Re: [wolfrunners] Languages & SF/F (fwd)

Yoon Ha Lee wrote:

> >> I think I have a pretty good background in languages myself (two years each
> >> Latin, Spanish, and French). However, Americans on the whole are generally
> >> ignorant/intolerant of other languages.
Ignorant, yes.  Intolerant?  I'm not so sure about that.  I would say it
is easier to claim that Americans are not driven by economic factors to
learn other languages to the same extent that speakers in virtually any
other part of the world are.  In America and Canada, one can travel
thousands of miles and travel through barely a handful of isoglosses
demarking the limits of one dialect from another.  In Europe, it is not
difficult to travel a hundred miles without running up against a significantly
divergent dialect, or even language. (This is not to say there is anything
good or bad about this condition;  it is merely stating the factual case.)
In much of the rest of the world, that phenomenon can be even more
exaggerated.  People, at root, learn languages not because they like to,
much as we on Conlang might think otherwise, but because they are
driven to do so because they need the other languages to survive, in a
very real sense.

If Americans are in fact generally intolerant about other languages, I would
say it is not a sign of intolerance of languages per se, but intolerance of the
people speaking them, since anything that differentiates people might be used
to divide them as well.

> When I read "A Clockwork Orange", the edition had an "analysis" included,
> and the person spent a lot of time discussing the "meaning/symbolism" of
> the slang words. I was very proud of myself when I realized I had figured
> out something that this literature "expert" obviously had no idea about:
> the slang words were simply variations of the Russian word.
>
> The person didn't seem to have bothered to think about any other possible
> roots of the words (what is it with this obsession with symbolism?). It
> wasn't that difficult to make the connection. I had had only one class of
> Russian at this time and it jumped off the page at me.
I'm not sure that this strengthens the case that people are intolerant of
other languages. Ignorant, yes, but not intolerant.

> > I treat any sf/f I'm writing as a translation.  I use
> >"jenar" (from the morpheme-root jnr) for "dagger" only because it has
> >significant cultural significance, and the weapon is peculiar to that
> >society.  I use vra and ves instead of yin and yang because I modified
> >the philosophical system, etc.
>
> My Russian teacher really tried to impress on us that you can't always
> directly translate words. For an example, she would write Russian words
> up on the board and give the English "equivalent". *Then* she would tell
> us what the word *really* means--all the connotations and nuances that
> come from being a Russian. Direct translations are nearly impossible.
Well, "usually" only in proportion to the abstraction that the word is being
used as a label for.  There is, on the contrary, usually no problem in
translating words like "mother", "sun", "grass", etc., since most language
groups have similar notions about what those entail.

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Tom Wier   |     "Cogito ergo sum, sed credo ergo ero."
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