Circles of word-meaning

[petronia]

[EDIT - unlocked]

How I think of it, anyway. There's almost certainly a proper term for it in linguistics, but I've only ever had the one introductory course, plus a bunch of self-imposed readings. (And I sold the book for it. I really shouldn't have.) Actually there's probably more than one term, because I use it for a couple of different mechanisms. The first is something that happens in translation, when word A' in language A translates to word B' in language B, but A' doesn't always mean the same thing at the same time as B', or isn't used in quite the same way. Or possibly A' designates a concept in A-cultural-paradigm that's functionally equivalent to the concept B' designates in B-cultural-paradigm, but strictly speaking they're not the same concepts. Like the Chinese 'qin', which is translated as but doesn't really have the same circle of meaning as English 'blue', or even Japanese 'aoi'. Here of course circle of meaning = range of colour, which makes it easy to see. Modern Chinese has proper equivalents for blue and green and black, but 'qin' exists in my head as potentially all three, or - tricksy! - all three simultaneously. And you've seen that colour, I'm sure, even if there's no word for it in English: it exists in pottery glaze, and beetle wings, and oxidated metal. But being that there's no word, reification (if one can call it that) forces one to be much more of a poet in English.

(I actually rely on a Japanese-Chinese dictionary to do my GB translations; rather, it's a Japanese dictionary, the detailed kind with examples and phrases and obscure kanji, that has a Chinese definition tacked onto the end of each word. The Japanese definition gives me a good sense of the Japanese-to-Chinese circle-of-meaning overlap, which tends to correspond closely anyhow, and the second step - Chinese-to-English - is for me nearly transparent, because I've spent my entire life doing it.)

All of which to say, Kadzuki's infamous "Fuuga" doesn't sound nearly as dumb in Japanese as it does in English. If Kadzuki were an Anglophone, he wouldn't have called his street gang "Elegance" either. 'Elegance' makes one think of opera pearls and Tiffany chandeliers. 'Fuuga' (exact circle of meaning as the Chinese 'fengya', but then it's a Chinese concept in the first place) is almost too Asian to be translated OTOH, but it rather takes in the tea ceremony and flower arranging and making poetry at the moon and... and slicing people to shreds with silk koto strings. It has the character for 'wind' in it; there's a sense of wildness, aesthetic freedom if you will, that you don't get in English at all. Bah.

There's another thing that happens with circles of meaning, which is when you use A' in B, not B' in B, with the meaning of A' in A. That of course is if A' exists within B in some form. ...Okay, I've lost everyone. But it's really intuitive, and everyone in Montreal does it all the time. I used 'complaint' in one of the drabbles below when what I mean is the French 'complainte', but strictly speaking it doesn't mean the same thing in English. It does to me, though, to the point where I don't really know how an American would feel about that sentence first-hand. But at least it's much better than when I want to use the French word 'mélopée', which I swear to God has no English equivalent, and it isn't even a difficult (or a very French!) concept. It refers to a drawn-out, rise-and-fall vocal phrasing, like the quarter-notey "throat" singing you get in Arabic or Indian music.

Comments

[worldserpent.livejournal.com]

Colors are particularly interesting. I've heard that the Romans had no term for grey, was it, and instead referred to it as another shade. In English, maybe you'd refer to such beetle/oxidated colors as iridescence, but that's more of a description than a color, I suppose.

Was recently reading interesting book by a Japanese author which touched on translation. He cited an excerpt from an English book about a woman making tea with water, and how Japanese students just beginning English would be confused, because while of course the woman is assumed to be making tea with hot water, the adjective is omitted, whereas in Japanese, an entirely different word would be used. This corresponded to how Malay, I think, has no separate word for ice, instead referring to it as "solid water."

There probably is a technical term corresponding to melopee, but it's probably something that only music scholars use on a regular basis.

[quixotic-sense.livejournal.com]

Modern Malay actually adopted a transliteration of the English word "ice": ais. You're right, though -- Malay doesn't have a seperate word for ice. It's usually referred to (at least where I come from) as air batu, lit. rock water.

A very useful word in Malay which I think has no exact equivalent in English is jelak. It's the feeling you get after eating too much rich food, particularly sweet ones, and you just can't face the thought of eating more. ^^

[petronia.livejournal.com]

Someone should write a book on how colour words influence cultural perception, and it wouldn't even be a short one. (Sometimes one barely notices. I've had someone point out to me only very recently that there's no English word for the Chinese colour called "apricot red" - much more glowing and saturated and ruddy than "peach" - though IMO that in itself would do as a description. Hot pink is also a very recent addition to the Western concept of colour. I believe it was a French perfumer who was inspired by Indian saris for her packaging, earlyish in the century, and described it at the time as a colour that "didn't exist in the Occident".)

I think Japanese wins the confusion game, though - the not differentiating between present and future tense really delivers the points. ^^ (Even Chinese forces a perfect/imperfect marker at that point, though Asian languages are just... more time-floaty, in general.)

The point of 'mélopée', alas, is that (circle-of-meaning again) it isn't a technical term. It's not-a-technical-term in the same way that 'ululate' or 'croon' aren't technical terms; it's a word that Baudelaire would use to write Orientalist poetry, she sighs, and there's just nothing for it in English.

[tsutanai.livejournal.com]

It's less cultural perception, perhaps, but there's lots of linguistics experiments on color terms. In general, across languages, you start with Black and White. Then, if a language has three (primary) colors, you add Red.... etc. I forget the order. (It seems that in Japan "midori" has become a primary color, despite that etymologically, it's obviously not one originally.)

And the effects carry over into sorting of course, and the definition of what's the most essential representation of the color, etc.

One of the few places that the Weak Linguistic Relativity Hypothesis was still credited when I was in the field. (The Strong one died not longer after Whorf did, I think....)

[worldserpent.livejournal.com]

That's interesting, about hot pink. I had always assumed that it didn't exist before a certain period because you needed industrial dyes to create it. Probably, then, hot pink can only be created by some natural substance existing in India? Fascinating to consider, when we can have clothes any color that we want, that dyes were once probitively expensive. (Refined sugar too)

Huh, and at this stage in the learning, I'm glad I don't need to remember one more tense.

Heh, for a long time I thought that ululate was a semi-technical term, because I usually saw it in descriptions of what people heard in the Middle East. At least I've usually seen people use it in the context of Mid Eastern mourning, even though the dictionary def doesn't specify it as such.

[ayatsujik.livejournal.com]

You're inspiring me to dig up dictionaries and squint for more colour words. Is the apricot red you mentioned '杏'? (damn, the language is starting to slip away already.) And somewhat unrelated to your post, but the different descriptors, sort of, that colours can take in languages (cf. English) - I've never seen why '绀' is navy blue in Jap and red-tinted black in Chinese. >_>

And fengya - 'tis a gentlemanly thing, nothing at all to do with them pale soft boys with limp wrists in teashops, deshou.

[tsutanai.livejournal.com]

I had heard that 朱色 (of a fairly nifty idiom, among others) is different between China and Japan. It Is Said that it was a translation error or something, but I wouldn't know how far to throw it to trust it.

The question is, I suspect, when did 紺 come into use in Japan? And for what? How did the use change, if it did? And what are the relevant dying processes? (Interestingly, they have something in common, which is the almost-black.)

And, what? Pale soft boys with limp wrists in tea shops? I always thought it was burly underworld un-integrated-into-polite-Republican-society types in tea shops. Maybe I'm in the wrong century again.

[petronia.livejournal.com]

朱色 is a vermilion/ochre red in China. It seems to mean pure (fire-engine) red in Japanese, but I've never been certain. ^^; That's the problem when you stumble into the murky pool of perception - I have friends who can't tell the difference between pink and magenta and lavender, and one man's vermilion could very well be another man's red or orange regardless of language.

[petronia.livejournal.com]

Yes, indeed, and indeed - it's one of those things that just never sound right in English. (Like my Chinese first name. >_>;)

Though there's some extrapolation to be done here, re what Kadzuki was on about anyhow. My take on it is that it's a stunningly excessive display of power: that he can afford to go around Mugenjou being gentlemanly and well-bred and dressed in pink, because no one would fuck with him because of it. Even the laid-back Kazu-chan of today has something of that pride, and it shows from time to time.

[z107m.livejournal.com]

its actually been a topic of discussion for a while, even Goethe speculated on the ancients' perception of color being different. (funny how we always think fo the pristine white marble sculptures of the romans and greeks, while in reality, they were painted pretty bright colors at times)
Linguistically, I think the hot names are Paul Kay and something Berlin... Kay was a linguist who teamed up with an anthropoligist to study these theories mainly pertaining to the romance languages, I think.
One of my crazy name dropping prof was really into them... because in our post-modern, post-structuralist, post-everything society, they seem pretty desparate to bring our dying field into the level of semiotics to justify the continued funding of the department.