Geoff Nunberg’s latest Fresh Air piece “Meeting of the Minds”:http://www-csli.stanford.edu/~nunberg/compromise.html is a riff on the notion that Arabic has no word for “compromise”. I suggested to him that lots of fun was to be had googling for the phrase “has no word for”. Like, apparently German has no word for “humor”. But of course, Geoff was already way ahead of me. I cite from his email:
bq. I did a number of searches on strings of the form “L has no word for,” “no word in L for” and the like. The results were all over the place; I’ll refrain (well almost) from comments:
For L = French, I got hits for the completing words “home,” “ape,” “mind,” “negro,” “kilt,” “noodles,” “doggie bag,” “grub,” “river,” “tacky,” “jockstrap” (really?), “duct tape,” “hangnail,” and “shallow.”
For L = German, “unless,” “humor,” “[the concept of a] team,” “fluffy,” “wife/husband,” “actuary,” “bitch,” “pantaloon,” “fair” (as in “fair play”), “playing,” “convenience,” “humility,” and “bullying.”
For L = Russian, “a/the,” “identity,” “design,” “privacy,” “toe,” “copywriter,” “freedom” and “thirsty.”
For L = Spanish, “boys, fathers,” “flunky,” “heartburn,” “sportsmanship,” “bullfight,” “accountability,” and “compromise”(!).
For L = Chinese, “brand,” “wrist,” “garage sale,” “headhunting,” “word,” privacy,” “improvisation,” “art,” and “yes” (the last cited as a problem for Chinese translators of “Ulysses”)
For L = English, among other things, “a housebreaker who works only by day,” “sabbatical/jubilee” (not native words, the writer says), “Schadenfreude,” “the area between the nose and the upper lip,” “a mother who has lost a child” (Saporta made a point of this one somewhere), “Gemutlichkeit,” the parents of one’s son- or daughter-in-law, “Zukunftsangst,” “ugly beauty,” “informed guess,” “hospitality” (of the sort whose denial can get you in trouble with God), and “a person who sends letter bombs because he is mentally unbalanced and believes that technology is getting out of hand” (I thought we had done that one).
One page I came across adds to this that Guugu Yimithirr (spoken in North Queensland, Australia — I bet it didn’t occur to Geoff to try that one) doesn’t have words like “left” and “right”. I know some people who probably would prefer being speakers of that language. By the way, the page in question is the official “FAQ”:http://www.lsadc.org/web2/faq/faq.htm page of the Linguistic Society of America on the topic of “Does the language I speak influence the way I think?”:http://www.lsadc.org/web2/faq/faqthink.htm.
PS Geoff confirms my suspicion:
bq. No, I didn’t think to try Gugu Yimithirr. Ed Keenan told me once, btw, that the name of that language translates roughly as “this/that sort of talk.” (’Gugu’ is “speech,” and ‘yimi-thirr’, sometimes ‘yimidhir’, is a demonstrative with a comative suffix.) I can imagine the exchange that first attached the name to the language for English-speakers: “So, what do you call that kind of talk?”
Geoff
Arabic for compromise is taaradhin, verbal noun from a Form VI (reciprocal action) verb, and a trilteral root meaning “to be content or satisfied”: They contented one another and each was satisfied.
Since we’re swapping esoterica …
May 31st, 2003, at 10:12 am #Although the identification of the morphemes of Guugu Yimidhirr is correct, the overall meaning is “the speech that uses yimi for ‘this’ (as opposed to the words other languages use).” Blake and Dixon (in Handbook of Australian Languages, Vol. 1, p. 29) say “As with the names of other languages of the region, the name distinguishes this particular language from its neighbours by seizing upon a distinctive word… The suffix -dhirr ‘with’ is cognate to the endings seen in the names of languages spoken to the South (for example, Gugu Yalandji) and to the North (for example, Guugu Nyiiguudji, formerly spoken near the mouth of the Jeannie River).”
Since we’re swapping esoterica…
May 31st, 2003, at 10:43 pm #My information on Arabic comes from Khalil Barhoum, who did his doctorate in linguistics at Stanford and now directs the Stanford program in Middle Eastern & African Languages and Literatures. I asked him about the comment from BlogalVillager (Colin Brayton) that the Arabic word for compromise is ‘taaradhin’, and Khalil wrote in reply: “The word ‘taaradhin’ means something like ‘reconciliation,’ not ‘reaching a middle ground,’ with the implication of a struggle or hard feelings being involved in the process.”
Of course it may be that ‘taaradhin’ renders “compromise” in some contexts (or maybe it means “undetached compromise clauses,” something the Mideast is in sore need of right now).
June 8th, 2003, at 9:52 pm #