15 ms·

The problem is that English doesn’t have a subjunctive tense that maps cleanly to other languages. It is implicit and masked. Expressing doubt is even culturall

The problem is that English doesn’t have a subjunctive tense that maps cleanly to other languages. It is implicit and masked. Expressing doubt is even culturally looked down upon as incompetence. Hence the confusion by native English speakers.

lgessler 7y ago
I'm not sure what the particulars are in this article, but if the suggestion is that Japanese is unusually expressive and English is unusually impoverished, that probably isn't true. In general, Language A and Language B, unless they're very closely related, will always lack some grammatical categories in common that will make translation from one to the other difficult. Eastern Pomo, for instance, requires any well-formed verb to inflect based on how the speaker learned the information being reported, with four possible values: direct, reported, inferred, or non-visually sensed (smelled, felt, etc.) knowledge. Retaining this information would be awkward in English, and encoding it in an Eastern Pomo translation would often be impossible (in the context of translating a book). Hindi lacks articles, while English has at least a and the, which encode (roughly) how identifiable the noun it is attached to is in the present situation. The rules governing when to use the, a, or neither are incredibly subtle and complex (I'm sure you've heard second language speakers getting it wrong but not in a way you could readily explain). Going from English to Hindi, the articles can mostly be safely disregarded, but going from Hindi to English, you need to think hard about how identifiable each noun is in discourse. I'm probably taking all this a bit too seriously, but it's frustrating to see well-intentioned but wide-eyed writers like Iyer trying to evoke a sense of wonder propped up by pseudolinguistic claims.

15 ms·

The problem is that English doesn’t have a subjunctive tense that maps cleanly to other languages. It is implicit and masked. Expressing doubt is even culturall

by 0x8BADF00D 7y ago

lgessler 7y ago
I'm not sure what the particulars are in this article, but if the suggestion is that Japanese is unusually expressive and English is unusually impoverished, that probably isn't true. In general, Language A and Language B, unless they're very closely related, will always lack some grammatical categories in common that will make translation from one to the other difficult. Eastern Pomo, for instance, requires any well-formed verb to inflect based on how the speaker learned the information being reported, with four possible values: direct, reported, inferred, or non-visually sensed (smelled, felt, etc.) knowledge. Retaining this information would be awkward in English, and encoding it in an Eastern Pomo translation would often be impossible (in the context of translating a book). Hindi lacks articles, while English has at least a and the, which encode (roughly) how identifiable the noun it is attached to is in the present situation. The rules governing when to use the, a, or neither are incredibly subtle and complex (I'm sure you've heard second language speakers getting it wrong but not in a way you could readily explain). Going from English to Hindi, the articles can mostly be safely disregarded, but going from Hindi to English, you need to think hard about how identifiable each noun is in discourse. I'm probably taking all this a bit too seriously, but it's frustrating to see well-intentioned but wide-eyed writers like Iyer trying to evoke a sense of wonder propped up by pseudolinguistic claims.