If you haven’t read any of Bill Bryson’s work, you are a fool, a hermit, or a socially unacceptable combination of the two. I HIGHLY recommend his audio books. Hearing him read his own work is a snigger-fest. I think he's the fuddy-duddy (but charming) professorial version of Dave Barry.
I'm reading one of his grammar books (he writes travel, science, and language books) for the umpteenth time. You have to love a book that opens:
Any language where the unassuming word fly signifies an annoying insect, a means of travel, and a critical part of a gentleman's apparel is clearly asking to be mangled.
Excerpted from The Mother Tongue: English and How it Got That Way by Bill Bryson:
“...The richness of English vocabulary, and the wealth of available synonyms, means that English speakers can often draw shades of distinction unavailable to non-English speakers. The French, for instance, cannot distinguish between house and home, between mind and brain, between man and gentleman, between “I wrote” and “I have written.” The Spanish cannot differentiate a chairman from a president, and the Italians have no equivalent of wishful thinking. In Russia there are no native words for efficiency, challenge, engagement ring, have fun, or take care...
...On the other hand, other languages have facilities that we lack...Portuguese has words that differentiate between an interior angle and an exterior one...The Italians even have a word for the mark left on a table by a moist glass (culacino) while the Gaelic speakers of Scotland, not to be outdone, have a word for the itchiness that overcomes the upper lip just before taking a sip of whiskey. (Wouldn’t they just?) It’s sgriob And we have nothing in English to match the...French sang-froid, the Russian glasnost, or the Spanish macho, so we must borrow the term from them or do without the sentiment.”
Other terms we lack:
schadenfreude - (German) Delighting in another’s misfortune
sgiomlaireachd - (Highland Scottish) the habit of dropping in at mealtimes
So, "J'ai escrit" is not "I have written?" I thought it had a similar function in French. Maybe I never really caught on...
And the Russians really don't have a word for "fun." It only translates as "silly." ANother concept I found frustrating was "I don't care," but not in a negative way, in a "it doesn't really matter to me" way.
Posted by: Shannon at December 6, 2005 5:49 AMI forgot to finish that last thought, DOH!, they don't have a (regulary used) phrase that means "I don't care/it doesn't matter."
Posted by: Shannon at December 6, 2005 5:50 AMDrop it, Shannon, it's no biggie. ;-)
Jen, I will have to investigate these books. Thanks for the tip.
John, you'll love them. I recommend A Walk in the Woods and I'm a Stranger Here Myself. If you have a tape player in your car I recommend A Short History of Nearly Everything.
Posted by: Jen Rodis at December 6, 2005 10:36 AMshannon, j'ai escrit IS "i have written" in french, but i think the point jen is making is that there is no way to distinguish between that and "i wrote." they use the same words no matter how you translate it.
Posted by: kat at December 8, 2005 8:53 AMmais j'ecrivais ou j'ecrit? Whatever. My french grammar is dusty, and I understood her ulitmate point...that we have complex ways of describing time (such as "I will have gone") that other languages don't and vise versa, which is rather cool.
Posted by: Shannon at December 8, 2005 7:56 PM