About 6,000 languages are in use in the world. And there are many dead languages we still know a lot about. There are quite a few things that we who use English might find strange about other languages, but also things we could learn.
I think the notion of giving a capital letter to every noun, as they do in written German, is an interesting idea. I live in thrall to a Cat, you have a Dog, my Uncle keeps a Giraffe.
I’m not so keen on words having a gender as they do in German, because it doesn’t seem to be consistent. Der Vogel (the bird) is male, die Ente (the duck) is female. To further confuse matters, das Auto (the car) and das Buch (the book) are neutral.
Perhaps it makes sense to Germans.
And other languages order the words in a sentence differently. French (and many other languages) puts the adjective after the noun it refers to. They’d say une chat noir (a cat black).
German has all sorts of sentence structures. They almost always have the verb as the second idea in a sentence, which gives odd (to us) sentences like “Oft esse ich Kuchen” (often eat I cake).
Conversation subjects can be very different. In some Asian countries it is normal, even polite, to ask someone you are making small talk with: how old are you and how much do you earn? We English-speakers would never dream of doing that.
But then non-English speakers find it weird that we say “It’s very windy today” on a windy day. They’ve already worked that out for themselves.
Some languages have words that don’t have absolute equivalents in other languages. There is, in some quarters, huge debate over whether the Virgin Mary was actually originally described as a virgin.
In Hebrew texts, Mary is described as almah, which meant “young” or “maid” but not necessarily “virgin”. The Hebrew word for virgin was bethulah. But that wasn’t the word used. Almah was translated as parthenos in Greek, which can mean virgin.
It has difficulties, as you can see.
Much cleverer and more learned people than me have discussed this in great detail, so I offer no opinion other than to say that precise translation is clearly important.
Moving back on to (relatively) safer ground, Chinese word meanings can depend upon whether you pitch a word high or low. “Ma” spoken in a high tone means mother, but ma in a low tone is horse.
That could be troublesome if you got it wrong.
Word of the week
Gotterdammerung (noun)
A loanword from German meaning the cataclysmic collapse (of a society or regime) marked by great violence and disorder. EG: “There would surely be a gotterdammerung if we were to change the order of adjectives and nouns in English”.
Read the latest Oh my word! every Saturday in The Courier. Contact me at sfinan@dctmedia.co.uk
