A Rose by Any Other Name
It is said that man is the only species that uses language. (Listening to some animals, though, one sometimes wonders.) It seems our world is built on shades of meaning, and perceived intentions of language. The true power of language has nothing to do with its science of grammar, but with the interspersed clouds of vocabulary.
The more languages you speak, the more nuances you see. Being able to speak three languages - English, Castilian, and Galician - I sometimes find the words easy to translate, but not the real meaning. The word parish in English to me speaks of a neighborhood church to which believers may go from that neighborhood or ten streets over because they like the priest or because there doesn't happen to be a church of their denomination any closer. In Galician parroquia speaks to me of various villages in which whatever one wants on a religious basis (weddings, funerals, etc.) has to be done in that church because that's the church that handles those villages' religious needs.
Village is another word with different connotations. In English, it speaks to me of New England, small communities, fall foliage, roadside farms, pick-your-own-apples. Aldea turns into curvy lanes, stone houses and painted houses stumbling together in kitty corner conversations, kitchen gardens behind wire fences, looming woods, curiously pecking chickens, cock-a-doodling roosters, squealy pig pens, and quilted fields. These nuances are lost in translation.
Of course, many of those meanings also depend on the speaker's experience. Outside New England, I don't have the experience of a village to have other understandings of the word. I also don't have the experience of an aldea outside Galicia, though Spain is pretty much homogeneous. Local experience can also create local language. Sometimes words are used that mean something different elsewhere. That happens in Galician very often. Pine needles are called differently sometimes in neighboring parishes or villages. Here, we call them jaruma. A couple kilometers away, they call them picos. Our guiso (stew) is someone else's estofado (meat and potatoes).
There is a hypothesis in linguistics, called Sapir-Whorf, which has two views, one, that language determines the world view of the person, and two, that language provides a coloring of that world view, but in no means fully determines it. I go along with the second, though not completely. Language is a result, in my opinion, of the need for communication and the history of a determined area. English has evolved from many different sources. It can be called a Germanic language, and a Romance language because it was first formed by Angles, Saxons, and Scandinavians, and later revamped by the Latin-speaking Church and the French Normans. History has determined that the word village is derived from the French village and not from the German dorf.
That history of an area also gives the nuances of the words. However, the greater worldview is not so much affected by language as by gained knowledge. The nuances remain a part of the local or national culture. That is the reason why, in interminable foreign language classes, we also had to read about the countries where those languages are spoken. That's why we sometimes had to be bored by tales written by Rabelais in French class or Quevedo in Spanish class. We learned the language, and also had to learn a little of the culture to fully understand the meanings of the language we were learning.
One reason I don't like to read English books in Spanish is that sometimes the translator has no understanding of such nuances, and uses the wrong word or group of words. Sometimes, for a translation to keep the meaning, it cannot be exact, but has to adapt to the language it is being translated to. If the translator is bad, I find myself stopping every other sentence and translating it back to the English, and I never get involved in the story. That's one result of our poor English language teaching. Vocabulary and grammar are memorized and spit out, but never really incorporated into the world the person sees, because the nuances have not been learned, and therefore, the language cannot be well understood.
With the years, language has become fascinating to me. While teaching English can sometimes be exasperating when the child or teenager only cares about getting the minimum passing grade, gaining knowledge of language and seeing relationships and shades of meanings simply becomes more interesting.
The more languages you speak, the more nuances you see. Being able to speak three languages - English, Castilian, and Galician - I sometimes find the words easy to translate, but not the real meaning. The word parish in English to me speaks of a neighborhood church to which believers may go from that neighborhood or ten streets over because they like the priest or because there doesn't happen to be a church of their denomination any closer. In Galician parroquia speaks to me of various villages in which whatever one wants on a religious basis (weddings, funerals, etc.) has to be done in that church because that's the church that handles those villages' religious needs.
Village is another word with different connotations. In English, it speaks to me of New England, small communities, fall foliage, roadside farms, pick-your-own-apples. Aldea turns into curvy lanes, stone houses and painted houses stumbling together in kitty corner conversations, kitchen gardens behind wire fences, looming woods, curiously pecking chickens, cock-a-doodling roosters, squealy pig pens, and quilted fields. These nuances are lost in translation.
Of course, many of those meanings also depend on the speaker's experience. Outside New England, I don't have the experience of a village to have other understandings of the word. I also don't have the experience of an aldea outside Galicia, though Spain is pretty much homogeneous. Local experience can also create local language. Sometimes words are used that mean something different elsewhere. That happens in Galician very often. Pine needles are called differently sometimes in neighboring parishes or villages. Here, we call them jaruma. A couple kilometers away, they call them picos. Our guiso (stew) is someone else's estofado (meat and potatoes).
There is a hypothesis in linguistics, called Sapir-Whorf, which has two views, one, that language determines the world view of the person, and two, that language provides a coloring of that world view, but in no means fully determines it. I go along with the second, though not completely. Language is a result, in my opinion, of the need for communication and the history of a determined area. English has evolved from many different sources. It can be called a Germanic language, and a Romance language because it was first formed by Angles, Saxons, and Scandinavians, and later revamped by the Latin-speaking Church and the French Normans. History has determined that the word village is derived from the French village and not from the German dorf.
That history of an area also gives the nuances of the words. However, the greater worldview is not so much affected by language as by gained knowledge. The nuances remain a part of the local or national culture. That is the reason why, in interminable foreign language classes, we also had to read about the countries where those languages are spoken. That's why we sometimes had to be bored by tales written by Rabelais in French class or Quevedo in Spanish class. We learned the language, and also had to learn a little of the culture to fully understand the meanings of the language we were learning.
One reason I don't like to read English books in Spanish is that sometimes the translator has no understanding of such nuances, and uses the wrong word or group of words. Sometimes, for a translation to keep the meaning, it cannot be exact, but has to adapt to the language it is being translated to. If the translator is bad, I find myself stopping every other sentence and translating it back to the English, and I never get involved in the story. That's one result of our poor English language teaching. Vocabulary and grammar are memorized and spit out, but never really incorporated into the world the person sees, because the nuances have not been learned, and therefore, the language cannot be well understood.
With the years, language has become fascinating to me. While teaching English can sometimes be exasperating when the child or teenager only cares about getting the minimum passing grade, gaining knowledge of language and seeing relationships and shades of meanings simply becomes more interesting.
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