Tag: words words words

Why Translation is So Hard

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It isn’t the literal meanings of the words that make it difficult.  It’s the connotations — all those associated ideas that hang around a word like shadows of other meanings.  It’s connotation that makes house different from  home, and makes scheme into something shadier in American English than it is in British English.

A good translator, accordingly, will try to convey the connotative as well as the literal meanings in the text; but sometimes that can be a whole bundle of meanings at once, and trying to fit all of them into the space available can be like trying to stuff a down sleeping bag back into its sack.

A couple of my favorite examples, from Old English because that’s what I studied:

“Cold” in Old English (and in the older Scandinavian languages in general) has, in addition to its literal meaning, connotations of “fated” — usually “ill-fated,” because nobody in the old Germanic literature ever had good luck — and “unlucky.”

So in the Old English poem “The Battle of Maldon,” when the poet says, Ongan ceallian þa ofer cald wæter Byrhtelmes bearn (“Then Bryhthelm’s son began to call out over the cold water”), the listener/reader knows that bad stuff is about to go down . . . as indeed it does, because what happens next is that the raiding Vikings wade across the ford — the cold, unlucky water — to engage with the Essex fyrd (the militia, more or less), and heroic disaster ensues.

Another of my favorites comes in the closing lines of Beowulf, after the hero is dead and everybody is explaining to everybody else just how bad things are going to get now that he’s gone (this is known as the Old English elegaic mode, and J. R. R. Tolkien stole large chunks of it outright for the poetry of the Rohirrim):   Forðon sceall gar wesan monig, morgenceald, mundum bewunden, hæfen on handa… (“Therefore shall many a morning-cold spear be grasped in the fingers, hefted in the hand…”)  That passage gives us the ill-fated “cold” again, and adds “morning” to it — morning, in Old English epic poetry, was a bad time of day, the time for surprise attacks and general low spirits.

All you need after that are two ravens flying past, and the wolves howling.

Local Option

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The big difference between grammar and syntax, on the one hand, and punctuation and spelling, on the other, is that grammar and syntax are part of the essential nature of language in the same way that bone and muscle are part of the human body, but punctuation and spelling are human-made, artificial, and arbitrary.

The spoken language is first, and primary.  The written language is a secondary construct, a device for pinning down and freezing in time the transient and ephemeral spoken word.  Spelling and punctuation are imposed upon the language from the outside, in the interest of reducing confusion and supplying at least a few of the non-verbal language components that are lost during the spoken-to-written changeover.  It’s not surprising, therefore, that some these externally-imposed cues can vary from region to region, or even among native speakers in the same region.

A couple of cases in point:

Grey vs. gray.  According to the dictionaries and the handbooks of usage, gray is the “preferred” American spelling and grey is the British one; but “preferred” is not the same as “required,” and a number of American writers use the grey variant.  (Full disclosure:  I’m one of them.  If I’m making up a style sheet for a copy-editor who’ll be working on one of my books, that’s one of the things I’m going to tell him or her.)

The serial comma.  (Also known as the Oxford comma, or the Harvard comma.)  This is the comma that comes before the “and” in a list of items in a series:  “three cheers for the red, white, and blue”; “send lawyers, guns, and money”; “every Tom, Dick, and Harry.”  Some writers believe in the serial comma with an almost religious fervor; others don’t like it at all and never use it.  This one really is a personal choice; just be consistent, and let your copy-editor know.

Peeve of the Day

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I know you’ve heard this one before.  And I concede right now that there’s no logical reason why “already” should be spelled as one word with a single “l”, while “all right” is two words and a double “l”.

Language isn’t consistent, okay?  It’s in a constant state of change, and not all the bits of it change at the same rate.  At some time in the future, “all right” may well have finished mutating into the single-word, single-“l” form — but that time is not now.

There.  I’ve got that off my chest, so it’s back to the word mines.

Buried Tech

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Language is full of buried tech.  For the writer of historical or created-world fiction, this poses some interesting problems.

On the one hand, you’ve got the language of tech that hasn’t been invented yet (for historical fiction) or that flat doesn’t exist (for created-world fiction.)  Consider, for example, all the resources of vocabulary and metaphor that come from living in the world after the discovery of gunpowder:  We speak of people going off half-cocked, and of plans hanging fire; we talk of loose cannons; we say that someone has a hair-trigger temper.  None of these expressions make sense in worlds where gunpowder and firearms are absent.  Using them in those contexts is sloppy writing — it may not bother most of your readers, but the ones that it does bother, it will bother a great deal.

Another example of not-invented-yet tech causing language problems:  In a pre-clockwork world, you aren’t going to have people saying, or even thinking, things like “in a few seconds” or “a couple of minutes later” — the resources didn’t exist to divide time into pieces that small.  In most parts of medieval Europe, for example, you’d be lucky to get things pinned  down to the nearest canonical hour, and that only if you were someplace where you could hear the church bells ringing.  (For really brief intervals of time, a person might think in terms of breaths or heartbeats, or in terms of how long it took to recite a particular prayer, such as “a Pater-Noster while.”)

The other language problem you get with buried tech comes from obsolete technology — things that were once common enough to pass into metaphorical use, but that have fallen into desuetude while their metaphorical use continues.  For a good example of this, take a look at this entry over at Making Light, in which the actual mostly-disused process behind the still-common phrase “batten down the hatches” is explained and discussed.  The question for writers in this case is, how long does it take before the metaphor becomes completely detached from the object or process that it once referred back to, so that it can function simply as a bit of vocabulary in its own right?

“Batten down the hatches,” even used in its figurative sense of “to make ready for possible disruption ahead”, still implies a world and a society in which sailing ships once existed; but if you’re writing about a created world in which — for whatever reason — there isn’t enough open water to make sailing ships a part of its past history, can you get away with using “batten down the hatches” in its figurative sense?

My guess is no — not for a couple of centuries.  Possibly longer, if people keep on writing adventure stories about the Age of Sail, and other people keep on reading them.

It’s a fraught thing, vocabulary.

Word Peeve of the Day

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Today’s word peeve (I can’t help it; deadlines make me peevish): a couple of not-exactly-homonyms, affect and effect.

People mix these up a lot, and it’s not really surprising.  They look exactly alike except for that initial vowel, and in spoken English the difference between those unstressed vowels becomes even more obscured.  Just to add another layer of confusion to the vocabulary cake, each of them can function both as a verb and as a noun.

It works like this:

Effect has its ancestry in the Latin verb facere, meaning to make or do or bring about (plus a host of related extended meanings), plus the Latin prefix ex-, meaning from or out of (among other related things.)

Effect-the-noun, accordingly, is something that is made or done or brought about:  One effect of the hurricane was a prolonged power outage.

Effect-the-verb is less common; it means to cause or bring about something:  The new mayor hopes to effect some changes in local disaster response policy.

Affect also goes back to that same Latin verb facere, this time with the prefix ad-, meaning to or toward.

Affect-the-verb is the more common one here; it means to do something or cause something to happen to someone or something else:  The hurricane will affect the east coast from Maine to the Carolinas.

Affect-the-noun is the least common of the lot; it’s mostly used in psychiatry and related disciplines, and refers to the outward manifestation of someone’s inward state.  A person who isn’t showing much by way of such outward manifestation has a flat affect — his/her affect, in this case, is the behavior that he/she is turning toward the world/the observer.  Most of the time you won’t need to worry about this one.

(As you probably have guessed, I’ve got hurricanes on the mind right now.  I’m not in the storm’s current path, but I know people who are.)

More on Names

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A couple of thoughts on names, as I surface from the depths of deadline madness:

Avoid alliteration and echo.  (I know — you saw what I did there.)  If you’ve got one character named Fred, don’t name his best friend Frank.  The same goes for his worst enemy, his favorite second cousin, or any other major character he’s likely to interact with on a regular basis.  And don’t name his sister Frances, either.  Your readers will thank you.

In the real world, of course, you’re likely to find clusters of alliteration all over the place — we’re all of us likely to know more people than there are vowels and consonants in the alphabet.  But fiction isn’t the real world.

Also: When inventing names for characters in a created-world fantasy, it’s generally a bad idea to borrow names wholesale from an existing or past this-world culture — your readers may make assumptions about your imagined culture that you didn’t intend, or may decide that you’ve borrowed more than just the names.  This is a can of worms you don’t want to open by accident.  (Cans of worms should only be opened deliberately and after considerable forethought.)

Making up your own names out of nothing but a handful of phonemes is a tricky process, depending a lot upon having a good ear for such things — and fewer people have a good ear for such things than think they do.  There are computer programs these days that generate English nonsense-words, meaningless but pronounceable collections of phonemes that can be sifted through for potential names:  Gammadyne’s Random Word Generator is a full-featured program with a lot of customizable options; or if you’re looking for something quick and free, the nonsense word generator on this page will display you a list.  Of course, you’re still stuck sorting through lists of words like Acenmithok, Cegraen, Heunara, Seligis, Cersposhe, Lis or Ellets, Michapere, Abiled, Aliger, Dernald for the ones that’ll actually work .

My own keepers out of that bunch, if they were all going to be characters in the same story, would be Heunara, Seligis, Lis, and Dernald; Heunara and Lis would be female and Seligis and Dernald would be male.  But that’s mostly because I’m arrogant enough to believe that I do have a good ear for such things.  Or at least a trained one.

(A quick-and-dirty shortcut, if you don’t want to go the computer-generated route:  Look at the names of minor characters in Geoffrey of Monmouth’s History of the Kings of Britain and Malory’s Morte D’Arthur.  They’re pronounceable, they’re in the fantastical vein, and they draw on the raw material of the common French/English/Celtic name-hoard without being obvious about it.)

Fatal Verbs

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There are a couple of verbs — both of them used at times for dialogue attribution — which might as well be specialists in character assassination.

One (and I have Teresa Nielsen Hayden to thank for the tip) is “whined.”  As soon as a character whines something, he or she loses the respect of the reader.  Heroes don’t whine.  Strong villains don’t whine, either.  If you want your readers to dislike some character, all you need to do is hint that the person might have whined at some point.

The other verb is “to smirk.”  Only smug, self-satisfied characters smirk.  Likeable characters don’t. A smirk is not a smile; nor is it a grimace; and it doesn’t substitute for either one of them.

(I’ve been fighting that fight for going on four decades now.  I’m nothing if not persevering about these things.)

Back Again

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I’m home from a week spent teaching at the Viable Paradise writers’ workshop on Martha’s Vineyard.  As usual, I did as much learning as teaching; a stretch of time spent in the company of other writers is always invigorating.

It’s also exhausting, especially when you have to plunge directly into a couple of editing gigs and a heavy deadline.

But I’ll try to keep y’all posted, as it were.

(Yes, my native dialect is one of the many variants of American Southern, tempered by seven years of grad school in Philadelphia, fifteen years as a camp follower Navy spouse, and a couple of decades’ residence in far northern New England.  What this means, in practice, is that I have access to an actual second-person plural, which is something that a functioning language really ought to have.)

 

Homonym of the Week

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Because I’ve been bumping into this one all over the place lately.

Things that are discreet are quiet, unobtrusive, not-noticed, and don’t draw attention to themselves.  “Smith made discreet inquiries into Jones’s financial history.”

Things that are discrete are separate and distinct from each other.  “Jones set up discrete budgetary categories for his various expenditures.”

Got that?

Good.

 

Another Thing Not to Do

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As a general rule, avoid writing dialect.  If you don’t have a dead-on ear for that sort of thing, it’s not going to work — and the failure state of attempted dialect is truly dire.  Not only do you risk coming off as unintentionally funny (and “funny” is just one of the many many things in writing that you only want to be on purpose), you’re putting yourself in position to get called out for imposing a privileged outside-observer point of view upon the native speakers of whatever dialect you’re trying to write.

Furthermore, styles in writing change, and dialect has been out of fashion for some time now.  But it wasn’t always so.  English literature of the nineteenth century, in particular, was crammed full of painstaking representations of different dialects:  national dialects, regional dialects, class dialects, all carefully done in what passed (in those pre-International Phonetic Alphabet days) for phonetic spelling.  Sir Walter Scott did it — the characters in The Heart of Midlothian speak Scots broad enough to carpet a floor with — and Mark Twain did it and even Alfred, Lord Tennyson did it (check out his Northern Farmer: Old Style and Northern Farmer: New Style for a couple of wince-worthy examples.)  One reason for the popularity of written-out dialect pronunciation may have been the common practice at the time of reading books out loud in the family circle; if the reader wanted to “do the voices”, the written-out dialect would give him or her some guidelines.

Sometimes, the way the writer transcribed a character’s dialect said as much about the writer’s own dialect and that of his or her intended audience as it did about that of the characters.  Check out the coastal New England dialect as depicted by an educated Englishman for an English audience in Rudyard Kipling’s Captains Courageous, for example.

(The Heart of Midlothian and Captains Courageous are both good books in spite of the dialect writing.  I don’t really recommend the Tennyson, though, except as a curiosity.)