Nuanced differences between languages

The four articles we read this week by Slobin, Atkins & Levin, and Haspelmath each applied the topics they were discussing at hand to many different languages. Thus, these articles gave me insights into how languages compare and differ. An example of language differing comes from Slobin. He discusses how some languages give speakers relative freedom in the way they can phrase sentences, while other languages are more strict. One example that stuck out to me was when Slobin stated, “With regard to the domain of motion, some verbs conflate path and manner. An example of such a verb in the frog story is Turkish turmanmak ‘climb.’ Unlike English climb, which is neutral with regard to path (one can “climb down from a tree” or “climb out on a branch,” for example), the Turkish verb is used only for upward motion in a grasping manner. (The same is true of equivalent ‘climb’ verbs in other V-languages.)”. This point about a difference between English and Turkish made me realize that translating between languages is more complex than simply looking up “equivalent” words in a dictionary and replacing them with words from the other language. Also, English “climb” gives speakers relative freedom when using this word, while Turkish limits the speaker’s use of this word to what we traditionally think of as “climbing.” 

On the other hand, Atkins and Levin give an example of how English and Russian both share the fact that “the accusative case is the default case of transitive objects, including the objects of causative transitive verbs.” The particular example is “(27) Sobaka viljala xvostom. dog-NOM wagged tail-INST. ‘The dog wagged its tail.’” The authors state, “Thus, in Russian the body-part construction is not truly transitive, consistent with our suggestion that the transitive uses of quiver in (26) are not causative.” This example demonstrates that languages actually may share nuanced characteristics. From past reading, I believe this is called a Universal, which is a property that all languages possess. 

Finally, Haspelmath gives further interesting examples of how languages compare and differ. One was when he discussed the concept of hyponyms. That is, in compounds, “the first compound member generally serves to modify and narrow the denotation of the second compound member, or, in other words, the compound is a hyponym of its second member. Thus, lipstick is a special kind of stick (not a special kind of lip)…” In English, “Since semantically the second member is in this sense more important, it is referred to as the head of the compound…” “In English, the compound head is always the second member but in other languages such as Spanish, the head is the first member.” For example, ‘swordfish’ in Spanish is literally “pez espada” or “fish sword.” This example reminded me that when we are learning rules of linguistics, we have to be mindful that they do not necessarily apply the same way to all languages, but that is what makes linguistics so interesting.