So my boyfriend speaks Singhalese, and is always receiving phone calls and speaking Singhalese with others. I always want to know everything that is going on lol but sometimes he says it can’t be translated. There are also times he will say something that sounds like “Singhalese Singhalese college Singhalese” and I will ask why are you using random English words throughout? And he will respond that there is no translation.
As a monolingual speaker, I don’t understand how this works. Shouldn’t everything have its own word in every language? I understand having weird phrases in your own language, or jokes that wouldn’t translate, but not simple words.
Edit: didn’t know you could get downvoted for asking a question. Thanks guys.
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Aside from the ‘complexity in translating’ comments, which are true, there are some languages that shift the distinctions between the parts of English like nouns and adjectives. I had this Japanese friend who would use the word ‘chansu’ (chance) but always in the positive connotation, as in “my big chance”. But he would always leave the qualifier out because it was part of the word to him. To which I always replied, “There’s a chansu that I’ll get hit by a bus today!” When thinking it over, I noticed he also included the affect (how you feel about it) of “big chance” in ‘chansu’ so the meaning to him was adjective-noun-affect all wrapped into one word. So, in summary, even a single word sometimes is hopeless to translate because you can’t extract it from the context.
tl;dr. Cultures are different, so ideas and concepts they have singles words for will be different.
>Shouldn’t everything have its own word in every language?
So the obvious answer is. Well…no.
But it’s pretty interesting to explain *how* that might be.
So I’m going to take your example of Singhalese not having a word for college.
I assume you are in the US. We typically have an elementary school, middle school/junior high, and high school. Then after high school is college. Right?
Pretty much everyone goes from elementary school to middle school to high school. Lots of people stop here but some might go on to college.
But in Germany it’s different. In grades 1-4 everyone goes to the same schools. Called *Grundschule* this could translate to elementary school.
But after than students are actually broken up into three groups, based on how well they did. These are completely branching paths.
*Hauptschule*
This is basically for the “slow” students. Typically it’s 5 years.
*Realschule*
This is 6 years and it’s a bit broader than *Hauptschule*, but not as much as the last category.
*Gymnasium*
This lasts 9 years and is for the “smart” kids to get them ready to go to college.
So what would you call *Hauptschule* in English? Highschool? That doesn’t really work, it wont really convey the same idea. *Hauptschule* can only really be translated as “highschool but specifically for students that aren’t going to go to college but instead become something like a carpenter or mechanic” What about *Gymnasium* “highschool but for smart kids”?
You see how these concepts don’t really match a single word in English? We can still explain the same concept using multiple words, though. We just never bothered to condense that idea into a single word.
There are a few things, one is not all languages have words for all concepts, because they usually are not needed. A good example is English has “he” and ”she” to refer to a person, if you don’t know their sex there is no word, if you see a a baby in a stroller you have to ask the parent their sex before you can say “oh he is so cute”. We do have a word for a non-human that isn’t sexed, that would be “it” , you can say “aww it is so cute” when talking about someone’s cat, that doesn’t work for a baby.
Not all languages are like that, some do have words for referring to a person without a sex. There are a lot of more complex words too, stuff like “microprocessor” doesn’t have a word in a lot of languages, it’s a recent term, and languages tend to lag, often people will use these words in English because it’s easier, and eventually they just respell it with their pronunciation rules and that’s the word in their language. Also, there are just a lot of words that languages have come up with that would translate to simple phrases, “the pull of the void” might be a single word in some languages.
Communication is a tricky thing. Each language needs to create words for communication and the base of it is that the people using it shape it to serve them in the best way possible. They can express a feeling or something important to the community , but that thing could be so special and unique that others languages just never get a synonymous.
But natives can always explain how that word is used and the meaning of it.
Every language is different. Not just that “Gato” is Spanish for “Cat”, but that there are concepts that one language may have that another may not have, because those languages grew and evolved in different cultures, in different circumstances.
For example, ***Mamihlapinatapei*** is a word in Yagan, the indigenous language of the people of Tierra del Fuego that means “the wordless yet meaningful look shared by two people who desire to initiate something, but are both reluctant to start. ” It’s one word in their language, a simple word that means something, but it takes a sentence to explain it in English. Not all languages express the same ideas in equal fashion.
So, if you speak two languages, and find that one of those languages has a better word that explains an idea that the other language doesn’t have, you might find it easier to use that other word, than to try and invent a brand new word for your language that has the same meaning.
Just as a point of topic, you may have picked out a bad example with Singhalese.
I’d assume he’s a native speaker, which means he’s wealthier (since he speaks english as well, and you only speak english, a small leap of faith), which means the person he’s talking to is also probably also bilingual english as well, so this may simply be the best way to communicate the idea and they both know it, or they are referencing something specifically unrelated to Sri Lanka, so they may just use the english word for it, say like “bowling alley” or “badonkadonk” or “crackwhore” that there just may not be equals. I dunno, just using random made up examples.
I have friends who speak it as well, and they mix a lot of english with Singhalese as well when they are talking with their Sri Lankan friends who speak both.
The one thing no one has said yet…maybe he just doesn’t want to tell you.
My wife speaks Khmer and I am glad I don’t know what her mother says about me.
The concept you are looking for is “loanwords”, common in all languages (even English!). Basically, a concept is introduced to a culture or language, a concept that was formerly completely alien to the language.
“College” is not a concept Singhalese had until recently. Now they are familiar with it, but instead of inventing a new word, they just borrow the existing one– and that is what you hear when you eavesdrop.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loanword](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loanword)
(I mentioned English, our language is pretty much nothing BUT loaner words, and I mean that seriously. English has words from Latin, Greek, German, Old Norse (Viking), Celtic, French for starters, and most other languages along the way. Some languages, like French, are very picky and reject most loanwords, but English is kind of a language whore. We take everything that comes our way. This is a large part of why English has so many bizarre spellings, rules, exceptions, etc. We’ve been borrowing and inventing for 2,000 years and haven’t slowed down in the modern day!)
Here are a couple short videos that you may find interesting.
* [https://youtu.be/LQEzTcLH27U](https://youtu.be/LQEzTcLH27U)
* [https://youtu.be/EqLiRu34kWo](https://youtu.be/EqLiRu34kWo)
* [https://youtu.be/H3r9bOkYW9s](https://youtu.be/H3r9bOkYW9s)
There is also different cultural contexts. Try to translate “app” to someone living in 1920 or 1820
There’s a lot of words and concepts that don’t have direct translations between languages.
Take “purple” in Spanish. The have “morado” and “púrpura“. The first is a bluish purple and the second is a reddish one, in addition to “Violeta” which is in the middle.
In common usage English would call all three purple, particularly the first two. Someone accurately translating “morado” would have to describe it rather than jus insert the English word. Eg: if someone told you they have a “camisetta con rayas de moradas y púrpuras” a direct English translation would be “t shirt with purple and purple stripes”. Doesn’t quite work.
For examples in English between countries – in the U.K. “Community College” isn’t a thing. If you’re talking to someone from the U.K. (who doesn’t watch much US TV) and mention “Community College” you’d have to go and describe it to them. Similarly in the US a UK “Overdraft” isn’t a thing with banking (basically a pre-approved rolling personal loan available on your checking account with no repayment schedule, just you clock up interest whenever you have a balance lower than zero in your checking account, but it’s not a credit card as you don’t have to make a minimum payment and different laws apply to checking account cards vs credit cards). How would you describe that in America using a single word?
So when you have people who are bilingual talking it’s fairly common to sub in words from their other language when it’s a better fit, this happens a lot when talking about things between different countries as there are stuble differences between concepts in different countries.
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