There isn't much of a mind of the language with such matters.
They are idioms and quite often native speakers do not actually realize what they are saying when they use them.
I remember that when I gained more proficiency at Finnish, that many Finns remarked that I was teaching them because I was manually analyzing what was actually literally being said and they never quite considered what they were saying.
Consider that many English speakers when they are saying “God damn it.” they are really not realizing that “God” is the subject, “damn” is the finite verb in the subjunctive mood, and “it” is the direct object, thus expressing a wish that God damn it, whatever “it” might be. — it is an indivisible idiom for them which is also why it is often spelt as one word.
Especially because the subjunctive mood is rarely used as such to express a wish in modern English.
I agree with your point about idioms many times being used without awareness of what they “actually” mean, and while I would still say it’s interesting for me to hear/see the idiom anyway, it’s not really the meat of where the “mind” is to me.
There are dozens of examples I can think of, such as how people refer to themselves and to others (Japanese is especially interesting here), how people communicate spatial relationships/directions, and how people refer to body parts (calf in Portuguese literally translates as “potato of the leg”).
It’s said that our language shapes how we think, and just the barest glimpse I’ve seen in to “literal” translations gives me a window in to not only how that’s true, but how particular languages can shape particular thought patterns.
> There are dozens of examples I can think of, such as how people refer to themselves and to others (Japanese is especially interesting here), how people communicate spatial relationships/directions, and how people refer to body parts (calf in Portuguese literally translates as “potato of the leg”).
The last one is surely an idiom, and the other parts are the ones that are often hard to translate literally.
I wouldn't say that “the honorable front” as a translation would really do justice to the meaning of /omae/ in Japanese and how it differs from, say, /anata/. “the honorable front” is the literal meaning of /omae/, but it's again an idiom that Japanese speakers scarcely realize the origins of, though Japanese's ideographic spelling perhaps would serve to make speakers more aware of such origins.
They are idioms and quite often native speakers do not actually realize what they are saying when they use them.
I remember that when I gained more proficiency at Finnish, that many Finns remarked that I was teaching them because I was manually analyzing what was actually literally being said and they never quite considered what they were saying.
Consider that many English speakers when they are saying “God damn it.” they are really not realizing that “God” is the subject, “damn” is the finite verb in the subjunctive mood, and “it” is the direct object, thus expressing a wish that God damn it, whatever “it” might be. — it is an indivisible idiom for them which is also why it is often spelt as one word.
Especially because the subjunctive mood is rarely used as such to express a wish in modern English.