> For instance, there is no English translation for the Japanese wabi-sabi—the idea of finding beauty in imperfection—or for the German waldeinsamkeit, the feeling of being alone in the woods.
Writers who proclaim that English has no translation for word x from language y, only to provide a matter-of-fact translation in the very next clause/sentence always make me chuckle.
Or they provoke pedantic ire. Depends on how much sleep I've had. :p
It's the simple words. English doesn't have a translation for German Brot. The English word bread denotes something almost but not entirely unlike Brot.
The criticisms ring hollow when you have to use a bunch of different languages to show the supposed paucity of English. Does German have a wabi-sabi? Does Japanese have a waldeinsamkeit?
It's a similar thing with animals, when people say humans are useless animals because we can't swim as well as dolphins or see as well as hawks, even though we swim better than hawks and see better than dolphins...
Does "apple" in English truly equal "ringo" in Japanese? The context is similar, but the iconic implications and inferences are not an exact match. There is something uniquely American about "apple". Not "ringo", but "apple". Worth naming a company after even.
And that's just with a fruit. Can only imagine how asynonymous less concrete terms would be.
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[1] Oddly, I hear this a lot recently. Quick search brings up Theodore Sturgeon who I wouldn't mind attributing this to at all.
What is "uniquely American" about the word apple? Both the word and fruit come from elsewhere and still abound in those places: the word came into use in English over a thousand years ago, and the first apple tree to grow in the Americas would have been planted by a European settler some centuries later. There are cultural associations with apples in America, but do these attend to the word or the culture? And are they necessary for an understanding of the word 'apple' - whether by someone learning English as a second language, or as their first but in another part of the world?
Perhaps you mean that 'apple' has a different meaning in the United States than, say, in Wales, because its web of implications looks different in one place than another. Following that thought, though, the same would be true of two American speakers, who surely have their own idiosyncratic webs. It's an interesting idea. But are words not 'synonyms' that have the same referent, only because two speakers have different relationships to that referent? Is a word partly its evocation? Or can we look at its evocation separately from a stricter 'meaning' it shares between speakers? (Surely it shares something, or language would lose its point.)
Incidentally, synonym is not the word to be nullifying here. A synonym is a like word, something that may equal the original but usually differs in degree, amount, tone, allusion, or other effect. Anyone using a thesaurus without a dictionary is sure to embarrass themselves sooner or later: differences in meaning between like words are common, and it is no revelation to say that one speaker will have different associations with a word than another, particularly if they come from different cultures.
Absolutely. Red and blue states. The east and west coast. Socioeconomic class. Gender, race, age, education. You and I.
But those are the differences. What we have in common also pertains. Almost everyone is American, exposed to the same media climate, and, most importantly, speaks English.
And that is why we communicate. We connect and overcome our differences using what we have in common to get things done.
"Apple" is only the tip of the iceberg. It will mean different things to different people. But what we share between us culturally is the American "apple" and the English "apple". If we compare that with the Japanese "ringo" and the Japanese word "ringo" there will be differences. To say "apple" = "ringo" is only equating symbols and mere entry points, to which not all else automatically follows.
> evocation separately from a stricter 'meaning'
There is evocation, and there is meaning, at all times. There is also context, and the intent of the speaker. There is even body language and tone. Even this is a simplification, but it is far more accurate than what they taught most of us at school, which is something like "language = grammar + vocabulary". This model does not translate mechanically even though theoretically it's suppose to. What we've now found is that what is missing is not technology or algorithms or processing power, but rather, most of the picture. That's why it still takes a good human translator to translate it all. Computers still cannot infer intent, transfer emotions, or cross cultural lines without embarrassing themselves.
(Thank you for a thoughtful and stimulating response.)
I did confess the pedantry of my amusement-but-sometimes-irritation. I'll indulge myself to point out any substantive translation between two languages will involve expanding some words into phrases while some phrases may be condensed into words. The deeper irony of this way of presenting the issue is that it's usually ubiquitous and common words, which tend to have complex situational meanings that map very messily between languages.
For example, the English word power translates both pouvier and puissance from French, an imbalance which forces translators into circumlocutions that I lack the patience to attempt to explain on my tablet [1]. Which is to say, they are decidedly not matter-of-fact.
Its the presence of these ordinary words that really are problematic to translate that feeds my reaction here. By singling out highly-specified words that are unlikely to exist but straightforward to express, the real heart of the translation issue is actually obscured. What's worse is that this misleading and cursory method of explanation has become a sin twice over by embedding itself as a worn-out pop-science cliche. By now you may have surmised that I didn't sleep too much last night.
Having got that off my chest, I will now stop soapboxing all over this really quite fascinating article.
[1] this distinction has been heavily discussed however, as it's important in the work of several famous theorists. a googling should yield explanations.
There is no such thing as "word" and "phrase" distinction across languages. There are only ideas.
In written Mandarin, for example, there are only pictographic characters. Each single character translates to an English word or phrase, but which it translates to is completely arbitrary. It is extremely anglocentric to say "English doesn't have a word" for a given Chinese character, if in fact English has a phrase for it. The Chinese language has no obligation to translate each character succinctly into a single English word.
In fact, one of the greatest strengths of pictographic languages is the high degree of information density per character. More often than not, a pictograph will translate to an English phrase, not an English word. For native Chinese readers, inference comes naturally, as each character is built out of a set of "radicals," each representing a narrowly defined idea, that act as the primitive building blocks to convey a complex combination of their ideas within one "character."
I hate to be pedantic because I totally agree with the idea you're articulating here, but it is misleading to describe Chinese characters as pictographic. The correct term is "logographic" because they are graphic structures that represent morphemes. There is a large variety of character types, some of which are pictographic but most are not. My favorites are characters that visually represent abstract ideas:
上 下 凹 凸
up down concave convex
I recently realized that the logographic misconception about Chinese writing probably stems from the pretty recent past when Classical Chinese was the sole written form, and thus certain characters represented a common meaning to speakers across dialects. Of course, it's still not historically accurate to describe even Classical Chinese as purely "logographic" (for that matter, even Egyptian hieroglyphs have phonetic elements), but at least it explains the misconception somewhat
@jhedwards: My mistake - I guess I associated the term "logographic" with the idea that modern chinese characters represent "ideas," which is mostly false. My comment was aimed at the "pictographic" misconception, and was meant to agree with yours, which I evidently read too quickly.
In modern written mandarin, each character corresponds to a spoken syllable, which roughly corresponds to a morpheme, although sometimes it seems that without the writing system to differentiate the vast number of homophones in the language, the morpheme-syllable correspondence would get murky very fast. Which is indeed a manifestly logographic element of the writing system
Do you have a source for the logographic nature of written Chinese being a misconception? I understand that many people use Chinese characters phonetically to write their dialect, but when I did graduate work in Chinese the books and linguistics professors all referred to the writing system as logographic. Perhaps this is a new line of thinking I am just not up on.
Only a small percentage of Chinese characters are pictographs. Over 95% are compounds, with the first part suggesting the broad category of meaning and the second part suggesting the pronunciation.
> Each single character translates to an English word or phrase
Each single character represents one Mandarin syllable (with a very small number of exceptions, like 儿), which may or may not be its own word. Hence each character may or may not translate into an English word or phrase.
The upshot is that life is its own state of matter, essentially a self-stabilizing repeating pattern of matter and energy, like a waterfall or a chemical clock.
This seems to be a really overcomplicated re-stating of Darwin.
There is no "lower level" at which to explain it: Things that are good at making copies of themselves will tend to be more prolific. Restating Darwin in terms of thermodynamics takes a simple idea and complicates it without adding explanatory power, which makes it a poor theory.
Here is how you "say 'Life' in physics": Life is a pattern which obeys four rules:
- Reproduction: The pattern makes copies of itself.
- Inheritance: The copies share traits of the original.
- Variation: The copies can be different from the original.
- Selection: The success of the pattern making more copies depends on the traits which it inherits.
That's it. A tree is alive. A person is alive. A stone is not alive. A virus is alive.
And an idea is alive. It is a pattern in matter which replicates (I can tell you an idea; now there's one in my head AND your head), it inherits (your idea is similar to mine), it varies (you may reinterpret the idea, or combine it with your own ideas), and it selects (you will spread ideas you think are good, and discard those you think are bad). From this arises technology, or religion. We may, with a twist of the mind, think of either as an organism in its own right living in the habitat of human consciousness. (Perhaps all of our species' success can be attributed to the fact that our brains support a symbiotic form of life which can adapt far, far faster than DNA can).
And so by this definition even a solar panel is alive (and the "problem" of physically differentiating the two evaporates); it is just a stranger form of life that spends part of its existence as the plans for its production, coded in the configuration of matter in its blueprints, computer files, and human brains; and whose life cycle includes a stage where it is physically manifests and makes it self useful to its human hosts by providing them electricity. Its design is copied and mutated; some better at providing power for less effort, and thus more likely to propagate and eventually out-compete weaker designs.
All persistent dynamic structures are fundamentally circular motion. And there has to be an energy gradient to drive the motion against the resistence that is required to reproduce.
So, imagine a torus in a bath of molecules such that the torus rotates in proportion to the flux of light through it's hole. The torus rotates not like a steering wheel, but around itself (called poloidal rotation), such that the inside squeezes together and the outside expands. This might catch molecules from the surrounding bath, expanding the torus, changing it's shape. It would also tend to change it's relationship to incident light.
At some point, the torus could "shed" a second torus, roughly equal to it's original, smaller shape, which would participate with the environment in the same way, aggregating energy and matter to reproduce itself, until either all light is consumed, all free matter is consumed, or both.
Anyway, I'm not sure if this is all that realistic - but I think it captures the important quality of "life" when it comes to physics, mainly that life is circular motion that has the general character of memory and reproduction.
>life is circular motion that has the general character of memory and reproduction.
This is totally random but that bit reminded me of a quote from Black Elk Speaks:
>Everything the Power of the World does is done in a circle. The sky is round, and I have heard that the earth is round like a ball, and so are all the stars. The wind, in its greatest power whirls. Birds make their nest in circles, for theirs is the same religion as ours. The sun comes forth and goes down again in a circle. The moon does the same and both are round. Even the seasons form a great circle in their changing, and always come back again to where they were. The life of a man is a circle from childhood to childhood, and so it is in everything where power moves. Our tepees were round like the nests of birds, and these were always set in a circle, the nation's hoop.
That's lovely, but my meaning is a little more specific and technical, and comes from the singular observation that Life cannot be constructed from unbounded linear motion. The sun shines on the planet, making things move, but gravity pulls it all down again. It's only "circular" in the same sense that a human can be approximated by a sphere of water.
My understanding of "life" has changed since I learned how biology at a low enough level is mechanical. A virus is a mechanical structure with nothing that we normally consider "alive". It arrives at a cell by accident, and its mechanical structure happens to interact with the surroundings to literally drill into the cell and then interact with its contents, again mechanically.
If anything, the author could have gone into Wittgenstein more, but she did cover a lot of ground... My stab at it:
Before Wittgenstein philosophers were obsessed with the factual nature of words and tried mapping everything correctly (logically) with the natural world. Except, they were failing.
Wittgenstein came in and basically said language was never designed to represent reality, but rather is what emerges from the use cases between people. Communication is a transaction ("game" in his words), and not some mathematical or logical construct. It may have such properties, and the people and the context are all real, so reality is involved, but language is not a direct output, nor does it need to directly correlate to resist contradiction or paradox -- which are abound in philosophy.
Except, for those who speak it, language is their reality. Those who cannot overcome their own immersion can never see past their own words, which sums up much of his opposition. They are all correct in their world and in their words... except Wittgenstein was talking about how words and worlds worked.
In short, words can be arbitrary, and are constrained by the goal to communicate and transact. This exact phenomenon which Wittgenstein described as what we are doing is the phenomena England is describing as what biological systems are doing.
It's all Dissipative Adaptation, with language being the unique construct for every such system that emerges and sustains it all.
Contrast with his ideas in the Tractatus Logico-philosophicus, his first great work, where he boldly (arrogantly?) claimed that all philosophical problems are pseudo-problems caused by misuse of language.
It seemed to me like the author of the article was playing a bit loose with Wittgenstein's ideas. Isn't the idea that gravity is merely a "translation" of the curvature of spacetime an example of precisely the kind of Tractatus-speak that the language game idea was meant to demolish? Or am I missing something.
The idea the author seems to try to hint at is what i would call a Functor if we were talking about Categories:
- Language games have structure
- Structures can be compared by correspondences/functions
- A particular concept in one language game therefore could be transported along such a correspondence into another language game.
- We don't have a good correspondence between the language games of biology and physics that allows us to transport "life" from biology to physics.
- Or do we!???
P.S. It occurs to me that my analogy with categories and functors is itself a transport between the language game of category theory and the language game of language games.
> It occurs to me that my analogy with categories and functors is itself a transport between the language game of category theory and the language game of language games.
Bahahahahaha! Brilliant.
If I remember my category theory correctly, wouldn't this mean that you've discovered a Monad between the language game of category theory and the language game of language games?
If so, we could create the most incomprehensible monad tutorial yet written! Now there's a real achievement.
I also felt the Wittgenstein references "thrown" away in the article.
I guess the author tried to say that the word "life" has many meanings but in the physics "language game" its meaning is yet to be defined. In other words, defining what the word "life" means is defining what life is.
It seems that any discussion of what "life" is, inevitably stresses the language used to the breaking point. This leads one to ponder the nature of meaning itself. Philosophers certainly have a head start on that one. The scientist solution is to fortify a small subset of language before going into battle, whereas philosophers appear to grow vast fields of language in the hope that meaning survives attack by virtue of diversity.
It's a shame there is a huge lack of technical details here... maybe there is a profound thing that has been discovered, but I can't tell because the article is vague and describes the mundane and obvious in a grandiose style.
I am often disappointed with Nautilus. I find it tends to tout lofty or revolutionary ideas, and frosts them with intellectual prose, but underneath the article is surprisingly vague, content-free, and/or unscientific.
non-live systems follow the entropy maximization gradient, ie. they maximize entropy only locally. Live systems increase entropy beyond that is possible by only following the gradient, ie. live systems maximize the total entropy integrated over whole space-time path of the given system.
Writers who proclaim that English has no translation for word x from language y, only to provide a matter-of-fact translation in the very next clause/sentence always make me chuckle.
Or they provoke pedantic ire. Depends on how much sleep I've had. :p