All your little words

[muckefuck]

bunj said something innocuous the other day that go me thinking: "Well, your irises are up, but not blooming." Sounds like I own the irises, doesn't it? I don't. I had them in my possession for no more than a couple hours. They were a gift to bunj and e.; I bought them at Home Depot, took them to their house, and immediately planted them in the ground. Yet we both know immediately what he means when he says "your irises".

No textbook of English that I know of tells you a possessive adjectives can be used this way. They simply list them and give a few straightforward examples. Textbooks of foreign languages for English speakers simply list the equivalent adjectives and leave you to assume that they are used in exactly the same way. Are they? Could my brother speak of deine Schwertlilien with the same reference? What about outside of SAE (i.e. Standard Average European)? Does Korean work this way? Does Chinese? Which set of possessives would I use in Polynesian?

It's at this point that I start to get very depressed.

When he was young, my father couldn't understand what was so hard about learning a foreign language. You just memorise a bunch of new words, right? And he wasn't bad at memorising. A few Spanish lessons soon disabused him of this misconception. It may have been the grammar that changed his mind, but--as my friend zompist once pointed out--it's not the grammar that's the problem so much as the words. The number of times he didn't have the grammar to say what he wanted to is nothing compared to the number of times he didn't have the right vocabulary.

The worst part is that, outside of technical terminology, almost nothing lines up exactly. Something like "rotary cutter" or "epididymis" can probably be translated more-or-less exactly into any language with the appropriate domains. But "woman" or "fib"? Good luck! And it gets worse: So much of what we say consists of consecrated phrases. Replace one element with a near-synonym and nobody knows what you mean any more. (Consider: What if I had said "blessed" for "consecrated" back there? Would you still know what I was talking about?) I know I do this all the time. German-speakers have sometimes commented on how "interesting" my word choice is. There may be something fresh and arresting to not using the same fixed expression as everyone else, but I can't shake the feeling that they're only trying to make me feel better (while really sniggering behind my back).

Little words are the worst of all. Not to long ago, I wanted to write "Go nuts" in a foreign language (might've been German, might've been Welsh) and I realised I didn't know how. It's an expression I use commonly--probably once a week--and I haven't a clue how to say it in any language I've ever studied. The other night, I had zompist and his wife over and I used the opportunity to quiz them on the use of "Permiso". I hear it all the time from waitstaff, so I know if means roughly "Excuse me". But when can I use it? Thanks to her, I know you would use it to ask someone to let you past on the street, but not, for instance, to interrupt them in a conversation. But can you use it to mean "I can't believe what you just said!" or sarcastically in the manner pioneered by Steve Martin? You tell me.

It's enough to make me despair. Is there any point to learning a language if I can't practice it often and everywhere? Years of exposure won't be enough to pick up all the nuances that I express in my English within a single hour of ordinary conversation.

Comments

[pleinweb.livejournal.com]

Out of curiosity, would the possessive work in other languages if you replaced the pronoun with a name or proper noun? "Muckefuck's irises." I know far too little about foreign languages to soothe you. All I can think is that it would be a lot of fun to discover the equivalent, in other languages, for certain phrases used in English. There may be no way to say "go nuts" in Japanese and have it mean the same thing that you mean, but I bet there is something else you could say that would give the same "don't hold back" meaning with approximately the same feeling.

That would be a dictionary worth buying.

*soothe soothe*

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

The question of equivalence goes beyond possessive adjectives to the use of possessive expressions generally. I would assume that if "your irises" can be used this way, "Da's irises" could as well (in the proper context, i.e. where the person being spoken too also knew the history of those plants). But some languages could only use a prepositional phrase--i.e. "the irises from Daniel" or the like--and it might not be possible to replace this with a pronominal adjective like "his" or "your".

There's variation even in English. The British have a curious usage, typified by this comment from the blog of one Jane Galt: "My favorite thing about our Jane is that she doesn't know how to spell Britney." The "our" seems to indicate endearment, something like "our friend Jane", "Jane, who we all know and love"; its presence softens the sentence, making it sound less critical. Doesn't it? Again, the dialect is different enough that I have to guess. I wrote to an Australian the other day and realised that I didn't know the right turns of phrase to give it the note of casualness that I wanted. Do I call him "mate"? Will he understand "Have a nice life!" or will it sound like a kiss-off?

Discovering the equivalents is fun--it's one of the reasons why languages are my chief hobby. I was tickled as hell to find out that young Germans are using "Meinetwegen!" (lit. "on my account") roughly the same way young Americans use "Whatever!" But I think of all the expressions there must be equivalents for and it seems overwhelming.

There are dictionaries and phrase books like that out there; I own several for Japanese. They're fun for browsing, not so useful when it comes to finding the one expression you need in a particular context!

[cpratt.livejournal.com]

I always translated "Von wegen!" as "As if!" btw...