From: John Burger (john@mitre.org)
Date: Tue Apr 21 2009 - 13:28:35 CDT
William J Poser wrote:
> The problem of translation is even worse than you may realize. In the
> language of the area in which I live, for example, before I can decide
> how to say "it's raining" I need to know whether the speaker is on
> land
> or on water. nawhulhtih means "it is raining onto land". tawhulhtih
> means "it is raining into water".
Yes. I haven't been reading the list that closely, but I assumed that
this whole discussion was a long-running thread that began on April
1. Seriously.
The list of utterances which can reliably be translated into more than
a few languages with little or no context is vanishingly short. Even
"yes" and "no" are problematic - in some languages these operate like
English, in some they reverse when the question has negative polarity,
and in others there are additional words for that situation.
- John D. Burger
MITRE
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