sognare, sleep - dormire
Spanish dream - soñar, sleep - dormir

so I have no idea what that point was about.

This message has been edited. Last edited by: BobHale,

Words for water, number of words for snow in Eskimo, no tenses in Hopi, etc.

The Whorf-Sapir hypothesis (i.e., that a person's language and its grammatical structures affect how a person models realith mentally), at least in its strong form, is pretty much looked down on by most real linguists these days. It was Benjamin Worf who misinterpreted the Hopi verbal system, and not Leonard Bloomfield, and it was in the '40s or '50s. Native Hopi linguists are the ones doing the complaining. Whorf was an amateur linguist who worked for an insurance company as an engineer/inspector by day. I agree with aput that the grammatical category of tense is oftentimes mixed up with the grammatical category of aspect in many languages verbal systems. Tense has to do with the time an event (being spoken about) happened (relative to the speaker's time). Aspect has to do with its duration, whether the action was completed or continued on.

Irish Gaelic's most interesting feature, of the top of my head, is that its word order is VSO. Not that that means much.

Yes and no. In Late Latin, sic 'thus' and non 'not' came to be used for yes and no (whence si in Spanish, French, and Italian). Abelard (of Heloise fame) wrote a philosophical tractate called Sic et non. In classical Latin, one usually repeated the verb from a yes/no question in the affirmative or negative.

As for languages not having a word for X. When people don't have a word for X, they use language to describe X. That's what we use language for. Also, all concepts do not exist a priori in the mind. (For example, perhaps my use of the linguistic term aspect above.) But, one can also have the concept in mind (e.g., from observation), but not have a word for it, though it exists. If I'm talking with somebody, and she doesn't know the word schadenfreude, when I explain what it is, then she can use the word for the concept.

The nonsense about Spanish and Italian: both languages have a verb for 'to sleep' from the Latin dormio and words for dream from the Latin somnium. There's also a verb in Latin somnio which means 'to dream'. Go figure.

Oh-oh.
* finds large red emergency release switch
*sound of steam escaping from real linguist's ears*

I can see that I should have put a whole lot more thought into this post before I made it. Sorry, guys.

As for the "water" point, Shu assumed, as some of you told me, that while the Japanese word for "hot water" is a different word, the word for "cold water" is probably the term used for water, in general. Apparently that's the way it is. English has no word for water. Isn't it "water?" Not sure what your point is aput.

As for the discussion from the Hopi Indians and the Chinese, Moore does mention Benjamin Lee Whorf's Language, Thought, and Reality. Here is his specific wording; perhaps I read into it: "Whorf's research into the speech and culture of the Hopi Indians, whose language, like Chinese, has no concept of tenses, started a wave of enquiry into the relationship between language and culture. Academics refer to the area of study as 'sociolinguistics'." He goes on to say, "What emerges is not only the universal phenomenon that certain languages have 'no word for X' -- such as the widely held notion that the Inuit peoples have no word for 'snow,' and the more significant fact that the Alogonquin people have no word for 'time' --but also, conversely that languages, indeed whole cultures, have words, terms, and ideas that are simply untranslatable."

I also misinterpreted the point about "sleep" and "dream;" like Bob, I should have looked them up. What he in fact said was this: "What are we to make of the fact that languages such as Spanish and Italian have the same noun for 'sleep' as for 'dream,' while others like French and English differentiate between the two? Do some nations sleep differently from others? What we mean by 'dreaming' is plainly not the same as what the speakers of Aranda, an indigenous language of Australia, mean when they say aljerre. For Indigenous Australians, dreaming is a vital way of holding the created world together." He goes on to explain the latter sentence, citing British author Bruce Chatwin. You see, he was talking about the Spanish and Italian nouns.

I think I may have been the culprit here in my poor explanation of his points. So sorry. While he may have some linguistic points wrong, I still think it a good book on words. I can't imagine Simon Winchester writing a forward for a book on words that is completely erroneous.

A human being who had no concept of time would be unable to function in society.

Having said all the above, I refer to Bob's comment. What do you think the author means when he says the Algonquins have no word for "time." As with the Irish having no word for "yes" or "no," there must be other ways to indicate "time?"

One story I have heard which makes a good point about words is that of the Irishman and the Spaniard who were chatting (in English) about the differences between their two languages.

The Spanish are famed for their laid back attitude to life and their expression "mañana" (tomorrow) is often cited as representing the Spanish attitude towards task completion.

So the Spaniard asked the Irishman, "...Do you have a word in Irish Gaelic that means the same as mañana?..."

To which the Irishman replied, "...To be sure, indeed we have - but it doesn't convey quite the same sense of urgency..."

I think the point is that we have a word for water above boiling point - steam, we have a word for water below freezing point, ice but the word "water" collectively refers to the substance in all its forms and that there is no separate word that just means the liquid form. Japanese, it seems, rather than having fewer separate descriptors (i.e. no word for water) has more in that it has a separate word for "hot water" which we lack. (I'm assuming that there are Japanese words for steam and ice.)

quote:

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What we mean by 'dreaming' is plainly not the same as what the speakers of Aranda, an indigenous language of Australia, mean when they say aljerre. For Indigenous Australians, dreaming is a vital way of holding the created world together

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Does he support this in any way? It seems to me that the process of dreaming is likely to be the same for all creatures of the same species. The social significance, the philosophical importance if you like, attached to dreaming, is added after the fact.
You might just as easily say that anyone who believes dreams tell the future (and there are plenty around who do) dreams in a different way to anyone who doesn't believe it. In fact the dreaming is the same, it's the rationalisation that's different.

Japanese, it seems, rather than having fewer separate descriptors (i.e. no word for water) has more in that it has a separate word for "hot water" which we lack.

But what does that mean? The fact that I have to say "hot water" rather than X, or "hot water just before it boils", rather than Y (X and Y being single lexical items, words, in some language Q that none of us know), doesn't mean I don't have the concept of "hot water", or, in another neck of the tundra, cannot differentiate between one kind of snow and another. What is the difference between having a single word for "the reinforced eylet through which you pass your shoelaces", say grommet, or having to say the nine words or something similar above. I really don't think that it says anything very interesting about English. Perhaps it says something interesting about one or two particlar speakers of English who aren't cobblers. These factoids you see in the popular press are almost as annoying as Quechua is a more difficult than Sumerian; or, Lithuanian is an older language than English.

That there is a difference between how languages divide up the world is an interesting point, and anyone approaching language for the first time has to learn it.

But beyond this, most differences between languages just aren't interesting as indicators of differences between humans. Language is arbitrary. Word choice is arbitrary (chien, dog, Hunde), grammar is arbitrary (two, no, or three genders; separate plurals or not; distinct plural classes or not; verb first or verb middle or verb last...). You have to choose something, and choosing VOS order or three genders is no more significant than choosing the noise Hunde. There's no "neutral" grammar or lexicon that other languages are "unusual" compared to.

Differences in lexicon are everywhere. French aimer roughly corresponds to English love and like, while fleuve and rivière mean different things but both correspond to river. There's nothing exotic about it: and there's no such thing as "river" or "love" that one language gets right by denoting straightforwardly and the other doesn't.

and anyone approaching language for the first time has to learn it.

Perhaps I overstated myself in wrath. I did not mean to say that the 1-to-N words phenomenon was uninteresting, but perhaps that the people who theorize about the differences in how folks think or perceive the world are less interesting.

quote:

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Originally posted by jheem:
But what does that _mean_?

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It means that I agree with your point entirely and was pointing out the flaw in a previously given example by demonstrating that using exactly the same data the opposite conclusion can be drawn.

I must learn to make my meaning clearer.



Or to put it another way, it has no intrinsic significance whatsoever.

Okay. I understand that it is the concepts of a culture that are important, not just the fact that they do or do not a specific word for a particular concept. In fact, I do believe we have discussed this here before.

Yet, I do find it interesting that some languages have words (or multiple words) for concepts, while others don't. For me, it gives some indication of how the different cultures view that specific concept. For example, if one culture has only 1 or 2 ways of describing "snow," while others have at least 30, that may (or may not) mean that the first culture doesn't get as much snow as the second. That the German and Greek languages have a word for a concept that means getting enjoyment from another's misery, but English doesn't...does that say something about those cultures? I don't know, but it sure is interesting to debate and the type of discussion that I love. I believe it's referred to as 'sociolinguistics?'

I am about to ask Jerry, who knows Spanish very well, about the noun for "dreaming" in Spanish. Shu and I have been talking and have had a hard time thinking that there are action verbs that don't have nouns. Still, I wonder if the verb "soñar" might mean something subtly different than the English word "dream." Sometimes those online translation programs are less than optimal, and it is always better to talk to someone who knows the language.

Does he support this in any way? It seems to me that the process of dreaming is likely to be the same for all creatures of the same species. The social significance, the philosophical importance if you like, attached to dreaming, is added after the fact.

Bob, Moore quotes Bruce Chatwin on that, writing:

"Aboriginal myths tell of the legendary totemic beings who wandered across the country in the Dreamtime...singing the world into existence." Moore goes on to say that if a tribe's Keeper of Dreaming fails to carry out his or her 'dreaming' task, walking the songlines that put the world together, the Earth as we know it will come to an end.

This message has been edited. Last edited by: Kalleh,

"Soñé que la nieve ardía, ¡ay ay ay!
soñé que el fuego helaba,
y por soñar imposibles,
soñé que tú me querías."

I dreamed that the snow was burning.
I dreamed that the fire was freezing.
And to dream the impossible,
I dreamed that you loved me.

I dream that this will help, Kalleh, but I do have my doubts.

Soñar is the infinitive = to dream.

El sueño is the noun.

~~~ jerry

I dream that this will help, Kalleh, but I do have my doubts.

Well, thanks, Jerry. Of course it helps; you are our Spanish expert here. There is a specific noun for 'sleep,' too, I assume?

I can't understand what the author might have meant. I still have this feeling that, while he didn't say it well, he had a legitimate point to make. I mean, the Web site of his publisher says that he lives in France and Spain. I just wish I knew what he meant.

I am going to send the publisher the question.

This message has been edited. Last edited by: Kalleh,

I haven't heard from the publisher of the book, so I imagine I won't. I would love to find out what was in the author's mind.

Just today in the newpaper I read about a phrase in French that would be very helpful:

L'esprit de l'escalier - meaning the spirit of the staircase, referring to the fact that the salons and ballrooms of great French houses are on the second floor, so that it is while descending the staircase as you leave that the perfect line comes to you, too late of course. Hasn't that happened to us all? We think of what we should have said way too late? What an interesting way the French have of saying that.

We don't have a pithy phrase of word for that, do we?

Try Treppenwitz. OK, I know it's German, but it's in WWFTD..