Re:A Bemidji professor is on a quest to keep the Ojibwe lang...
by jl6 on Monday April 20, 2020 @08:55AM
(#22923401)
This is a sidetrack, but is “wel” like “do”, as per the examples on Wiktionary? Or simply like the English word “well”?
Re:A Bemidji professor is on a quest to keep the Ojibwe lang...
by ivanbakel on Monday April 20, 2020 @09:37AM
(#22923684)
"wel" is basically nothing like the English "well", except in archaic speech. It is similar to "do", but you can't use "do" to positively affirm nearly as much as you could use "wel". There is simply no way to directly translate it, and it has no equivalent in English - though you can describe it, as the positive "not".
That's a misunderstanding of Treuer's point. English is able to define English nations and express the English cultural perspective. He's not arguing that language, generally, is a tool for communication - he's saying that specific languages each yield their own specific identities.
To address the point more generally - languages do, for most speakers, have an influence on thought. People acknowledge that effect to varying degrees, from "you can't think what you can't express" to "language is intertwined with culture and culture differentiates thought" (i.e. not quite Sapir-Worf).
As an anecdotal argument - monolingual speakers often expect translation to be one-to-one, bar idioms. The fact is languages differ in nuance for different kinds of terms, to the point where a mapping might be one-to-many, many-to-one, or completely absent - and those nuances can and do reflect different cultural attitudes. For example, there is no English equivalent to wel[1], the Dutch word for reinforcing a positive sentiment.
[1]: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/wel#Dutch