Today I browsed through a language column of a Swedish newspaper, and to my surprise I found not only one, but two articles that might be worth mentioning.

The first one dealt with words. The amount of words in languages in fact, and in Swedish first and foremost. The title of the article was (very loosely translated) “Sometimes English is Less Rich in Words than Swedish.” The word literacy was brought up as an example: in English it’s a very useful and multi-facetted word that can be used in many different ways. For instance, it can be used to describe the ability to read or write, or it can concern literature. Or many other aspects.

In Swedish we don’t have that luxury. We don’t have a word to describe the ability to read and write. We call it – again loosely translated - ”the ability to read and write.” Quite pragmatic; quite Swedish. Likewise, we have various ways of expressing the different meanings of literacy. The article’s main point was that we should utilize and be happy for our language’s many terms and expressions, but I can’t help but feel that this is a special case; an isolated event that the author attempts to use to imbue the idea that Swedish isn’t a language with few words. Sometimes in the title of the article is a useless word: it’s like saying “sometimes it’s better to be poor than rich;” it’s a special case that will not hold true for the vast – the extremely vast – majority of cases. It’s not worth making a big deal of.

But then I started writing this post, and was struck by how I couldn’t find a good translation for the article’s title. “Sometimes English is Poorer in Words than Swedish” might have sounded better than the one I chose, but the Swedish title used a word that positively reflected that a language has many usable words. I wanted to show the negation of that, so I went for “less rich” instead. What I really wanted was a translation for the Swedish word, but I couldn’t think of one. Verbose was the best I could come up with, but to my understanding that would have implied that English was a language that required more words to describe things – the complete opposite of what I meant. And “less verbose” really wouldnt’ have fit the bill at all. This might be my poor English vocabulary rearing its ugly head, but it might also be the case of a deficiency in expressing this particular thing in English.

Which brings me to the second article; one which describes the difference between the Swedish words kontamination and katakres. The first one is pretty straight-forward: contamination. In linguistics this refers to a mix-up of common, neutral words, and even if contamination isn’t the correct English word it fits rather well despite that. The second word is more problematic. I can’t seem to find an English counterpart to it at all.

In fact, when I tried to look up a translation online it automatically gave me the suggestion “were you looking for catarrh?” Nooo… That’s not really what I wanted.

The word katakres comes from the Greek word for misuse, and in Swedish it means a specific mix-up: when proverbs or idioms get mixed up. An example would be:

You can’t see the forest for all the birds in the hand.

Yeah, I know. I suck. If I knew more English proverbs I might have come up with something decent.

Again, katakres might have have a perfectly good English translation, but that’s beside the point. The point is that (to my knowledge) Swedish possesses a word for a concept that the English doesn’t. If I were prone to state the obvious, I would mention that languages aren’t one-to-one mapped, and that they are more like Venn diagrams. And that would inevitably lead to a conclusion where I stated that speaking of a word-rich or word-poor language is pretty irrelevant since they can be used in different ways, with focus on different concepts and ideas.

It’s a good thing that I don’t state obvious things, though. And it’s also a good thing that I found the katakres article, ’cause I’ve learned a new word today. I hope someone else found it as fascinating as I did.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 5th, 2006 at 2:07 pm and is filed under Linguistics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.