GB drabbles

Okay, let's try this again.

( 0-v, vii, viii, xiv )

...Uh. (Really obvious by this point.) Whoever gets it first gets a cookiedrabble? ^^;

Circles of word-meaning

[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.