It was a huge deal, the way the Japanese artist delivered the lines - and that a woman was delivering those lines! - in Bowie’s song It’s No Game. Her aggressive delivery, and the “masculinity” of the lines, would scandalize the Japanese at the time…and maybe even now.
I also love that Bowie tells Fripp to shut up at the end.
I’m pretty sure no one else would dare take such a liberty w/Mr Fripp!
I feel a vast affinity for this word, being a Detroiter and all. Detroit has endured many disimprovements during my lifetime.
It was in one of the links above to words that are not the real words - the definition for sonder was “the realization that every other person that you see has a life as rich and complex as your own”
Going the other way, one English word that I frequently can’t find a good translation for, at least in Latin languages, is “pattern.”
It’s such a simple and commonly-used word in English, and is used in a variety of contexts but all with the same underlying meaning – a pattern in a rug, a pattern of behavior, there’s a pattern in what keeps happening, I’ve developed an organizational pattern, the notes rose in ascending patterns, a holding pattern…
The dictionary translation in Italian is “modello,” which is far more specific to one of those cases. In Spanish they might say “patron.” In French perhaps “schéma” or “motif.”
These are all specific aspects of “pattern,” but don’t unify them into one overarching concept.
Anyway, feel free to show me wrong if plenty of other languages have this. I just like noticing examples of these kinds of words in English.
Pattern is a good example of connotation drift, I feel. in German the word muster is the preferred translation, as it fits most of the use cases as a noun. As a verb, it can mean “examine” (etwas mustern, “ich musterte die Situation”, and so on. Discharging from the military is also ausmustern.
You want a fun word to translate into other languages? Try “fancy”.
When I was learning Japanese in high school (lo these many years ago), in a boy’s school, we were taught that the correct “I” was watashi. There were, we were informed, other first person singular pronouns, but we shouldn’t fuck around with them until we knew what we were doing.
My cousin, going to a different boy’s school, also learning Japanese, told me one day that they had been told to use watakushi. My next Japanese class, I used it: Watakushi wa… and got no further before the teacher stopped me, and informed me that watakushi is extremely formal, and that she’d only ever heard women using it.
I always got paranoid about the endless intricacies and potential ways of getting wrong even something as simple as which “me” to use, and then I came to the conclusion that, as an obvious gaijin, nobody would expect me to get any of it right anyway, and so long as I didn’t do something like call my boss “-chan”, I’d probably be fine.
Then I spent the next twenty years forgetting almost all of it except for watashi wa wakarimasen.
I have a large, but now obsolete copy of Roberts-Collins unabridged from 1998. It gives half a dozen senses-- explaining the differences between motif, style, patron, modèle, habitudes, tendances, scénario habituel, échantillon, exemple,structure, schéma and so on. I expect that more recent editions will only add to these.
The English speaker’s unifying sense of pattern across psychology, the arts, climate science, etc gets broken down and distributed amongst all those different senses.
In my library it replaced a 1951 copy of Cassels, which only gives modèle, patron, échantillon, dessin, exemple, and doesn’t really cover the scientific uses of pattern.
Sure, English has direct translations for each of those words as well.
I guess my point was that if someone said “There’s a German word that unifies the ineffable overarching connection between ‘motif,’ ‘model,’ ‘habit,’ ‘tendency,’ ‘schema’ and ‘structure’ and it’s a common word that they use all the time” we’d think that was pretty neat, and it would belong on a list such as this.
Robert gives translation guidance for all of them. Cassels doesn’t.
So, if their advice is to be followed, a climate scientist, a psychologist, a music critic would all habitually choose different words to describe this sense of repetition.
