| Pages in topic: < [1 2] | The national language and the national character Thread poster: wonita (X)
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| Minimalist... | Dec 24, 2007 |
I'll be a minimalist Scandinavian, and agree with everything Madeleine said
Merry Christmas, all!
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Hilde Granlund wrote: I'll be a minimalist Scandinavian, and agree with everything Madeleine said Merry Christmas, all!
I'm neither minimalist nor Scandinavian, but well said Madeleine.
You should have studied law, you have a lovely way of ripping "arguments" to shreds
Merry Christmas (to everyone who celebrates it).
| | | | | Climate warning | Dec 24, 2007 |
Evangelia Mouma wrote:
I read somewhere, I do not remember where, that people in countries where there is much cold must have languages with not many vowels because that way they won't have to have their mouths open for long (in order to pronounce the vowels) and get colds. I found it hilarious (think of Finnish) and just wanted to share.
Were this true, we'd seriously have start worrying about global warming... Swedish (spoken up in the cold frozen north) has 3 more vowels than English and Italian (4 actually, as we view Y as a vowel).
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Lawyer-Linguist wrote: I'm neither minimalist nor Scandinavian, but well said Madeleine. You should have studied law, you have a lovely way of ripping "arguments" to shreds
Thanks Debs, I studied a little, teeny bit of law and were I somewhat younger, I definitely would continue.
As it is, I leave it to my 13 year old son, who has decided on becoming a business lawyer and could "rip" anything anyone says to bits. Excuse for not doing homework - if I do my homework it will not not feel like home so how can I do homework.
To prove this point, I just ended up with an argument about what his argument actually is...
Merry x-mas.
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Adrian MM. (X)
Local time: 22:23
French to English
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| No Swedish word for please | Dec 25, 2007 |
I'd be interested to know the Swedish word for please instead of of a long-winded 'varsågod och' (be so good as to) because - in Spain - I have had to act as a mediator to placate enraged Spanish waiters and barmen who were not used to minimalist tourists placing an order without at least attempting to say please in any language understandable on Majorca.
My explanation was that the Swedes use other ways, such as 'Good day to you. I would like to...'
Also, when workin... See more I'd be interested to know the Swedish word for please instead of of a long-winded 'varsågod och' (be so good as to) because - in Spain - I have had to act as a mediator to placate enraged Spanish waiters and barmen who were not used to minimalist tourists placing an order without at least attempting to say please in any language understandable on Majorca.
My explanation was that the Swedes use other ways, such as 'Good day to you. I would like to...'
Also, when working at a translation company in London, British account managers (work allocators) used to come into my room every week and ask the same - work-disruptive - question: have the words Dear Sir or Madam been omitted by mistake in the letter translated out of English? The Norwegian or Swedish translator seems to have omitted the opener and gone straight into the letter without any frills'.
Now you superiors can advise me, without prejudice, what linguistic or cultural message I should have tried to put across to those translation managers or manageresses who also used to query the Spanish sign-off 'un abrazo fuerte' = a strong, fond embrace used between professional colleagues of the same sex. These two examples are indicative of Scandinavian vs. Latin national temperaments. If not then, by all means, just play them down as a sweeping generalisation or dismiss these comments as a mere 'joke'.
But the perennial, thorny problem is how to deal with these postal idiosyncracies in English translation: include Dear/Madam, Colleague or Dear Sirs - as I do - when there's no opener there in the Scandinavian source-language.
Then how to deal with the sign-off of a Spanish letter from a(n) Hispanic to a US/UK lawyer: 'Yours Affectionately'; when in doubt, leave out; or reduce these friendly, collegiate greetings to a bland, unemotive Anglo-Saxon understatement of Yours Sincerely/ Faithfully...
[Edited at 2007-12-25 01:12]
[Edited at 2007-12-25 10:12]
[Edited at 2007-12-25 13:26] ▲ Collapse
| | | | Balasubramaniam L. 
India
Local time: 01:53
Member (2006)
English to Hindi
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SITE LOCALIZER | More the language itself, it is the literature in any language that can shape character | Dec 25, 2007 |
More than the language itself, it is the literature of the language, which in a way is the repository of the intellectual and artistic churings of people who speak that language, that could possibly shape character.
So one could suppose that if one reads a lot of Russian or Chinese literature, he/she is bound to run into Lenin, Gorky, Tolstoy and MaoTse Tung and since all these are powerful thinkers and writers, it is likely that the reader will be influenced by socialistic ideas.... See more More than the language itself, it is the literature of the language, which in a way is the repository of the intellectual and artistic churings of people who speak that language, that could possibly shape character.
So one could suppose that if one reads a lot of Russian or Chinese literature, he/she is bound to run into Lenin, Gorky, Tolstoy and MaoTse Tung and since all these are powerful thinkers and writers, it is likely that the reader will be influenced by socialistic ideas.
Talking of German, can any German miss the writings of Karl Marx and Engels and not be influenced by their down-to-earth humanism and deep yearning for a socialistic order of society?
On the contary, if one reads of lot of English, you will encounter Rudyard Kipling, Bertrand Russel and American capitalistic and imperialistic writings and start thinking in those lines.
Read literature in Hindi or any of any of the former colonies and you will get a strong wiff of anti-colonial, anti-Western, anti-imperialistic and nationalistic fervour.
But we can't of course carry this line of thinking far, for even in English we have a lot of revolutionary writings (Shelly, Keats, Milton, Shakespeare), and with translation, writings in any one language can easily become available in any other language. So we have Tolstoy, et al, in English too in very good translations.
So it is simplistic to say that languages, or even their literatures, have anything to do with a nation's character. ▲ Collapse
| | | | Samuel Murray
Netherlands
Local time: 22:23
Member (2006)
English to Afrikaans
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| An off-topic comment | Dec 25, 2007 |
Bin Tiede wrote:
For example, the order of the English sentence "I must have a cup of tee" should be "I must a cup of tee have" in German. Behind the surface, a mere change of word order, is a change in the thinking process. The German must plan the whole sentence before opening their mouth, whilst an English speaker may still be thinking what to take actually after the verb "take" appears.
Nice try, but the fact is that the English person also has to do planning in advance. The German can change what he wants to do with his tea at any time, but the English bloke is stuck with his verb right at the start of the sentence and if he wants to do something else with his tea, he either has to restart his sentence, or complete his sentence by saying something irrelevant about coffee or something.
In fact, with these type of sentences with split verbs, the German can end his sentence without even saying the verb and his audience is likely to know what he had wanted to say, because the first part of the verb naturally leads to a limited number of possible second parts. The English bloke can't end his sentence prematurely unless it doesn't matter what (noun) he's talking about. This enables the German to speak in what might appear like very, very long sentences, which are in fact short incomplete sentences strung together fast enough to emulate the speed of thought.
| | | | Jack Doughty
United Kingdom
Local time: 21:23
Russian to English
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In memoriam | In defence of Rudyard Kipling | Dec 25, 2007 |
I am a great admirer of the poems of Rudyard Kipling. He was or course a poet of his time, which was the time of the British Empire at its height, but he was by no means a poet of propaganda for imperialism.
The Line "East is Easy and West is West and never the twain shall meet" is often quoted against him in this context, but actually what the whol poem says is quite the opposite. Here are the first four lines:
OH, East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall m... See more I am a great admirer of the poems of Rudyard Kipling. He was or course a poet of his time, which was the time of the British Empire at its height, but he was by no means a poet of propaganda for imperialism.
The Line "East is Easy and West is West and never the twain shall meet" is often quoted against him in this context, but actually what the whol poem says is quite the opposite. Here are the first four lines:
OH, East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet,
Till Earth and Sky stand presently at God’s great Judgment Seat;
But there is neither East nor West, Border, nor Breed, nor Birth,
When two strong men stand face to face, tho’ they come from the ends of the earth!
For the whole poem, see http://www.bartleby.com/246/1129.html
And if this poem of his has anything to say about imperialism, I would call it anti-imperialist:
The Legend of Evil
This is the sorrowful story
Told when the twilight fails
And the monkeys walk together
Holding their neighbours' tails: —
"Our fathers lived in the forest,
Foolish people were they,
They went down to the cornland
To teach the farmers to play.
"Our fathers frisked in the millet,
Our fathers skipped in the wheat,
Our fathers hung from the branches,
Our fathers danced in the street.
"Then came the terrible farmers,
Nothing of play they knew,
Only. . .they caught our fathers
And set them to labour too!
"Set them to work in the cornland
With ploughs and sickles and flails,
Put them in mud-walled prisons
And — cut off their beautiful tails!
"Now, we can watch our fathers,
Sullen and bowed and old,
Stooping over the millet,
Sharing the silly mould,
"Driving a foolish furrow,
Mending a muddy yoke,
Sleeping in mud-walled prisons,
Steeping their food in smoke.
"We may not speak to our fathers,
For if the farmers knew
They would come up to the forest
And set us to labour too."
This is the horrible story
Told as the twilight fails
And the monkeys walk together
Holding their kinsmen's tails.
Much is being said in this thread about the evils of generalizing and stereotyping, but don't apply them to all the works of a very talented and versatile poet like Rudyard Kipling. ▲ Collapse
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Anne Brackenborough (X)
Germany
Local time: 22:23
German to English
| No, it's us English who are good at planning things. | Dec 25, 2007 |
The English are accurate and good at planning. Of course they are, if they are trained to be so after their birth. The English language is so accurate that you need two different prepositions for "in the room" and "into the room". English sentences have a so-called "fixed structure", eg., they must be in the order subject - verb - object. For example, Germans can say "Eine Tasse Tee brauche ich unbedingt" (A cup of tea I need urgently), "Brauchen tue ich eine Tasse Tee" (Need do I a cup of tea) ... See more The English are accurate and good at planning. Of course they are, if they are trained to be so after their birth. The English language is so accurate that you need two different prepositions for "in the room" and "into the room". English sentences have a so-called "fixed structure", eg., they must be in the order subject - verb - object. For example, Germans can say "Eine Tasse Tee brauche ich unbedingt" (A cup of tea I need urgently), "Brauchen tue ich eine Tasse Tee" (Need do I a cup of tea) "Ich brauche eine Tasse Tee" (I need a cup of tea),or "Mann, brauche ich eine Tasse Tee!" (Boy, do I need a cup of tea!) - but in English you can only say the last two forms. Behind the surface, a mere change of word order, is a change in the thinking process. The English must plan the whole sentence before opening their mouth, whilst a German speaker may start the sentence with no idea which word will even come first. As long as an English baby starts to learn the English language, it is trained to think, to plan like the English. ▲ Collapse
| | | | | Please, more in detail | Dec 25, 2007 |
Bin Tiede wrote:
the Chinese language - ...It is often unclear, if an action has happened or it will happen. You need to find it out according to the context.
Bin, could you please dwell on this more in detail, may be tell funny story ?
Thank you
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