4 ms·
A language's common vocabulary ("dog", "bicicleta", "Handschuh") probably has little effect on thought in a language. Idioms have great influence on expression,
by silentbicycle 18y ago
A language's common vocabulary ("dog", "bicicleta", "Handschuh") probably has little effect on thought in a language. Idioms have great influence on expression, however. They are crystallizations of the culture that has shaped a language, and are often difficult to translate without this implicit context.
For example, the Swedish word Lagom. Or, in programming, Common Lisp macros, monads in Haskell, the act of defining a word in Forth, etc. (It's easier for me to list idioms in a language other than English, because I'm immersed in English most of the time.)
While trying to implement algorithm X in a language without garbage collection (for example) is possible, the expression may become so burdened by otherwise superfluous detail that the original meaning is obscured like a "needle in a haystack".
- asdflkj 18y agoDo you think the word "lagom" characterizes Sweden? It has just now occured to me that words that are hardest to translate often seem to characterize the culture of origin as a whole.
- silentbicycle 18y agoThat the language has a concise placeholder for such a value means that it's probably culturally significant. I don't know how much it characterizes Swedish culture as a whole, but making it as easy to consider such a thing as, say, "truth" or "freedom" in English would probably influence discussions about e.g. sustainability. Another is that English doesn't have an immediate distinction between free-no-cost and free-unrestricted, such as "libre" vs. "gratis" in Spanish. This has led to some ambiguity in Open Source discussions, so the phrase "Free-as-in-beer" gets used a lot now.