Re: weekly vocab

On Wednesday 03 April 2002 19:41, Aidan Grey wrote:

> At 07:41 AM 4/3/2002 -0500, Muke wrote:
(and someone else wrote, probably Aidan as well)

> >  For example, zoo week, wherein
> >
> > > the 5 (or 10) words would all have to do with the zoo. Or the
> > > computer wee, or the stew week, or the birthday week, or...
> >
> >The problem with something like that is... well, even with diverse
> > vocab like this week's people already say things like 'my
> > conculture doesn't have this' (birch trees are based on location,
> > werewolves on mythology, etc.)  I imagine quite a few people would
> > be left out with semantic fields like 'computer' for a
> >week...
>
>     On the other hand, Languages are supposed to be able to
> communicate something, possibly even anything. Even if there isn't a
> unique word for any given concept, circumlocutions could be used. The
> Bible _has_ been translated into languages that don't have a word for
> God, or that don't have palm trees, or camels, or...
Yes, and changed the cultures it was planted in. Granted, this usually
happened because the people who brought the Bible to those cultures did
so with *intent* to change them.

For a conculture, with a language that may have millions of speakers
but they're of necessity imaginary and usually resident in only one
person's mind, the danger of the culture being irrevocably changed by
concepts alien to it is immense.

This is why I don't want to translate from the Bible: I don't want
Biblical ways of thinking in Valdyan culture. Note that I carefully
avoid any mention of "purity" or "contamination". I'm not saying that
the Bible is bad (far from that; it's a great source of inspiration for
my real life), only that it's intrinsically un-Valdyan and I don't want
any influence from it in things Valdyan.

I don't mind change when it comes from inside; I do mind change when it
comes from cultures that the culture I'm working with can never have
come into contact with.

The way I think of it (other people are, of course, perfectly justified
if they think of it differently for their cultures) is that Valdyas is
in a self-contained world, powered only by itself. Any translation with
a *really* alien concept (whether it's computers or the idea of one
almighty God) will have a very large impact on the world, possibly
large enough to throw it out of kilter and make it less true to itself.
On a vocabulary of two thousand words, five or six words that are alien
*in the same direction* give an enormous push in that direction.

> So, if your lang
> doesn't have a word for birch, then how would your speakers, upon
> seeing one for the first time, name it? Words for car, gun, alcohol,
> and such in Native American languages being great examples (often
> translate as something like white:man's-horse or the infamous
> fire-water, for example).
And those words, or rather the concepts behind them, have changed
Native American culture beyond recognition. Language is a powerful tool.

There's a big difference between introducing a word that the language
as it stands doesn't have yet (I don't have a word for "birch" but I
know there is one; I've just never needed it) and introducing a word
that you know the language doesn't have because there's no referent for
it in the culture.

For what it's worth, I'm another of those people who are much better at
translating in context than disjointed words, and I'll probably do some
of the sentences (possibly replacing words with the nearest equivalent
that *does* have a referent, to get the grammar).

   Irina

--
irina@valdyas.org  Back up, but not perfect yet: www.valdyas.org/irina
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