What do you see in the two pictures? If your native language is English or German, you’ll probably see hands and arms in one photo, and feet and legs in the other. If your native language is Russian, on the other hand, only one word will spring to mind in each case: руки (ruki) for the first photo and ноги (nogi) for the second one. This is because the human body is divided up somewhat differently – though equally logically – in Russian: рука (ruka) means both your arm and hand, and нога (noga) means both your leg and foot.
Here’s another example: a German speaker would see two types of Schrauben, one with a Mutter (a nut), and the other without. An English speaker, on the other hand, would see a bolt on the left and screw on the right.
Example number three: gherkins and cucumbers. An English person would distinguish them very clearly, while a German person would prefer to use a generic term – Gurken – for both types, though it’s possible to be more precise and describe a cucumber as a Schlangengurke – literally a snake cucumber.
As a translator I get such issues quite a lot, and I sometimes need to ask clients what exactly they mean, as my target language – English – may force me to be more precise. On the other hand, it can also work the other way around, and I may be faced with a distinction in the source language that I don’t necessarily need to recreate in English. Russian, for example, has two words for blue: синий (siniy) and голубой (goluboy).
The first is light blue and the other is dark blue. Whereas in most languages they are both perceived simply as blue, a Russian speaker would regard them as two different – though similar – colours.
In fact, from a Russian perspective, it might even be a puzzle why others don’t have this supposedly clear distinction: “Почему во многих языках нет различия между “синим” и “голубым”? (Why is there no distinction between siniy and goluboy in many languages?): https://thequestion.ru/questions/12537/pochemu-vo-mnogikh-yazykakh-net-razlichiya-mezhdu-sinim-i-golubym
Our Chinese friends distinguish very clearly between a younger brother 弟弟(dìdì) and an older brother哥哥 (gēgē), a younger sister 妹妹(mèimei) and an older sister姐姐 (jiějiě), maternal grandparents 外公, 外婆 (wàigōng, wàipó) and paternal grandparents 爷爷, 奶奶 (nǎinai, yéyé). So a Chinese colleague would need to ask their Indo-European clients to clarify from case to case.
In linguistic theory such issues are often looked at in terms of semantic fields: each language has a different way of dividing up a given piece of reality (e.g. colours, family relations). Think of it as borderlines crisscrossing the landscape (in our example: the colour spectrum or the extended family). In different languages those borderlines run differently. And when we compare two or more languages, we find that sometimes those borderlines overlap, whereas at other times they may be missing here and there, or there may be totally different borderlines. As a translator I sometimes need to defend my choice of words, as some clients assume one-to-one correspondence between the borderlines in one language and those in another.
We read from time to time that learning and cultivating several languages may well prevent Alzheimer’s disease or dementia. Well, it certainly keeps you on your toes and encourages you to look at things from different perspectives. It’s a good attitude to have in all walks of life: the other person’s viewpoint is likely to be different because they – literally – see things differently. As soon as you “have a word for it”, that word tends to become a fixed category in your mind, through which you classify the world around you and arrange your thoughts.
You can also apply this to more abstract concepts. Language blogs are full of supposedly untranslatable words, and you can google for them to your heart’ s content. The German word Schadenfreude is even recognised by my English voice recognition software and has clearly found its way into the English language: a malicious pleasure at somebody else’s misfortune. Then there is the Dutch adjective gezellig which describes a warm feeling of spending time with friends. The Dutchman joining a group of friends gathered in a café, for instance, might say: “Hier is het zo gezellig!” (“You’re obviously having a good time together!”). ?
Moreover, no one has so far come up with a good English translation of the German Landeskunde or the equivalent Russian страноведение (stranovedenie), in each case a term that covers everything you can learn about a given country. Cultural studies seems too narrow, and German Wikipedia describes Landeskunde as “a typical term in the tradition of German-speaking research that focuses on studying the history, economics, society and culture of a given country, region or locality”. Hm, that’s even longer! ? https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landeskunde
So, as you can see, living with different languages is never boring ?