Jerry: appreciate your germane comments. They merit more than this quick response, hindered by UNseasonable Pagan HumBug distractions. Your ref to American-Indian languages is quite central to the SWH (Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis) controversy (quod googlet*). Whorf, the amateur (in the kindest sense) linguist of the S-W pair, declared that Hopi grammar lacked “Western” tenses, and deduced from this all manner of fanciful images of Native American “timeless” thought-patterns and Pantheistic world-views. Other “primitive” languages (which, in fact, turn out to have dauntingly super-sophisticated complexities) were claimed to lack “Western” verbs for “having” in the sense of “ownership/possession.”
These linguistic differences were (still are) so appealing to certain politically “progressive” movements that it is considered near-Fascistic, pro-Colonial to point out the undeniable FACT that Hopi speakers have NO PROBLEM in distinguishing and articulating past, present and future events. NLs have so many different overt and covert tense-systems even within the Indo-European family (cf English continuous and historic-presents; Russian perfective aspect etc), but it’s a challenge to deduce any real cultural causes-effects. John McWhorter offers the wonderful example of DAMON RUNYONESE, able to convey all temporal modes with the “present” tense: “Yesterday I meet Harry the Horse who tells me he is in Florida last week ...” Or should we read some Hopi-like temporal transcendence in the Bronx Weltenschaaung?
Very good point, JF, about those happy bi- and multi-lingualists who might well disagree over what’s “sayable” in their different NLs! Let’s first put aside all those who say “I have these wonderful THOUGHTS but I just can’t put them into WORDS!” Well, we might say “Draw them” (followed by a painful VERBAL interrogation: Is that a moon or a saucer? A cloud or a camel?); or echoing Wittgenstein: “Whistle them.” Semiotically, of course, pictures and signs can convey many shades of meanings, but ultimately we need NL to mediate mutual understanding. Think of NL as negotiated discourse between Humans. Maxwell’s equations are sublimely non-verbal but need a few NL-based seminars before we understand “all them squiggles.”
Not quite clear how one could define “perfect fluency” in any single tongue; even harder to define “equal fluency” in two or more languages. We need to separate acquiring (via some form of “osmosis”) several distinct “grammars” (e.g., Hopi from mum’s knee and English from dad’s shoulders!) which lies at the still contentious heart of Chomskyan theory (Noam never quite came up with a good definition of “Native Speaker” although that concept is central in to his notion of competence [langue/parole]), and the “hit’n’miss” acquisition of lexis, and especially becoming familiar with such volatile elements as idiom.
Here’s a thought-experiment: Vladimir Nabokov meets physicist Pyotr Kapitsa**
Both bi-fluent English-Russian. Both studied at Cambridge. PK, alas, did get that elusive Nobel (in 1978).
But “equally” fluent?
KP: What’s the Russian for “the magnetic moment of an atom interacting with an inhomogeneous magnetic field?”
VN: Nye znayiu! Nye panimayiu! I can render each word “literally” without a dictionary but the overall concept is outside my immediate comprehension.
KP: I’m glad you trust me that I’m not just spouting meaningless gobbleygook. It wouldn’t take me long to explain to a fellow scientist in a different domain (such as you, dear colleague) the significance of the phrase (it helped me win a Nobel, nudge-nudge, a worthless trinket) but translating it for, say, a Cherokee non-scientist, would take much longer. Interestingly, the two words that slip literally and innocently into Russian are potential False Friends: “moment” (Russian MOM’ENT = both temporal and mathematical objects, not to be confused with VAZHNOST); and “field” (Russian POL’E = both agricultural and mathematical objects).
** Why not? Both born St Petersburg; PK 1894; VN 1899 [April 23 btw is NOT NECESSARILY SHAKESPEARE’S BIRTHDAY even allowing for calendric quirks! April 23 1564 is a GUESS based on the KNOWN date of the Bard’s Baptism: April 26. So much for FATIDIC astrology!
I spot a non-sequitur in Nims’s haiku anecdote, which turns out to be an inadequate counter-example to my NL-equivalence “axiom.” We have two separate problems (i) the meaning & translatability of Matsuo Basho’s Frog poem; (ii) understanding the reason for it being rated so highly in the Japanese canon. Nims’s Japanese friend, one might argue, was either insufficiently bi-fluent/bi-cultural for (i); or did not herself fully understand it (always easy to wave the hands and claim “This text is so unutterably inexplicable!”) For (ii), without knowing a word of Japanese, we can readily accept the verdict of generations familiar with Japanese literature where Basho is hailed as the Nippon Pushkin or Shakespeare. In fact, we are lucky to have at least THIRTY translations of his Frog haiku, said to be the most famous and repeated EIGHT WORDS in Japanese Literary History. See
http://www.bopsecrets.org/gateway/passages/basho-frog.htm
Literally we have
Furu ike ya Old pond!
kawazu tobikomu frog jumps in
mizu no oto water’s sound
Here’s a few of the many so-called translations -- hardly a major linguistic challenge, you may think. Yet each of Basho’s 8 words have been through centuries of mangles and biddy-combs. There’s NO Japanese consensus, Some say it has NOTHING to do with real frogs or ponds! BUT my axiom states that for each Japanese “native” interpretation, there’s an equivalent in English, Basque and Xhosa.
pond
frog
plop!
Translated by James Kirkup
old pond
a frog jumps into
the sound of water
Translated by Jane Reichhold
While an inappropriaate but hilarious switch of genre by Alfred H Marks gives:
There once was a curious frog
Who sat by a pond on a log
And, to see what resulted,
In the pond catapulted
With a water-noise heard round the bog.
I’m tempted to borrow from Burl Ives:
Frog went a-courting, wouldn’t stop — huh huh
Frog went a-courting, would stop
Into the lake went plop, plop, plop — huh huh?
After perusing them all, you may well ask “What’s the fuss?” WHERE’S THE BEEF? Well, one needs to consider Basho’s longer works such as OKU NO HOSOMICHI.
Buddhist Robert Atkinson has a nice reverse spin, hinting that Anglophones have the advantage over Japanese readers in appreciating the haiku that Nims’s friend had so much trouble explaining.
“This is probably the most famous poem in Japan, and after three hundred and more years of repetition, it has, understandably, become a little stale for Japanese people. Thus as English readers, we have something of an edge in any effort to see it freshly.”
Matsuo Basho being a contemporary of Shakespeare, one must note the problems of language change on top of a verse-form built on Basho’s deliberate Zen-like compactness. We have the same challenges in “translating” our senior, revered Bard into Modern English. Many Anglophones rate WS highly without a decent knowledge of Elizabethan English. Tim Henderson recently cited from Timon:
The sea's a thief, whose liquid surge resolves
The moon into salt tears: the earth's a thief,
That feeds and breeds by a composture stolen
From general excrement: each thing's a thief:
Hands up if you know what WS USUALLY means by “excrement?” Hint: in Love’s Labour’s Lost, Don Armado boasts to Holofernes that the King “with his royal finger thus dally with my excrement.” There’s hundreds of similar potential misunderstandings (naughty, wherefore, silly, revolve, ...)
More on Axioms and VN’s imagery after the Hols. DV
Stan Kelly-Bootle
* This from WIKI:
Linguistic theories of the 1960s—such as those proposed by Noam Chomsky—focused on the innateness and universality of language. As a result Whorf's work fell out of favor. An example of a recent Chomskian approach to this issue is Steven Pinker's book The Language Instinct. Pinker argues from a contravening school of thought which holds that a universal grammar underlies all language. The most extreme proponents of this theory, such as Pinker, argue that thought is independent of language, and that language is itself meaningless in any fundamental way to human thought, and that human beings do not even think in "natural" language, i.e. any language that we actually communicate in; rather, we think in a meta-language, preceding any natural language, called "mentalese." Pinker, calling it "Whorf's radical position," vehemently denies that language contains any thought or culture, declaring, "the more you examine Whorf's arguments, the less sense they make." (1994, p. 60)
On 20/12/2008 02:20, "NABOKV-L" <NABOKV-L@HOLYCROSS.EDU> wrote:
Stan,
I suspect you chose the word "axiom" carefully in
classifying the statement that anything that can be
said in one language can be said (possibly at much
greater length) in another. After all, if a bilingual
speaker says something can be said in one language but
not another, only other speakers of the same two
languages can argue, and then it's one person's word
against the other's. So it's an axiom like the aptly
named Axiom of Choice, which you can take or leave,
but some find it very useful to take it.
A Navajo woman used to tell me that some things can be
said (or make sense) in Navajo but not English, and
yesterday I heard the same claim about other Indian
languages on Native America Calling (a radio show).
Another example is a story from the essay "Poetry:
Lost in Translation?" that begins /Sappho to Valery:
Poems in Translation" (1971) by John Frederick Nims,
(which has a remarkable range of original languages).
Nims describes how at a dinner party a Japanese woman
tried to explain to him why Basho's frog haiku is "the
most celebrated of all haiku". After an hour she gave
up: "But you'd have to live in Japan!" Of course one
failure doesn't prove something can't be done, but it
raises the possibility.
Nims also disputes VN's statement in the /New York
Review of Books/ (Dec. 4, 1969) that "a poet's
imagery is a sacred, unassailable thing." He further
quotes "the Russian word, with its fluffly and dreamy
and syllables, suits admirably this beautiful tree."
He replies, "...suppose we called the tree a scab-bark
or a snotch." He gives other reasons to change
images:
http://books.google.com/books?id=SOIxSpnAOzAC&pg=PA16
He doesn't consider Nabokov's approach, namely
footnotes.
Unfortunately, Nims's translations aren't the best
arguments for his position that literal fidelty must
be sacrificed for rhyme, tone, connotation, etc. One
of his best additions, in my opinion, is in the last
line of his version of Goethe's /Fliegentod/.
http://books.google.com/books?id=SOIxSpnAOzAC&pg=PA207
(Limited preview, original on previous page.)
An outstanding howler is in /Natur und Kunst/:
http://books.google.com/books?id=SOIxSpnAOzAC&pg=PA187
Unfortunately, my other favorite disaster isn't available
in the Google Books view of this book, but as Nims says in
reply to VN, it's a change of weasels to minks (is that an
example of poshlost?) in a poem by Antonio Machado. The
weasels' connotations may have been wrong, but the minks'
are worse.
Jerry Friedman