Recently, a local radio DJ played Breaking Benjamin’s song Blow Me Away. One of the phrases in the song is, “Only the strongest will survive.” The song was originally written for the game Halo 2, so that lyric is somewhat fitting.
However, I got to thinking about that lyric a bit, and me being me I also merged those thoughts with a couple of other thoughts I’ve had. See, I enjoy foreign languages even though I would never claim to be fluent in anything other than English (and sometimes, not even that!). Most recently I’ve been brushing up on my Latin and Koine Greek. One of the things that finally “clicked” in my head about languages is how you need to think conceptually instead of trying to map phrases one-to-one. That’s not to say I didn’t know that already, but rather that it finally fully set in my mind that meaning transcends individual words.
In fact, when I recently read through Gödel, Escher, Bach by Douglas Hofstadter, he made a comment about how originally people thought we could make great progress toward mechanical interpretations of texts using computers. Then, as we tried to do that and failed spectacularly, it became obvious that interpretation is more than just a substitution of words.
Just for fun, and to demonstrate my point, I ran the above paragraph through Google’s translate feature, translating it from English to Latin and then back to English again and it gave me this:
For when he recently read through Gödel, Escher, Bach by Douglas Hofstadter made to the mechanical devices of the people who first how we could make great progress of computers and using the interpretation of the texts. Then, as he could and the efforts of is to do spectacularly, so be it is a clear correlation of interpretation of speeches.
Not only is that mostly gibberish on par with the emails I get from those generous Nigerian princes, but if I try to piece together the meaning from the words presented it seems to me that it actually reverses my original meaning in the last sentence!
Now, some people are very strict with how they define and interpret words. Word X means concepts A, B, or C, period. If I were to make an analogy, I’d imagine these people as viewing the meaning of words similar to islands in the ocean. There is the water of chaos that swirls around, but when you get to the word itself, the definition stands strong and immobile. It is fixed, no matter what the ocean does.
However, I have become more and more convinced, over time, that words are more like clouds in the sky. That is, they are still distinct units, but their edges are a bit fuzzier and a little malleable. Note that I do not maintain that postmodern concepts of deconstructionism are sound, or that words have no actual meaning at all—anymore than I would say that a cloud has no shape or that a cloud could also be a fox. Rather, it’s just that the definitions of words are “fuzzy” at times, as opposed to fixed islands of meaning.
Thus, I realize more and more that translation is at the conceptual level rather than the word level. Some of the most difficult aspects of learning a foreign language is beginning to think like the native speaker. Take just the simple example of word order. In English, word order is critical; but in Latin, it is not important at all. However, Latin does still have some preference for word order, such as having the verb come at the end of the sentence (English is typically subject-verb-object; Latin tends to subject-object-verb).
To give an example of that in English, examine: “Susan goes to the bank.” Here, “Susan” is the subject, “goes” is the verb, and “the bank” is the object (here, a prepositional phrase). Latin word order would typically render it as “Susan, to the bank, goes.” That makes sense in English, but it is awkward. If every sentence was written that way, it would make English difficult to comprehend.
Since the structure of sentences helps to convey the meaning of the sentences in some languages (such as English), and falls into patterns of use in other languages, you can actually look at the structure of languages to see what information cultures think are most relevant. In English, we want to know first who or what is doing the action of the sentence, then we want to know what they are doing, and finally we want to know what they are doing that action to. In Latin, they wanted to know who or what was doing the action, then they wanted to know who or what the action was being done to, and only then did they want to know what action was being done.
Now, of course, this happens very quickly in speech. Nevertheless, there is a preference for the order of information, and adjusting how information comes can cause some amount of mental stress when one is learning a foreign language.
So what does this have to do with Breaking Benjamin then and the line “only the strongest will survive” that I talked about clear at the beginning of this piece? I’m glad you asked! Consider these two sentences side-by-side:
Only the strongest will survive.
Only the strongest will survives.
There is only one letter different between the two sentences, yet that one letter also determines whether or not the word “will” is a noun or a verb. And the best part? The letter that makes the determination is the absolute last letter in the sentence, and it’s not even part of the word that is changed! In the first sentence, “will survive” is the verb, but in the second, “strongest will” is the noun.
Now the question that I find interesting is this. If you were given those two sentences at different times in a conversation, at what point do you know whether “will” is a noun or a verb? Granted, you would typically have a lot more context than just one of those two sentences. Example: “You have to have a strong will to make it in the world. Weak-willed people just cannot cut it. Only the strongest will survives.” Here, the surrounding context would most likely make you think “will” is a noun the instant it comes up.
Nevertheless, I would wager that if I started an essay with “Only the strongest will survives” and another one with “Only the strongest will survive”, you would read both of those essays and automatically adjust the meaning in your mind, most likely without even noticing you’d done so. Indeed, I suspect that your brain provisionally holds a definition for the word “will” when it first encounters it, and then later on when it gains the rest of the knowledge needed, it “settles” on the grammatically correct interpretation. All without you consciously wondering whether “will” is a noun or verb.
Ultimately, the word “will” as used above must be a fuzzy word as it is being used. Your brain has to hold two potential meanings at the same time, and those meanings are in two different categories of words (noun and verb).
This brings to mind the dictionary argument too. When we are asked, “What does such-and-so word mean?” we go the dictionary. But dictionaries do not create meaning, rather they tell us how words are already being used. And the danger someone can fall into is thinking that the primary definition of a word is how the word must be used in every instance. (This is especially dangerous for first year Greek students who find Strongs’ Concordance.)
I thought of an illustration of the “dictionary fallacy.” Suppose someone pulls up an English text—let’s use Stephen King’s The Stand since it’s got significant length. This person randomly searches through the book and selects, again at random, one letter from one word. This person says, “I will give you $1,000,000 if you guess what letter was randomly selected.” In order to have the best shot at gaining the million dollars, what letter should you select?
By far, the most common letter in English is the letter “e.” Hands down, your choice should be “e.” But what are the odds that you would win the million dollars? According to a study done at Cornell, you would have only a 12.02% chance of winning the million dollars. That means that even though the letter “e” is most frequent, if you pick “e” you will be wrong nearly 88% of the time.
The same thing most certainly happens with definitions too, especially with words like “will.” For instance, look at the use of the word will here: “I will, of my own free will, that the will will be executed by Will.” Indeed, this reminds me of the famous grammatically-correct sentence involving the word “buffalo”: Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo (you can click the link to read the article about how it works out).
Translation, therefore, isn’t simply a substitution of the most commonly used definitions. Words have their meaning by use, and people use words very loosely. In the end, while it may serve to set analytical minds at ease if words were islands in the sea, conventionally words will always remain clouds in the sky.