CONLANG Digest - 7 Jun 2000

>From:    Lars Henrik Mathiesen <thorinn@...>
>Subject: Re: Kench declensions (long), was Two YANCs: Para-British
>
>For further reference, here are all the characters that MS programs
>will knowingly lie about, telling you they are in ISO Latin-1:
I don't think it's so much "knowingly lie about".  NT's charmap separately
lists "Windows Characters" from "Latin-1".  When people type a Windows
character, they see a character, 'cause it's in the Windows font they're
using.  The mailer just sends what it's given in the format it's been told to.

>From:    Jorge Llambias <jjllambias@...>
>Subject: Re: Untranslatability
>
>> >"El hombre se es"
>> >
>> >It's perfectly normal Spanish, but very difficult English.
>
>It is NOT perfectly normal Spanish.
Yes, "normal" was probably not the best word.  Maybe "legal" would be
better...

>If other native Spanish speakers
>say that they understand it but cannot put its meaning in
>other words, then how can we tell that they all understand the
>same thing?
To say something can't be translated isn't to say it can't be understood.
Many English concepts don't map exactly to other languages' words for similar
concepts, or even to similar English words.  That isn't to say that
English-speakers don't understand each other when they use them.

>Anyway, in my opinion something is untranslatable only
>to the extent that it is vague or undefined.
Very good!  Ranges of vagueness ought to be very hard to retain across
languages...   "El hombre se es" has a different range of meanings than a
word-for-word English translation has.


     *Muke!

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