Why can't anything be 100% clearly translated?

Its not subjective at all. These great writers like Shakespear and Milton uses phrases from the Hebrew bible as their punch line.

Like what - I never stated the post was from a media? What is unsubstantiated is the term RUBBISH with no directions. Do you find the first mention of Mount Arafat as rubbish - or historically vindicated? Is the omission of pivotal verses of a text substantiated for you?

 

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Of course it is.
There is no objective standard for "literary style" with regard to superiority or not.

So what?
They used what they needed. And Shakespeare in particular introduced a large number of phrases into the English language.

Fraggle has already pointed the numerous errors, distortions and outright falsehoods in the quoted document.
Oh, and per the forum rules if you can't post a link then you should give the source anyway. Otherwise it could be seen as plagiarism (or invention on your part).

And your reply betrays an equally false perspective, for example:

The falsehood here is that document you cited did NOT claim that Hebrew writing appeared from nowhere, but that the language itself did, which is what Fraggle replied to. Yet you ask for surviving writing, as if that makes the point.

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Oh, and your constant misuse of the word "alphabetical". The word means that the contents are ordered alphabetically, which is true for neither the bible nor the torah.
Plus, of course, the other slight problem of Hebrew not actually having an alphabet.

I'll leave your other attempts at obfuscation and falsehood for Fraggle to reply to, since he made the larger post.

 

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I love the way you worm yourself out of a compliment

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There are some terms that can be used in a linguistic sense, or in a cultural sense, or both.
Terms like "dialect", "dialectal"; colloquial"; "vulgar" come to mind.
"Vulgar" as in "vulgar Latin" means something very specific, as you are probably aware of.

I gave the example with Latin being considered a dialect of Sanskrit from a Sanskrit-centred perspective to point out how much perspective can change what something is termed.

If you read 19th century works in linguistics, you can see that the way some terms are used is different from the way they are used later on.
Or read Aristotle's Poetic, preferrably in different translations.

(Anyway, I only found out about this by accident once, it is not my field of expertise.)

 

It would depend on where you are in the Spanish speaking world.

"Hmm, okay, I don't see that at all, but okay," Is just a quick way of saying, "Hmm, okay, I don't accept what you just said, but I accept that you believe it," or "Hmm, okay, I don't see what you're seeing, but I believe you anyway."

So the whole thing depends--obviously--on context.

Were I addressing my friends in Spain, I'd say,

"Eh, bueno, no lo veo ni nada, pero vale." If you were conveying a lack of ability to see.

"Eh, bueno, no te sigo, pero vale." If you were conveying casual misunderstanding.

All of which supports the OP that nothing can be translated directly. Many sentences have multiple meanings, and the meaning has to be translated not the sentence.

~String

 

I still say that's bullshit - and you never dealt with the examples I posted the last three or four times you made that assertion.

"On time" and "in time" and "over time" and "of time" and "under time" and "through time" and "across time", to point to an example you yourself invoked, do not mean at all the same thing - none of them are synonyms, and the differences are all (in at least some contexts) significant.

Probably none. There were beats.

About the Hopi conception of time, Pinker knows less than many grade school teachers on the Hopi res. And the idea that those teachers are overpaid and underworked dilettantes is best simply forgotten in a mild fog of embarrassment.

You're old enough to know better.

Tip re your audience: if there are still any people around here who take confidence for competence and belligerence for authority, they are a shrinking minority. Just saying.

 

The great Eskimo vocabulary hoax

 

If I were a Hopi, and some Ameri would come to me bothering me with something, I would think "Why on earth should I try to do and think as this person wants me to?"

"On the bridge" and "under the bridge".
That is "little meaning"?

If anything, it seems that on some fundamental metaphysical level, you just do not appreciate relationships between phenomena, and so you minimize the roles of their indicators.

:bugeye:

 

Words get their meanings from the way they are used.

That's why a good dictionary will define a word, and also show usage.
You can't translate the usage directly into another language.

 

Iceaura:

You think my getting banned every time a moderator sniffs around here means anything to me?

Nice.

So confidently written, as well-- I'm trying to decide if your arrogance sneered to the right or the left when you wrote that.

It takes a mere 80 volunteer-hours at intellectually challenging places like day care centers and kindergartens, where the syllabus includes deconstructions on nose-wiping next to cootie protocols, and a mere 4 years in college to earn a certificate that entitles a poorly taught animal to teach younger animals addicted to television.

And you-- are actually-- claiming the average grade school teacher knows more about language than Pinker, a man who is not only so passionately obsessed with verbs he never watched television when young, but has a doctorate in cognitive neuropsychology and teaches at MIT?

Really?

Now tell me about Malotki and how he doesn't know the Hopi language or rock art or Latin as well as Middle Classed Midge taking three weeks to teach simple math to a moron she just spent 3 months empowering to believe that math is not as important as his sweet 'self esteem'.

Here is where competence comes in, Iceaura:

Substantiate your claim that the average school teacher-- you know, that woman up there so dutifully mistaking memorization for learning and grading for thinking, she's that fucking retard who will scowl on bad spelling and solecisms like That Awful Hanging Participle, good little scholar that she is-- yet could not write a decent piece of prose if her fucking life depended on it -- tell me how she knows more about the Hopi conception of time, or their language, than Pinker does.



Edit:

Singnal:

Thank you.


Superstring:
Castillian Spanish has this magical way of squeezing Broca's area til all the beautiful language dancing around in there gets a hernia, sounding as stilted and empty as the typical Spaniard.

Perhaps its the whole European thing?

 

Some words have few associations other than their simple meaning.

"The boy was sitting on the chair"
would be easy to translate into most languages.


"The lad was resting on the stool"
would be a little harder.

Lad implies an apprentice, eg stable lad, and a male approaching manhood.
Resting implies that the lad had been working, but now isn't.
A stool is a very simple chair, with little ornamentation.


There is much more information in the second sentence.


Harder still would be something like this:


She was dressed in the mourning clothes of a
widow. Her companion, also in black, appeared as a well-
formed young woman about eighteen, completely possessed of
that ephemeral precious essence youth, which is itself
beauty, irrespective of complexion or contour.
From "The Mayor of Casterbridge" by Thomas Hardy

Try translating that into Czechoslovakian.

 

I mentioned the blond, didn't I?

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I feel certain I mentioned the blond.
But maybe I didn't.

 

Because it is being used for 'understand' or 'experience' or perhaps 'believe.' Which are also dead metaphors or at least not originally literal. But given the context is translation, we have the visual sense being used as a metaphor for experience or believe. He is not saying that something about the language was not visible. Especially given what he was saying he did not see.

'It is an idiom' would have been better on my part, you're right. I was referring to the phrase not the preposition alone.

 

What would be a more formal, non-colloquial alternative to "at all"?

 

There are no instances of_______________.
or
____________does not occur.

or

There is no degree of_____________

IOW I do not think there is a direct formal one, but sentences of another structure would show up in dissertations and fact books.

But note: I do think 'at all' is colloquial, but my actual use of colloquial, in the post gedanken dismissed as babble, was not correct. So I changed my previous post.

 

http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/all

Or how about under no circumstances?

 

A short paragraph from the NY TImes; the first I came to.

A car bomb near a Shiite mosque in a village north of Baghdad exploded among crowds of people on Wednesday, killing at least 13 and wounding 24 others, the police said.

The prepositions in blue provide information.
The one in red, arguably, is a placeholder.

 

Do you get the "IT Crowd" on TV in the states?
That sounds just like the character Moss.

Moss: [laughing] Oh, dear me.
Jen: What are you laughing at?
Moss: This flipping circuit board, Jen. Some chump has run the data lines right through the power supply. Amateur hour! I've got tears in my eyes!


I'm not being too critical of you, Fraggle.
I love the character Moss, and he often reminds me of myself.