So, as you can tell by now, I'm all about trees today. Talking about the ambiguity of words on Tuesday reminded me of an example about how even if you know the words of a language, there are still many places for confusion:
we have forest, wood, and tree. Those concepts are pretty simple to us.
The Swedish have Skog, trä, and träd - words are in the same order, though skog takes the role of forest, and a little of the role of our word wood. This thus cuts off some of the meaning, or ambiguity in the range of meaning of trä.
The Danish on the other hand, have Skou and Trae - Skou being the equivalent to skog, and trae being equivalent to both trä and träd. Trae would leave much room for ambiguity in the language since it could mean almost as much as wood and tree.
It is interesting to look at how fuzzy the lines are of concepts across languages, and how it highlights the arbitrarity of it all.
Talking about placing things into categories reminded me of a discussion I had in a class about the differences in the way the French look at trees/shrubs, and the way we do. In French, arbre signifies a tree, arbuste signifies a vertical plant that is smaller than 8 meters and has a trunk, while arbrisseau is the equivalent of our shrub.
If one looks these up in a French to English dictionary, you get shrub for both the arbrisseau and the arbuste.
I had never considered trees and shrubs to be different degrees of the same thing; rather I saw them as more or less two separate entities. Maybe I have been wrong all this time about shrubbery? After having looked at that, I wonder if my, or the results of the French in general, of shrub on a GOE concerning trees would differ from that of Americans?
Either way, I feel like this highlights the cultural and language differences that would show up on a GOE.
On my way to Kroger the other day, my sister in the car. The parking lot is very full, and I am curious, so I ask her why this might be. To this, she responds:
It looks like all the cars are headed toward the dollar store. They must be having a huge sale... Relatively speaking.
After much laughing, I practically shouted out that this would be a good blog post, and she was excited to have contributed.
In the end, as excited as people get over sales, you have to wonder what they consider a huge sale, or a cheap meal...
So, driving in the car the other day, and my passenger is telling me where to go since I have never been in this part of town before...
He says: you're gonna want to turn right at one of the streets up here.
I reply: Any one of them?
He says: No, no. It's a specific one.
One misunderstanding over the use of one word could make for one frustrating situation.
Moo I say! When I think Bob Evan's (the restaurant), I think country food from 'down on the farm;' but whoever decided that the farm was down? I for one see down as going south, and up as going north. So a farm in Ohio would be going up. There seems to be a conflict of viewpoints between what is up and what is down in geography.
People often seem to go down to the country, up to the city, down to grandma's; completely disregarding if it's north or south. Yet, after all that, they go ahead and say, up north or down south, for emphasis. It seems that this is mostly an evoked meaning, used differently depending upon dialect, geography and time/age.
The same is true in France, though not with any city, only Paris. Many people, though it seems to be on the decline because people see it as pejorative (at least in my experiences), say that you go up to Paris, and down to the country - 'Monter à Paris' and 'Descendre de Paris'.
If Paris is so much higher than the rest of France, why can't I see all that is clearly below it?
So in Latin class the other day, a question was raised about how one says 'to turn' refering to one's self. This of course is reflexive in nature, and therefore takes a pronoun in order to say 'he turns himself around.' This got me thinking about some other languages and how the number of arguments in certain predicates varies between languages.
So, taking to turn for a basic example, we get:
Ego me verto = 2
Je me tourne = 2
and
I turn around = 1
I turn myself around (=2) would be perfectly acceptable, and I've seen it used especially in literature, but in current American English it seems unnecessary and therefore a pleonism where in other languages this redundancy does not exist.
So here's my Semantics and Pragmatics blog! :)
