| > It is now clear that there exist English words that don't correspond to a single word in the other language. But that's true of any language. Not only that, but English uses loanwords heavily which are often Anglicisations of words from other languages, which may not in themselves be just one word. "Ho ho ho", the flag-waving Little Englander types say, "Gaelic is such a stupid language, they don't even have a word for 'television', they just say 'television' in a stupid accent!" But English also has no word for "television". Worse, the word "television" isn't even just a loanword, it's two words from two different languages, "tele" from Greek and "vision" from Latin. What a bodge job! Imagine letting something like that slip through to production use! The hypothetical Catalan-Hungarian inventor of it in another leg of the trousers of time may have called it llunylátás, and then where would we be? Well, most languages would have some variant of that word to mean "television", as they do now, I expect. The English word "galore" (meaning "sufficient" shading towards "more than enough") comes from the Gaelic words "gu leòr", (goo lyaawr, the grave accent above the o makes the vowel sound longer). What a silly language English is, doesn't have a word that means "more than you're ever likely to need", has to steal one from Gaelic and then spell it wrong. Oh, they use this word "whisky". You know what that means? It means "uisge beatha" but they only say the first word, in a silly accent because they can't pronounce it properly. Quite often there's no single word for a thing you're trying to translate but that doesn't mean it's untranslateable. English has only one single word for rain, for example, but Gaelic has about half a dozen of which the only ones I can reproduce here are "uisge" (that word again) which just means "water", and "fras" which is more like a gentle shower. The rest of the words in the Gaelic of the North-West of Scotland that refer to rainy weather are, of course, profane in the extreme. |