 Is it possible to say something in a language that you can't translate into another language? I mean, it might be impossible to say the exact same way with the same number of words or sentences or with the exact same subtle connotations, but it should be possible to get the general idea across no matter what language you're in, right? Well, yes, kind of, but I'd like to point something out. If you studied a language in high school in the US, odds are like 90% it was a language that originated in Western Europe, specifically Spanish, French, or German. And from what I can tell, statistics are pretty similar in Europe, but with English has the most commonly taught language instead of Spanish. Not only are all of these languages Indo-European, and therefore tend to have some basic grammatical things in common, but there's been a lot of cultural exchange between these countries over the centuries, so they tend to have a lot culturally in common too. Now, I spent three years studying Spanish in high school, I get that there are legitimate reasons for studying and teaching these languages rather than others, but I feel like the fact that the languages we study the most all tend to be very similar to our own can make it difficult for us to see just how different languages can get from each other, and therefore just how hard it can be to translate some things. Now, I could pick plenty of languages to demonstrate this with, Chinese, Swahili, Arabic, but I decided to make a completely objective decision and go with the most studied language in the US that isn't European, Japanese, and a decision which I promise has absolutely nothing to do with the fact that literally everyone I hang out with is an animator. Moving on, there are a lot of things that make Japanese really different from most European languages, but what I want to talk about today is how it's pragmatically different. Pragmatics as a subfield of linguistics is a little bit difficult to define, but I think it's really helpful to compare it with semantics. Both semanticsists and pragmatists study what language means, but semanticsists tend to look at what a word or set of words mean all on their own, as if they exist in some sort of alternate language dimension, floating in a vacuum. Pragmatists, on the other hand, study what a language means in context, how what someone says combines with the shared knowledge between the speakers, the relative social status, their personal relationship, their immediate physical surroundings, everything that's been said previously in the conversation, how all of that meshes together in order to create the information that actually winds up getting communicated. Like, one of the most basic ways that what we say combines with what isn't said is in the use of pronouns. The word they doesn't really mean anything on its own, besides an unspecified person, but when we actually use it, it usually means someone very specific, and we're supposed to know who based on all kinds of contextual clues. Words that do this, that take on the meaning of whatever we need them to for the conversation, are called dyktik expressions, or indexicals. But Japanese even treats basic pragmatic things like indexicals differently. Notice how a lot of our indexicals come in pairs of two based on how close they are to the speaker. Here, there, this, that, now, then. Like, we sort everything into things that are close to the speaker and things that are far away from the speaker. Japanese, on the other hand, makes a three-way distinction instead. Koray and Kono describe things that are close to the speaker. Sore and Sono describe things that are close to the listener, and finally, Are and Anno describe things that are far away from both of them. Now, although we don't make this same three-way distinction in English, it's actually not all that strange for European languages as a whole, and English might actually have used to have the same three-way distinction in the form of here, there, and yonder. But you know what Japanese does that's way more weird and foreign? The wa-ga distinction. The difference between these two words is notoriously confusing and difficult to explain, and I barely understand it myself. But that hasn't stopped me from trying to explain stuff before, so here I go. Just maybe make sure you have annotations turned on in case I want to make any corrections later. Japanese uses certain words to mark what role something is playing in the sentence. Ga marks the subject of the sentence, O marks the direct object of the sentence, Ni marks the indirect object, No marks possession, and so on. The word that makes things tricky is the word wa, which marks the topic. What is the topic you ask? Good question. Very, very good question. Okay, so the topic is just sort of generally the thing we're talking about. Very often, the same topic will span multiple sentences, so it's probably not just the topic of the sentence, but more like the topic of discussion in general. Now, a lot of the time, the topic will actually overlap with one of the grammatical categories I mentioned before, in which case it can be very confusing which one to use. Paradoxically, if you want to emphasize the subject of the sentence, you should probably use the normal subject marker ga rather than wa, because even though calling something the topic makes it sound really big and important, the fact that it's already the topic of discussion means that it's kind of redundant to bring everyone's attention to it. Like, imagine someone talking to you and they say, We saw an alien yesterday. It flew around for a while before landing, then it took my friend. I tried to hit it with a shovel, but nothing worked because the alien was so big. Notice how the alien is basically the topic of the entire monologue. But in most of these sentences, all of the emphasis was on the other parts of the sentence, never on the word it, which represented the alien. Wa and ga seem to work the same way. By marking something as the topic, you actually put less emphasis on it. The next time I explicitly say the alien, it's because I'm not just saying it's big, but I'm implicitly contrasting it with something that isn't big, namely myself, which is also one of the things that wa is often used for. Contrast. Confused? Yeah, me too. Let's move on. Although all of these things don't exist in English and make it impossible to create things which are exactly equivalent, we haven't really come up against any situation where you legitimately can't translate the important thing about what someone's trying to say. I do think these situations exist, but in order to explain why, I want to talk to you about two ideas, speech acts and politeness. A lot of the time, when we say things, we're not necessarily trying to communicate information. Rather, the mere act of saying something does something. When your boss says you're fired, they're not just communicating the information you no longer work for us. Saying those words is identical with the action of firing you. Same goes for marriage vows. When you say I do, it's not because anyone in the room doesn't know. By saying those words, you are taking the action of marrying the person. So if in one language you have a set of words that comprise a speech act that no one would ever actually do in another culture, then how could you possibly translate that and come up with anything that is an any-way equivalent? Most of the time, though, speech acts aren't so grand and important. Instead, they often center around things like politeness. But what is politeness exactly? It's not just being formal when you need to be formal, it's also being informal when you need to be informal. Let me back up a bit. Everyone has a face. I mean, a literal face too, but within the field of pragmatics, a face is a sort of internal representation of how you see yourself in relation to everyone else. More specifically, we have negative face and positive face. Our negative face is our desire to be independent, to have control over our lives, and to feel empowered, while our positive face is our desire to be connected, to have strong social relationships, and to feel like we're part of a community. Not always, but often, these two things are sort of at odds with each other, because strong social relationships often involve more mutual obligation. Anyway, very often, through our speech, we do our best to respect the other person's face desires. If we're strangers, we'll try to respect their negative face by being more formal and traditionally polite, emphasizing how they can do whatever they want and don't have any obligations to us. But if we're friends, we'll try to emphasize their positive face, using nicknames, using curse words, maybe even insulting them. Each culture does this very differently, though, and has different signs for respecting people's positive and negative face. If you know any Japanese, you probably know where I'm going with this. Honorifics. Japanese has a huge number of words that they tack onto names and pronouns in order to demonstrate the speaker's relationship to them. San is usually used between equals of the same age, while Sama is slightly more respectful, while Kun is more or less the opposite, used for boys who are younger than you. Chan and Bo both mean that you find the person endearing or cute, while Senpai is used for your superiors in certain contexts, and so on and so forth. Sometimes, especially when people are changing what suffixes they use or getting it wrong, it can be next to impossible to understand what's happening unless you know about these suffixes, which is why animators are sort of notorious for learning some of the more common ones and even adapting them into English sometimes. So is it possible for something to be untranslatable? Well, yes, but only in the sense that sometimes people do things that don't make any sense unless you know about the culture they're doing it in. It's just that sometimes those things they do can be really tied up in the language they speak, because often our culture is tied up in the language we speak. Why is their music starting? I'm not done yet! I have a few announcements to make. Oh, this video is getting pretty long, isn't it? Well, if you're the kind of person who wants to know why this video took me so long and what the future of the channel will be and generally what's going on in my life right now, click here. But TLDR, I suck at deadlines when I'm giving up and having a consistent schedule. Anyway, bye.