[Typhon]

« The German language doesn't even have an expression for "small talk", she says. »

When will this idea that because Language X doesn't have Y, the idea Y represents is alien to X speakers finally disappear ?

Although language does have an influence on one's thinking habit, this idea is a gross misrepresentation of very complex phenomena.

There's no word in French for the verb "to need". There's no future tense in Finnish, nor are there any articles. There are no perfective verbs or declensions in English.

Yet, if an idea is intelligible, chances are you can express it in any language, and translate the result in any other.

[Vivtek]

Strictly speaking, there's no future tense in English, either; somehow, we manage to conceptualize the future despite this grammatical lacuna.

Hungarian has no word for "to have". No, really! The equivalent circumlocution for "he has X" is more or less "there is X for him".

Languages are weirder than most people give them credit for.

[Typhon]

There is a future tense in English, through the use of auxiliary verbs. Just because it's not formed by affixing a morpheme doesn't mean it cannot be thought of as a future tense.

The question is : does it behave like one ?

« Hungarian has no word for "to have" »

Just like Finnish and, curiously enough, Russian.

On the other hand, Russian has several movement verbs that don't exist in English nor in French ("to swim" will be either "плавать" or "плыть", for instance)

[_b8r0]

> There's no word in French for the verb "to need"

Un moment, s'il vous plait. J'ai besoin d'un dictionnaire Français. :)

Translates as: One moment please. I need a French dictionary.

[demallien]

'There's no word in French for the verb "to need".'

Sure, but there is an expression for the idea - the article didn't just say that there isn't a word for small talk, it said that Germans don't even do small talk. The example given was that th German translation of a Paddington Bear book actually just cuts out the small talk, which does indeed seem to support the idea that you disagree with...

[Typhon]

This is the reason I gave other examples. This doesn't apply only to words. It applies to expressions as well. Literal translation being possible is the exception, not the norm.

[notJim]

It used the fact that Germans don't have a word for small talk as evidence that Germans don't do small talk.

[pagekalisedown]

"to need" -> "avoir besoin" (to have a need)

Verbs are a lot more complex in French than in English, so I'm glad they went that way. Seems a lot simpler than adding a whole new verb.

[Typhon]

I know that, and that's beside my point.

[Florin_Andrei]

> There's no future tense in Finnish

Huh, really? How do they express phrases that refer to future events?

[xxpor]

In German at least, the future exists, but is rarely used unless it is necessary to disambiguate. For example, you would just say, Ich fahre morgen mit meinem Auto in die Schweiz. Lit. translated: I drive tomorrow with my car in/to Switzerland. More idiomatically translated: I will (or I'm going to) drive in my car to Switzerland tomorrow. I assume it's the same in Finnish, but it might not be because Finnish isn't even a Indo-European language.

N.B: I just finished my first semester of German. Please someone correct me if I am anyway wrong.

[tricolon]

With a telic object [1] or through context (i.e. "tomorrow").

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telicity#Telicity_as_an_aspect

[Typhon]

In some situations, the difference lies in the case of the direct object (partitive vs genitive/accusative).

Otherwise, it's a matter of context.

[dhughes]

Maybe that's why they are Finnish? (I kid!)