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Endangered Languages - Chukchi

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11 messages over 2 pages: 1
Astrophel
Tetraglot
Senior Member
United States
Joined 5731 days ago

157 posts - 345 votes 
Speaks: English*, Latin, German, Spanish
Studies: Russian, Cantonese, Polish, Sanskrit, Cherokee

 
 Message 9 of 11
19 February 2010 at 3:59am | IP Logged 
Piraha has no words for color - only darker and lighter.
In Moken, there is no word for want, take, when, hello, or goodbye.
The Kuuk Thayorre do not have "left" and "right", but use absolute direction...and when asked to arrange pictures chronologically, organize them east to west!

Even in German, a language very close to English, there's no way to say that someone "made" you do something. You either use the stronger word "forced" (zwang), or resort to circumlocution.

Different languages are like different styles of art. If an Impressionist, a Surrealist, and a Renaissance master all painted the same scene, even though they all had the same initial perception, they expressed it in different ways. Likewise, the same situations, emotions, and phrases are worded in completely different ways that reflect the culture and do not translate literally. Compare Spanish and Portuguese and note where the differences in phraseology lie and you'll see what I mean.

This is why conquerors always try to oppress the language of the conquered. You lose a language, you lose an entire, unique system of categorizing thoughts and expressing feelings about the world.
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Ulrike
Tetraglot
Newbie
Germany
Joined 5560 days ago

23 posts - 27 votes
Speaks: German*, Latin, English, French
Studies: Persian, Arabic (classical)

 
 Message 10 of 11
19 February 2010 at 10:36am | IP Logged 
In German, my native language, you can use "jemanden veranlassen, etwas zu tun" for the English "make somebody to do something". This phrase can be put into all tenses and is, as far as I can decide it for English is a foreign language to me, at least very close to "make somebody to do something."
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jondesousa
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Senior Member
United States
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Joined 6263 days ago

227 posts - 297 votes 
Speaks: English*, Portuguese, Japanese, Esperanto
Studies: Latin, Mandarin, Spanish

 
 Message 11 of 11
19 February 2010 at 1:34pm | IP Logged 
An old Bulgarian friend of mine used to tell me some fantastic Chukchi jokes. They were quite funny.


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