Been thinking, past couple days, about meaning, and the levels on which it pertains. This is all well-trod ground, so… But! The word 'ice' has a well-accepted general meaning: it's frozen water. For most people I've asked, tho, the phrase 'to break the ice' does not call to mind the thought of frozen water (save, course, on the rare occasion that the term's used literally); in that phrase, does the word 'ice', by itself, have any independent meaning? I think (as I'm sure many, many others have, before me): No. The meaning lives in the context and cannot be separated therefrom.
Previously, I've avoided sending you words like the Twi term 'twa': Usually, 'twa' means 'to cut'. However, the predicate determines the meaning of the verb very, very frequently in Twi. 'Twa akpeteshie' means 'to drink moonshine'. 'Twa nkɔmmɔ' means 'to have a conversation'. This mutability of meaning is a factor in almost all the common Twi verbs. It allows a dozen or so morphemes to do the bulk of the language's verbing.
So, so many words that are considered untranslatable translate quite easily *in context*. It's only when asked to stand on their own — where they carry the baggage of all possible combinations — that these terms seem uncapturable in other languages. But, Arabic. Most Muslims consider the Qur'ān to be untranslatable. Some consider this simply the result of the beauty of the language: The words were chosen by God Itself, so there's no hope of a human's doing justice through approximation. However, there is a school of reading which gives great importance to Arabic's three-letter roots: Most non-grammatical terms are derived in a semi-systematic way. Thus ك-ت-ب (K-T-B) is the root of a bunchload of words pertaining to writing: The verb كتب (kataba) means 'to write'. كتاب (kitāb) is 'book'. مكتب (maktab) is 'office'. مكتاب (miktāb) is 'typewriter'.إستكتاب (istiktāb) is 'dictɑtion'. In this understanding of how the language of the Qur'ān works, the relationship between words of a shared root is not only etymological, but semantic, and each word carries traces of all its cousins.
A religious example: The first half of the fundamental Muslim creed — the شهادة (shahādah) — is usually translated 'There is no god but God.' This is not the tautology in Arabic that it seems in translation: The second term is, as one might expect, الله — Allāh. The first term, however, is إلاه (ilāh). In the book *Four Basic Quranic Terms* (perhaps ironically, I'm reading this in translation from Urdu), Syed Abul-Ala Maududi looks into the various derivatives of the root ا-ل-ه ('-L-H), and finds meanings that include: '[Become] confused or perplexed… [Achieve] peace and mental calm by seeking refuge with someone or establishing relationships with him… [Become] frightened of some impending mishap or disaster, and [receive] the necessary shelter… [Turn] to another eagerly, due to the intensity of [one's] feelings for him… [Adore, offer] worship to…' From these varying meanings produced by the basic root, Maududi finds إلاه to bear specific implications not inherent in the English term 'god': 'We may therefore safely conclude from the above that the connotation of the word ilah includes the capacities to fulfill [sic] the needs of others, to give them shelter and protection, to relieve their minds of distress and agitation, superiority, and the requisite authority and power to do all these, to be mysterious in some way or hidden from men's eyes, and the turning of men eagerly to him.' This term, therefore, wouldn't be properly applicable to a deistic god or a Norse deity. (Tho, I should note, colloquial usage is not so strict.)
Generally, this kind of reading is applied selectively, and use of this form of exegesis varies from reader to reader. I don't have enough experience with the Arabic language or the Arabic-speaking world to say how widely people understand this kind of relationship between words to exist in quotidian life.
From an untranslatable book to the most translated book in history…I have been looking into the Twi translation of the Bible. In Genesis2:12, I found a Twi term that I had not encountered before and which was in none of my dictionaries: bedola. The NIV had 'aromatic resin',but the KJV had the more mysterious 'bdellium', which is probably drawn from the same term in the Vulgate, which, in turn, likely comes from Greek βδέλλιον (bdéllion). The Twi apparently was lifted directly from Hebrew בדלח (ḇədōlah) — no doubt, also the source of the Greek. Theories abound as to what this substance might be (and some of these theories have been accepted by mainstream dictionaries), but the fact is that Biblical and Hebrew scholars really don't know — the word appears only twice in the Bible, and nowhere else in the Ancient Hebrew corpus — so the Septuagint, the Vulgate, the KJV, and the Twi Bible all simply opted to swallow the word whole into their appropriate languages. (The KJV is preceded by Ælfric's 11th century Old English translation of Genesis, which contains 'dellium', and Wycliffe's c. 1395 Middle English 'delium'. It's entirely possible that the word was borrowed into English anew each time.) In Spanish, the Reina-Valera Bible uses 'bedelio' (or 'bdelio' in the old version), as do several other translations. Luther opted for 'Bedellion' in German. 'Bdellium' may be found in French. (My Thai Bible, however, and the two others I've found on-line have gone with ยางไมัหอม [yāŋ-mái hɔ̄̌m] which corresponds to the NIV's 'aromatic resin'.)
There is an exact, one-to-one, correspondence between these terms in their various languages (Ancient Hebrew בדלח excluded — it referred to a physical reality [or imaginarity] in a way that all these translations don't). On some level, we must consider בדלח untranslatable, as its exact meaning is unknown. But all these borrowed references translate one another with unparalleled exactitude.
Or not: If some well-known Romantic poem had used the term 'bdellium', it might mean a little more in English than it does in French. But perhaps that's true even without what-ifs: Does the Greco- Latinate 'bdellium' — which may call to mind heavy elements from the sagging belly of the Periodic Table and which begins with an exotic cluster of dark consonants — suggest the same thing to the Anglophone ear as the lighter, directly Hebrew-derived, and more familiar 'bedola' does to the Twi-speaker? 'Bedola' *could* be a Twi word, if it weren't not one. The Angles, Saxons, and Normans wouldn't have dreamt up 'bdellium' on their own.
Or perhaps the Angles, Saxons, Normans, and their linguistic descendants have never owned the word at all; perhaps 'bdellium' isn't a translation of בדלח. Is 'schmuck' an English translation of Yiddish 'schmuck'? Is 'garage' English for French 'garage'?
One last thought: Does the term *really* mean anything at all, in any variation, except as an expression of the wealth of Havilah? Perhaps the word, by itself, is as untranslatable as 'ice' in 'to break the ice'.
Bob Offer-Westort
San Francisco, California, USA
from Twi to English
mpan(y)insɛm
Literally, 'affairs of elders'. This can refer to history, custom,
proverbs, traditional law, or folktales.
Bob Offer-Westort
San Francisco, California, USA
from Thai into English
Independently, the term เกรง means simply 'fear', and ใจ means 'heart', in the (un-?)poetic sense (it needs to be combined with another word in order to refer to the physical organ). Combined, the term เกรงใจ means 'fear of offending another or causing inconvenience'. It's often proffered as an excuse for not doing something. From the other side, people often say 'ไม่ ตัองเกรงใจ' — 'No need to feel เกรงใจ', which indicates that one should not be afraid to put the speaker out — that the activity referred to will cause no inconvenience or offence.
Bob Offer-Westort
San Francisco, California, USA
from Arabic to English
ديوان can mean 'account books' or 'anthology' or 'oeuvre', but one of the more difficult meanings of the term to translate is 'collective poetic or literary tradition of a people'. Nizar Qabbani uses the term in 'A Lesson in Drawing' - 'When you grow up, my son, / and read the diwan of Arabic poetry / you'll discover that the word and the tear are twins / and the Arabic poem / is no more than a tear wept by writing fingers.'
Bob Offer-Westort
San Francisco, California, USA
from Arabic to English
Usually, دين can be translated as 'religion', but it perhaps corresponds more closely to a phrase like 'ideologically founded way of life'. 'Way of life' is a very common English translation among English-speaking Muslims. The term incorporates custom as well as belief.
Bob Offer-Westort
San Francisco, California, USA
from Spanish to English
In most varieties of Spanish, there are two singular forms of the second person pronoun: Usted and tú. The former is a formal pronoun, used for social superiors and new acquaintances. The latter is familiar. 'Tutear' is a verb meaning 'to address someone as "tú"'. However, the meaning isn't purely linguistic: It indicates familiarity. Thus, 'Puedes tutearme' ('You can address me as "tú"') is an invitation to familiarity. The connotation is similar to the English phrase 'to be on a first name basis with', but I can't think, off-hand, of an English term or phrase that describes personal relationships through linguistic usage in the same way.
[This also reminds me of the term 'voseo', which means 'the use of the second person singular 'vos' in place of 'tú'. 'Vos' is favoured in a few Latin American countries, including Costa Rica (the source of my familiarity with the term). This strikes me as probably different from what you're looking for.]
Bob Offer-Westort
San Francisco, California, USA
re: tutear, the same meanings, social and linguistic, apply to the French "tutoyer" and its opposite, "vousvoyer." One way French people define what makes the very rich not like you and me is that they vousvoient their children and parents.