I'm sorry, I'm unaware of any situation in which synonym does not mean "another word which is similar in meaning." Perhaps you could give me a few examples?
@Morgan Willows I pretty much responded to your talk abou "original" words, peanuts and weight of a vocabulary. Sorry if I was rude in any way fact is, however, and I just can't agree with your statement that Marry feeling "quite pleased" and "quite happy" is pretty much the same - I'm not a native speaker, but I think I can still feel the difference, not only in melody and different roots of "happy" and "pleased" (compare www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=please with www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=happy) but in the "weight" of the words as I hear them... When I try to translate these two sentences to my nat.language, they sound nothing alike - I have several choices of words, but I'd never choose the same words...
I was referring to this bit: Emphasis added by yours truly. Do you really argue, that substituting one synonym to another cannot change the meaning of a sentence? If so, I can give you plenty of examples where such substitutions do change the meaning of the sentence enough, that e.g. the meaning could be misunderstood (e.g. as hostile when it was meant to be polite) or it can simply change the meaning more blatantly, so the meaning is clear albeit different after the substitution. The words may have similar meanings, i.e. close to one another, but in practice, the connotations such nuances can carry may have a notable effect in the meaning of the sentence. If, however, you did not mean the quoted bit with the bolded part to be seen as an absolute, it doesn't show in the wording.
Actually if you'll read the entire sentence and take all of it in context (which is how sentences are supposed to work), what I actually said was that a synonym CAN be substituted without changing the meaning of a sentence. That "can" means it's possible not that it's an absolute set-in-stone rule. So, yes, it does show in the wording. Ok, I'm going to try to clear this up a bit. If you and another person are going to be given a number of points based on how many different coloured cards you're holding and you have two blue cards while the other person has a red card and a blue card, which one of you has more colours? Obviously it's the person with the two different colours, yes? So they would get two points and you would get one. That's what I'm talking about. "Happy" and "pleased" are essentially both blue cards. Maybe one is slightly lighter blue than the other but they're still both blue. When I'm talking about vocabulary weight, I'm talking about counting the number of concepts that a language has words for. "Happy" and "pleased" both cover the concept of feeling good about something, which makes them essentially two different words for the same thing. It's not about the emotional weight of the words but the conceptual weight. You can have 100 different words for 1 concept. That doesn't mean you have 100 concepts, you have 1; I'm not going to count 1 thing as a 100 things just because there are that many words for it. I'm counting the concepts, not the words. Does that make more sense?
I think it's a myth that English has more words than "any other language" - the people who claim this obviously just haven't studied any other language in depth. In my experience, Czech and Chinese are both far more descriptive than English - esp Chinese, since that's the one I actually speak. I can often translate things without problems from English to Chinese, but from Chinese back to English is a huge problem because there're few equivalent words, and where in Chinese we can have compound words that describe roughly 4 different things within the space of 2 syllables (recognised as one word), to express the same in English would take up about 3 sentences, all of which need to be structured very cleverly in order to retain the poetry inherent in the compound word of the Chinese. Czech, in my experience, has far more nouns than English - they have one single word for the phrase "And in a little while" and they also have a single word for "apple core". In English we must say "core" - if you simply said "apple" the meaning wouldn't be the same. But Czechs actually have a name for the apple core. Personally, I think a LOT of bravado surrounds English. However, there is one thing I'll grant English - English is not as easy as some foreigners who speak it like to say it is. English grammar is quite a feat to wrap your head around and being much more interchangeable than say, the grammar in Czech is, actually makes it far more difficult to grasp in full in the end, even if you could learn to speak and use English faster than Czech. Anyway sorry for the tangent - back to the question at hand. Which language interests you the most? When you write, you're gonna want to play with it. Which language do you enjoy playing with? You might take more pleasure out of writing the language you have a genuine interest in. For example, I'm learning Czech and Japanese right now, and neither language is objectively "better" - but when I'm learning Czech, I'm a little "Ah it's quite interesting", and when I'm learning Japanese I'm like, "Oh WOW. Yes, and then? And then what?" I know little of either language, but my personal interest lies in Japanese, and thus I'm always gonna be more enthusiastic. I am far more reluctant to speak Czech than I am of speaking Japanese, even though I can actually have casual conversations in Czech, whereas in Japanese I'm capable of only saying, "I ate breakfast in the morning". I only just learnt last night how to say "I brush my teeth" in Japanese. But it matters not. I actually introduced myself in Japanese to an office full of Japanese teachers, but I wouldn't do the same in Czech. It's got nothing to do with your actual level, but I simply try harder with Japanese because I actually want to learn it. As for publishing - as others have said, write in the language of your market. If you're successful enough, your Dutch novel could always be translated and sold internationally. And the truth is, really, I'd be glad to succeed in even just one country, regardless of where it might be. Sure, the Netherlands are much smaller than the States and UK and Australia and New Zealand combined - way smaller. But heck, it's still an entire frigging country! What I mean is, I wouldn't worry too much. Write in the language you actually enjoy using.
@Morgan Willows that is, I must say, if not unique, than very personal concept : the weight of a vocabulary based on number of "concepts" a language can represent. Thanks for making it clear: if I still don't agree on some aspects of your theory (for example, I still argue that, if you like, happiness and pleasantness are very different concepts), I'd like to hear(read) more on that - do you base it on any previous theoretical work, do you think any research might be done to further support it, do you know any similiar concepts in linguistics that are complementary or argue against it?
To the OP: There’s also the option of self-pubbing if it looks like no agent is interested in representing a Dutch author. I don’t know how selective they are, whether it’s the manuscript that matters, or manuscript and communication skills, or if some agents just happen to be of the opinion that it won’t be worth it, better stick to native speakers. Writing in a foreign language might make your journey a tad rockier, but the important thing is to write in the language that you enjoy, that works best for you. On the other hand, “the ownership” of English hasn’t belonged strictly to the US/UK/Australia/NZ etc. for ages. It’s a lingua franca, and every one of its speakers is basically allowed to develop it and contribute to it, say, coin words, introduce new idioms, etc. And then there's the whole "what do you count as a word” side to this. Are we talking about orthographical words? Grammatical words? Lexemes? You can make up some pretty crazy words with, say, an agglutinative language. This is really interesting. Translators often know just how tricky it is to find the best way to transfer the meaning of language A to language B. I have witnessed a fair amount of bitter fights T. Trianslator has had with synonyms and “synonyms,” idioms, and word length. Probably depends on the mother-tongue of the learner. The Swedes usually learn English more easily than, say, the Finns. Yeah, there’s always that. But you know how certain things sound really stupid in one language and really cool in another?
@KaTrian - got an example of something sounding really stupid in translation? I'm always interested in that kinda stuff, and it's a good laugh lol. What language group does Swedish belong to? Is it Germanic too? It's true that related languages will obviously be easier to learn (although somehow, for me, I've never found that to be true between English and German, despite their common roots and what some people tell me lol - I find German extremely different with only minor similarities between certain basic words lol). It's quite interesting when you listen to music - have you ever heard songs whose lyrics have been changed to a different language? As in, the melody stays the same as the original, but the lyrics are a sort-of translation or other times not quite a translation, you know, like if you were watching a Disney film in Chinese or Finnish, the songs are also sung in the language it's dubbed in. Like that. I grew up with the dubbed versions of Disney, so I can't tell with Cantonese. But when I've listened to Disney songs in Japanese in the past, it sounded very, very odd. Somehow, the rhythm of the language doesn't match the rhythm of the music I felt, and it's not easily recognisable to me that it's Japanese at all. But give me a song from an anime, and it's distinctly Japanese. However, I've been listening to some K-Pop and this band sings some of their songs in both Korean and Japanese. The melody and rhythm etc are identical, only the language is different, and yet the rhythm and melody fits perfectly in both languages it feels. What I mean is, I wonder if it's because Korean and Japanese, though originally unrelated languages, are still more similar than Japanese is with English.
I would hate to be limited to a single shade of blue when working in a visual medium. I could care less about infra-red and ultra-violet. Having nuance and selection in a language is a good thing. I'd argue that this effect is likely because of your familiarity with the Chinese language, culture, and art. The flow and poetry of Chinese is important to you, and you can feel the loss very acutely when translating. Chinese and English are very different languages, and any translation between the two is very challenging. From http://www.bokorlang.com/journal/31chinese.htm If you aren't familiar with all the implications and connotations of different words, you won't notice the loss that happens when the translation loses it.
Aight, my nitpicky self seems satisfied. I got one. You know the expression "from bad to worse"? Well, in Finland it's "ojasta allikkoon," which translates directly into something akin to "from a ditch to a boghole" which sounds pretty lame in English. Especially since allikko means boghole, puddle, or pond, depending on the context. I've even seen it translated as water jump, which would sound even dumber even though, technically, it's correct. Puns/idioms are usually the worst for a translator, especially if you work with subtitles since the space is usually limited to 35-37 symbols and Finnish generally has longer words than English which makes eng-fi translations a pain.
In Spanish, idioms are often nested. You need to know the meaning of one idiom to grok the meaning of another. In Spanish, a party pooper is called aguafiestas (water on the party). If someone really ruins a party, one says, Él vino como bombero. He showed up like a fireman. Speaking of puns, and of the from bad to worse expression. The expression one sometimes hears in Spanish is de Guatemala a Guatepeor. It's a play on the fact that the feminine for bad in Spanish is mala, and worse is peor.
For example, in my and T's ms, there're these rangers. If I wanted to translate that to Finnish, turns out there is no equivalent. You have a word that means "a guard" (with connotations to mal guards), another one that means "commandoman", and one that literally means "a mounted soldier." None of those options translate well the idea of a law-enforcing ranger working in space. North Germanic, specifically. In comparison to German, Swedish is really easy. No der, das, die and, while there're tenses, the verbs aren't inflected according to personal nouns, when there's ich bin and du bist in German, you have jag är and du är in Swedish, and so on. Swedish is like one of those languages Tarzan could've realistically taught to himself. That's interesting. I don't think I'd be able to hear the difference, though. I know Chinese (Mandarin, Cantonese...) is really difficult; the writing, the fact that it's tonal... I'm not surprised it's ranked one of the most difficult langugaes in the world! It's quite an advantage you can speak it I've heard that for a Japanese learner, learning Korean is quite easy, at least easier than to someone who's been learning, say, French and German.
@KaTrian - Chinese verbs don't inflect either. In fact, we don't even have plurals, nor do we have genders, and you can often drop your pronouns in a sentence and it all still makes sense Seriously, Chinese grammar is really really easy. What is difficult I think, besides the tonal part, is comprehension, because we have many monosyllabic words, and we also have many monosyllabic words that are actually identical in their sound, but mean totally different things. Just last night I asked my husband "How are you?" in Cantonese (I've taught him some phrases, he really should've been able to understand that). Anyway, it works out to be something like "Lei-dim-ah?" Problem, "dim" sounds identical to the word "o'clock" (so for example, two o'clock is "Lorn-dim", three o'clock is "sam-dim" etc). So my husband thought I was asking him for the time... ("What time is it?" would have been "Gay-dor-dim-ah?" - although you'd usually precede it with the word "now" rather than just drop the question. "Gay-dor" indicates "How many" - literally, how many hours is it?) In short, if he'd understood the word "how many", then the meaning of "dim" would be obvious - it can only be about time. But since my question did not include the word "how many" but rather the word "you" (Lei-dim-ah is literally "you how?"), it is clear that I'm actually asking how are you It's probably only obvious to me looool So I guess a foreigner would hear something like this: "You-dim-ah?" vs "How many dim now?" Anywaaaaaay... I'm not sure it's much of an advantage to speak Cantonese though really - it's one of those languages nobody ever wants to learn because it's both difficult and useless. If one were to learn Chinese, one would probably go for Mandarin, the national language. Cantonese is more of a... luxury language? You'd only want it if you specifically wanted to deal with Hong Kongers (Hong Kongese?) or otherwise I've heard it said that Cantonese is a sign of status, because HK is regarded as the Chinese Switzerland. In fact, some people in China thinks Hong Kongers are snobs and us Hong Kongers think mainlanders (Chinese people from actual mainland China) are poor and uneducated lol. Re Korean - don't people say Korean is meant to be quite easy? Esp with the alphabet - it's basically a lot like Czech - you read what's spelt, apparently, but Korean is the one language I've never actually tried, so I haven't a clue. I was rather amazed to find that Chinese heavily influences Korean, just as it has with Japanese - amazed not only because I didn't know they had any connection at all, but also because linguistically, none of Chinese, Korean or Japanese are related - they're not from the same family group at all, and yet we've clearly borrowed words from one another. I've heard traces of Cantonese, Mandarin and Japanese in Korean before, and tonnes of Chinese in Japanese. A couple of years ago I saw the Japanese word/letter "no" stuck in the middle of a Chinese advert - it means "of" like, "The house of John", indicating possession, and we also nicked the word "ichiban" from Japan. We think it means "excellent" - turns out it actually means "favourite" in real Japanese lol.
I thought "ichiban" meant, literally, "number one" in Japanese - or colloquially, "first rate." I spent six months in Japan in 2001 and that's what they told me.
You're correct, Min. Ichi means one (1) in Japanese. the -ban suffix added to ichi is one of a few different ways, depending on context, to denote the idea of first.
No idea, I remember trying to use the word on a Japanese person and she assumed I was asking for her favourite something, hence I assumed that's what it means lol. It definitely didn't seem to mean excellent/top anyway.
Strictly speaking, the relational status of Japanese and Korean is uncertain. It is clear that they share features from being in the immensely influential Chinese sprachbund, but there have been proposals which have attempted to relate the two languages to one another or to a larger macro-family (Altaic). Given this, similarities between the two languages are to be expected since they have similar influences, and there is speculation regarding potential relation
That's interesting! I don't remember which language families they're all in now, I just remember that they're all different. But the Koreans have to learn Chinese in school - I've seen their textbooks - because apparently they have Korean words that are based off of the Chinese original, which they've written in the Korean script, but they must know the original. I think it's also how they all end up with Chinese names. (as in, they have a Chinese version of their Korean name) I suppose, how do you even classify when a language is related anyway? Like, why are Chinese, Korean and Japanese supposedly not related and yet clearly share a large number of common words and sometimes even construction of words? And yet English is supposedly Germanic and seriously, I know, I know academically that is so, but I really don't see any correlation beyond a handful of common nouns.
Actually, there's a very strict definition for when two languages are related. If you wand to do historical linguistics or linguistic cladistics then the definition is: Two languages are related to one another if, and only if, they descend from a common ancestor by an unbroken chain of native language acquisition. If these conditions are not met, then two languages are not related. They may be similar due to borrowing or influence, but such a phenomenon is simply convergent evolution, not common descent. Therefore, English is Germanic because English derives by a chain of unbroken NLA (native language acquisition) from Proto-Germanic. The same is true for Swedish, Dutch, German, Gothic, and all other Germanic languages. Chinese, Japanese and Korean are not related because they cannot be shown to descend from a common ancestor. Chinese descends from Proto-Sino-Tibetan, and Japanese and Korean are uncertain (maybe Altaic like I said), but clearly NOT Sino-Tibetan. So they are not related, no matter how similar they have become by being next to each other, and by Japanese and Korean taking stuff from Chinese.
@Mckk : Thanks for sharing your thoughts on the quirks of Chinese. The tonality aspect really confuses me. My mothertongue is spoken very monotonically, no intonation whatsoever (though, to be honest, I stress key words more than most Finns. English influence and all that), unless you’re an over-excited teenage girl. So it’s quite difficult to hear the differences in tones in languages such as Chinese(s). The pronunciation of Japanese is usually quite easy for Finns to learn, though. Maybe it’s the vowels. If you look at Old English, it's quite... German-like (or Anglo-Saxon). Later on other languages have just added their influence, like in 1066 or thereabouts that French king wanted a piece of Britain, and so sheep became mutton.
@KaTrian - yeah I can see how that could be a problem. Czech is also extremely monotonous... I'm not keen on that aspect of the language, I must say. I still stress words in all the wrong places because of English, but it sounds so much prettier when there's some melody to it. I often joke about the way my husband sounds on the phone because he'd sound so bored, exhausted and even upset on the phone, and actually everything is perfectly fine and he's in a rather good mood - all this because there's no intonation to his voice when he speaks English. But if you're good at music, Chinese is doable. My husband's exceptionally good at hearing and even pronouncing Chinese, because he finds the first "note" and then adjust all the other tones according to the first note, whether he should go low or high and give it a lilt. So think of it like singing!
Both Czech and Finnish have fixed stress rules which fix prosodic stress to the beginning of the word (the Czech stress gets a little more complicated because they mean word at the phrasal level, so they can't and don't stress clitics like prepositions and pronouns), though because the stressis non-lexical and not contrastive, it is significantly weaker than the stress of English. Chinese syllables are not stressed at all, but rather have what's known as a tone contour. In most tonal languages, tones are distinguished by the degree of their pitch, but Chinese tones are distinguished by the shape of the tone across a syllable, which is why Chinese tones are called things like "high falling, high rising etc.". Tone contours lead to a language in which pitch shifts markedly across syllables and from word to word, but it's a very different system than the stress-accent systems that speakers of European languages are used to, given that we have only two pitches; stressed and unstressed (stressed syllables have greater volume, higher pitch, and in some languages, like English, longer duration, than unstressed ones). As for Japanese, Japanese actually has a single high pitch syllable which can appear anywhere in the word. It's like a stress, but it is only higher pitch and has no accompanying rise in volume or duration. This is known as a pitch accent system and is seen in languages like Japanese, Ancient Greek, Vedic Sanskrit etc. Secodn language learners of Japanese can normally substitute the pitch accented syllable for a stressed syllable when speaking. It will sound a little off to a native speaker, but it won't lead to confusion, since there is no lexical stress in Japanese. ....... This has been an intro to linguistic prosody
