Transcending origins: deconstruction and the value of knowing extra languages

In the Economist, I read tonight that Richard Weaver "wrote a book once called Ideas Have Consequences."

At first, I was annoyed by their use of the word "once." Is there some value in clarifying for us that he didn't write the book two, three, or sixty-one times? But the sentence felt wrong without it. Why? I started to think about the role that "once" played in this construction. Once (!) I arrived at the answer, I thought it would be neat to write about this episode, because it's actually a good, accessible story about the difference between a superior translator and a mediocre one.

One is tempted to think of once--which is derived from "one"--as fundamentally meaning "one time." Then, I thought about the Economist sentence in Japanese: The Japanese sentence that came to me automatically--based solely on intent and meaning, not words--was, "wrote a book quite some time ago." So, there it was. "Once" transcends its origin, and turns out sometimes to mean "long ago," with little/anything to do with one-ness.

A native English-speaker quickly realizes the truth of this proposition. "Once, my friend and I were on a trip," and so forth...

Where it gets more interesting, perhaps, is that "one time," a synonym of "once," turns out to convey the same meaning: "some time ago." For instance, "One time, I went to that store, and they were totally rude to me." (In fact, we almost never use "one time" to count occurrences." We do use "once" for that purpose. "One time" is used almost exclusively to place an event in the past.)

So, both "once" and its twin brother "one time" seem to transcend their origins in the counting world.

There are two morals to this story: First, a good translator doesn't translate words; he or she translates ideas. I know (pretty inept) Japanese translators who would have rendered that sentence as, "wrote a book [exactly] one time." Non-translators or poor translators think that translation is just word-for-word replacement. They don't get the fact that you need to understand the concept at hand, internalize it--separate it from its original words--and then choose new words for it from scratch in the target language. (I'm oversimplifying here, but the principle is important. It also explains why translation done by machines is still so shitty: they're basically word-for-worders, not internalizers.)

The other moral is that a second language can also be a useful tool for a writer--a prism through which he can peer at his native tongue. Kind of like pouring a mixed substance back and forth between two glasses to separate it out: idea expressed in English...then Japanese...then back to English.

Getting to the bottom of things

In its coverage leading up to the recent election, Time magazine wrote:

All of a sudden, boring bureaucracies like the Securities and Exchange
Commission, which have been undermined and underfunded by Republicans, become a
crucial bulwark against the rampaging free-market anarchists on Wall Street.
This is, as Obama says, a fundamental change — but not a radical one.

"Fundamental" but not "radical"? Is this last sentence saying anything meaningful at all?

"Fundamental" shares a root with "foundation." The fundamental attributes of a thing are those which underpin --sit beneath--its true nature.

"Radical" is descended directly from the Latin for "root" ("radix," I think). The root of a thing sits beneath it and anchors it to its true nature.

We might quite fairly, I think, call a foundation the root of a building...

One might argue that "radical" has acquired a sharp and dramatic nuance: Radicals want change, and they want it NOW. On the other hand, is "fundamental" any less sharp and dramatic when we apply it, for instance, to a religion ("[Christian/Islamic/whatever] fundamentalists")?

I'm not convinced that a contrast/comparison between "fundamental" and "radical" is meaningful.

When coworkers make themselves redundant

Colleague: "Make sure the e-mail is short, succinct, and to the point."

Me: "Unlike that sentence?"

To abuse or not to abuse: That is the paradox!

I love the fact that you can abuse someone and disabuse him at the same time. In fact, you can even abusively disabuse him!

It's an Odd Coincidence, Is It Not?

I am not the Japanese scholor that Driver-san is but I did do a few units of Pimsleur's Conversational Japanese.  One thing I learned was that if you add the "nay" sound to a word in Japanese it becomes a question of the form "is it not?". So "here is the car" becomes "isn't the car here?" by adding this sound. 

I found this very curious because I took Latin in high school (from a Jesuit named Father Crane whom, we were all convinced, had learned Latin as a child in Ancient Rome) and there was a similar construct in Latin. Well, not so much "similar" as "identical". If you add the letters "ne" (pronounced in Latin "nay")  to a word it expressed the exact same idea as the "nay" sound in Japanese. That is, "is it not?" 

This is either the mother of all coincidences (that two so very different languages should have the same exact sound used in the exactly the same way) or there must be some cross over from Latin to Japanese. That would be very strange, would it not, for the Romans to influence the Japanese?  I don't think anything like that happened in history.

But Japan was visited by Portuguese Jesuit priests. Portuguese is a "romance language" which means that it is heavily influenced by Latin. I have no idea if Portuguese has the "ne" construct in it but it sounds plausible to me. Maybe the Japanese got this very convenient verbal trick from the Portuguese who got it from the Romans. 

So perhaps both the Japanese and I learned Latin from Jesuits! 

An odd coincidence, is it not? 

Why the readings of Japanese characters can be such a mess

The core of the Japanese writing system, called kanji, comprises Chinese characters imported many centuries ago.

In Chinese, each character only has one reading. In Japanese, however, each of those characters usually has at least two readings. But it's easy to think of characters that have four readings. And I'm sure there are those with even more, but I can't think of one off the top of my head.

So why so many readings? Because each character tends to have more than one:

1) Japanese readings. The Japanese reading is the "native Japanese" word that expresses the concept described by the Chinese character.

2) Chinese readings. Why is it that the word only has one pronunciation back in China, but it's ended up having multiple Chinese readings in Japan? Because different pronunciations have gotten imported from different regions and eras of China.

Add to this the bonus of "ateji," whereby Japanese occasionally assign an arbitrary pronunication to a kanji or kanji compound. (This is like me telling you that my name is spelled "Stephanie," but please pronounce it "George.")

For a Japanese native, or a highly proficient foreign reader, none of this causes that much difficulty. The combinations of rules and rote memorizations burn their way into your brain after a while. But for the beginning Japanese-language student, it makes things pretty nutty.

Coincidence or Cognate? A story of 6-6-6.

The thing to keep in mind as you read this post is that, in at least a languages, "s" and "sh" are more-or-less the same thing. Japanese, English, and Hebrew, for instance, all treat "sh" as a variation of "s."

The Hebrew and Spanish words for "six" are, respectively, "shesh" and "seis." Coincidence? Or did the Hebrew word enter Spanish via Arabic? Spain spent 700 years under Arab rule, and quite a bit of Arabic found its way into Spanish. Wikipedia estimates that 8% of Spanish comprises loanwords from Arabic. So, did Spanish get "six" from Hebrew via Arabic, or no? This should be easily answered by finding out the Arabic word for "six," right?

Quite a few Arabic numbers are cognates of Hebrew ones. Remember, in hunting cognates, focus on the consonants.

1 = echad (Hebrew) = wahid (Arabic)
2 = shtyaim = ithnain
3 = shalosh = thalatha
4 = arba = arbaa
5 = chamesh = chamsa
6 = shesh = sitta
7 = sheva = sabaa
8 = shmoneh = thamaniah
9 = tesha = tisaa
10 = eser = ashra

From this pattern, we can see that the initial Hebrew "sh" seems to correspond to an Arabic "th." When "sh" falls in the middle of the Hebrew word, it seems to correspond to the Arabic "s." (The Kdsh = Qds model also supports this idea.)

So, WTF's happening with 6? Wouldn't we expect this to be "sisa" in Arabic? So are these words cognates or not? If not, is the Spanish-Hebrew "six" just a coincidence?

And here's another problem. Why would 6 be the only number that Spanish imported from Arabic?

I consider this mystery provocative, yet unsolved.