The Problem of Translation
Why is green vert
My window looks out into a grove of trees. My experience is automatically meaningful. I see things I call "branches" and "leaves" "and"sky" and "green" and "blue" and "black". I don't really know where those words come from. They automatically get attached to my experience.
I don't even remember how I learned most words. Like everyone I didn't know a language when I was born. I wonder how I picked it up. How do the adults around me get the idea of sky across to me? If they pointed at the sky and said 'blue' how would I know that it was the sky they were pointing at and not some birds nearby or a lamppost?
Beyond that how do we pick up subtle details like grammar? Even now I have a hard job with the intricacies of it's/its. And what does 'the' mean?
I understand that human babies are predisposed to pick up the language spoken around them. I surmise that all human languages probably share a sort of meta-structure of verbs and nouns and modifiers onto which the details of vocabulary get attached.
I imagine being a newborn experiencing a meaningless series of experiences. Soon I would come to recognize Mom - her voice and her smile. I imagine that recognizing them would make me smile and voice something like mama and so it would begin.
I'm unilingual I confess - I took French and Latin in school but never was anywhere near fluent. I went to Scotland for a winter when I was 19 and worked in a carpet factory. I was surprised at how quickly I picked up the lingo and even accent without even trying . Even at that late age my language structure changed without me even knowing. I was a bit surprised when I left Scotland to hitch-hike around Europe that I had a bit of a brogue.
One idea that I'm curious about is whether there are things that can be said in language A that can't be said in language B. For instance, it's said that there is no word in English for the German word shaedenfreud. It means 'the pleasure one feels when an enemy suffers misfortune'. And it's true that there isn't a single word that expresses that in English; but the idea is easily stated. I'd guess that German speakers want to express the idea more often than English speakers.
A similar example: It is said that the Inuit have 50 words for snow. But we southern Canadians have at least 5 words for snow (like snow, slush, powder, crusty, yellow) and I bet those who live in the Sahara wouldn't have any. But it wouldn't be hard to explain to a Saharan what snow was if you could speak their language.
We live in a time where many languages are disappearing. Some have been actively killed off. Here in Canada there was a concerted push to destroy First Nations languages that went to the extent of ripping children from their homes to residential 'schools' where they were re-parented and forbidden to speak their native language. Many of those kids died of all kinds of abuse. To our horror we are finding secret graveyards outside of those schools. A blot on Canada for sure.
But I'm not convinced that important ideas or concepts were lost to humanity because of the suppression of those languages.
N V Quine wrote this sort of thing. His idea was that there are many different ways of explaining the same set of facts and in many cases there is no principled way of choosing among them - it comes down to personal preference. If you lived in ancient Greece I bet the story of Zeus hurling thunderbolts would work more as an explanation for storms than theories about how convection currents build up electric charge in clouds.
One guide in this situation is what EO Wilson called 'consilience'. The idea was that though each scientific exploration explored new territory it's conclusions don't contradict that which is already known - rather new science enhances old science. It doesn't always work out that way. Copernicus did destroy astrology even as his ideas used the data provided by astrology.
And then there are Kuhnian revolutions in science where one paradigm replaces another with very profound implications. It's not that the old paradigm was wrong in itself - it's that new investigations were showing stuff that the old paradigm couldn't account for.
Once in 1967 at Saint John High School the term 'chick' meant a pretty girl like my female classmates. I took a year off and hitch-hiked around Europe and by 1969 when I got to university that term was not said in polite company. My female classmates were women and no they weren't coffee servers for the men.
I'm happy to say that now a chick is a chicken newly hatched - I think anybody I asked would agree. We'd also agree that chicks are really cute
What do you think?
I present regular philosophy discussions in a virtual reality called Second Life.
I set a topic and people come as avatars and sit around a virtual table to discuss it.
Each week I write a short essay to set the topic.
I show a selection of them here.