Articulating “the” situation in English, French, Hebrew and Russian

 

[statue of St. Pierre - Rome*]

While all languages have nouns, verbs and adjectives, the shy article identifying whether the noun is general or specific, the and a for English speakers, is a fascinating demonstration of the variety of approaches to defining ideas and how they affect second language learning. To demonstrate, English, French, Hebrew and Russian all have different rules for specifying nouns, which can often indicate the native language of writers when they write in another language, English in this example.

As a base line for this post, English article rules, granted a potentially controversial approach, distinguish general and specific nouns, ignore gender and sometimes allow the article to be optional. As a rule, the word a (an) before a noun in the singular or no article at all for a noun in the plural indicate non-specificity: A teacher/Teachers can kick you out of class. By contrast, the word the before both singular and plural nouns indicates specific examples: the teachers [at our school] are on strike. To complicate matters, abstract nouns do not require articles: Charity is the backbone of religion, with both charity and religion singular and without an article. In contrast, English nouns do not have gender, allowing English to have single comprehensive articles, specifically the and a, with an being used for pronunciation reasons, i.e., before a vowel sound, not a vowel as many students think. See a human vs an hour and a unicorn vs an umbrella. Finally, in phrases, English allows the omission of articles after the first noun, e.g., I brought the bread, butter and jam, with it being understood that the word the also applies to butter and jam. Most native English speaker intuitively understand these rules but not necessarily all ESL students.

French has the same articles but the distinction is less clear,  adds gender and number considerations and requires that all nouns have articles. The direct equivalent of the English articles are un/une and le/la/les/l’. In practice, their use is different from English. First, while the difference between un gateau and le gateau is clear, note the sentence la charitė est la colonne vertébrale de la religion uses the definite article, i.e., la, as compared to non-use of articles in English for the same sentence. Since French nouns, similar to most European languages, have a gender, the form of the article is adjusted for masculine, feminine and even plural: le gateau, la pâtisserie and les desserts. The l’ is used before vowel sounds, including before silent h’s, e.g., la hollondaise and l’angoise. The most common mistake of English speakers in French is to fail add the article to all nouns in a list, e.g., J’ai apporté le pain, le beurre, et la confiture. The different approach to articles in abstract nouns and lists is often noticeable in learners.

Hebrew only has half the article package, sometimes buries it but often is more than generous with its use. Specifically, Hebrew has a particle for a specific noun, the letter hehה , which it attaches to the relevant noun, e.g., חתול [hatul], a cat as compared to החתול [hehatul], the cat. In other words, the absence of the letter heh means that the noun is non-specific. The ambiguity is when a prepositional particle such as ב [bə], in, or ל [lə], to, is also added because the prepositional particle may include the article. Without full vowel markings, בקופסה  [bekufsa] could mean in a box or in the box. Not only that, in compound nouns, Hebrew adds the article to the second noun only. For example, compare בית ספר  [beit safer], literally house of  a book, a school, to בית הספר [beit hasafer], the school. By contrast, the definitive articles is added to all adjectives describing said noun. Compare חתול שחור [hatul shahor], a black cat, with החתול השחור [hehatul hashahor], the black cat. The result of this binary approach to the difference between definite and indefinite articles is that Israelis often make errors in applying them in English, particularly the word a.

As is typical in the Russian language, it went down a different route and simply has no articles, definite or indefinite. Instead, Russian indicates the specificity of the noun through noun case, word order or adding words. To quote Wikipedia: “The use of a direct object in the genitive instead of the accusative in negation signifies that the noun is indefinite, compare: Я не вижу книги [ya ne viju knigi]("I don't see a book" or "I don't see any books") and Я не вижу книгу [ya ne viju knigu] ("I don't see the book").” (Sorry for the quote but the writer did such a good job.). As for word order, again from Wikipedia: “compare В комнату вбежал мальчик [b’komnatu vebyejal malchik] ("Into the room rushed a boy") and Мальчик вбежал в комнату [malchik vebyejal b’komatyu]  ("The boy rushed into the room").” Finally, the addition of words such as какой-нибудь [kakoe nibud] or Любые [lubiye], which can be translated as any, makes it clear that no specific object is intended. The results of this syntactic approach is the most Russians have no clear idea of how to use the and a in English.

All roads to Rome, they say. So, as long as the text transmits the intention of the writer, everything is kosher. At the same time, it is fascinating to see how languages approach the subtle matter of definitive and non-definitive articles. Not only does it show the variety of approaches human languages take but, on a practical level, it sometimes allows the reader to identify the native language of the writer.

* Picture captions allows the blind to fully access the Internet.

Picture credit

Say it again, Sam or syntactical repetition

 

[Humphrey Bogart*]

Redundancy can be both positive and negative. In legal terminology, terms and conditions are the same as are cease and desist and thus merely add superfluous complexity to the language. By contrast, on airplanes and space vehicles, redundancies save lives. In grammar, redundant structures are quite frequent but from far from universal. Comparing examples from English, Hebrew, French and Russian, I will present some linguistic double-takes in the use of prepositions, articles, subjects, possessives and negations.

All languages use prepositions in conjunctions with verbs but the difference appears where they are multiple objects of the preposition. Most languages repeat the preposition before each noun. For example, in French, you would say “Je suis allé au cinéma, au café et à la piscine” meaning I went to the movies, coffee shop and pool. Note that the preposition à meaning to in its appropriate form (à and au) appears before each noun. This is the practice in most languages but not in English. The word to is only used once before the first noun in the English translation.

To be fair, in the case of a particle, a word without any lexical meaning but serving a grammatical function in the sentence, repetition can matter. Take the following Hebrew sentence:

הם הכירו פה את כל סוגי מזג האוויר, את החברה ואת הים.

The word את is a particle indicating the presence of a specific direct object. Translating the phrase literally into English, it comes out “They knew all types of weather, the society and the sea.” In Hebrew, the particle is placed before each noun, clearly indicating that types of weather, society and sea are all direct objects of the verb “to know”. However, in English, because of the intervening presence of the words “types of”, it could be understood that they knew types of weathers, types of society and types of sea, not the writer’s intention. Thus, a lack of a repeated article or particle can create ambiguity. The sentence as translated came out: “they are familiar here with weather of all types, the society and the sea.”

This example leads to the matter of articles, the and a in English. Since in most languages nouns have a gender, i.e., masculine, feminine and sometimes neuter, it is necessary to insert the gender identifying article before each noun. In the following sentence Le pėre, la mėre and les enfants ont tous les droits., meaning the father, mother and children all have rights, each of the forms of the French article le is used in accordance with gender and number. However, as English nouns do not have gender unless it is natural, e.g. girl and boy, there is no need to insert the word the before the two last nouns as the first use implicitly applies to each of them. Reverting back to the translation in the previous paragraph, it is not a mistake to repeat the article if it adds a certain required emphasis or stylistic element. As English stresses conciseness, the repeated articles are usually omitted.

Certain languages lack a commonly-used form of the verb to be in the present tense, notably Hebrew and Russian. They simply write the subject and predicate without that verb. For example, in English, in identifying someone’s profession, a person would write Mr. Jones is a teacher. In Hebrew, due to the lack of a register-neutral form of the verb, it comes outs Mr. Jones, he teacher. In effect, the subject, Mr. Jones and he, is repeated to allow use of the accepted grammatical structure, pronoun – identifier, without a verb. Here the redundancy is required by syntactic rules that do not apply in most languages.

Possessives are often doubled, albeit for different reason. In French, the form of the possessive is determined by the gender of the noun it describes, not that of the person that owns it. For example, in the sentence “Son chien est laid”, which means his/her dog is ugly, the use of the masculine form son is indicated because the noun chien is masculine. In order to clarify the matter of ownership, it is necessary to write Son chien à lui or son chien à elle in order to indicate his or her, respectively. In Hebrew, for syntactical reason, a possessive declination is added to the noun in addition to the actual possessive element. To demonstrate, בעלה של נינה [baala shel nina] translates literally as her husband of Nina.  The ה at the end of the word בעל turns “husband” into “her husband”, which, according to English thinking, is obvious due to the word of. English does not require such doubling up.

Finally, there is strange matter of negation. Most languages a no is a no, i.e., one word of negation does the job. You don’t need to add any other element, an example in itself. Even Russian is satisfied with one word: он не нужен большее [on nye nujen bolshe]. It does not need more, literally. However, French takes an additional step, i.e., an added pas, because the negating ne is not sufficiently emphatic: ça ne suffit pas. Ne is not enough. If you only use ne, it suggests an explanation or fear: je crains que il ne soit trop tard. – I fear that it will be too late. Like in backgammon, it is double or nothing in French.

Good reasons exist for redundancy in language even if they do add words. By nature and training, I value conciseness and efficiency in language. On the other hand, these repetitions are part of the language and add a certain charm as well as precision. So, to paraphrase Humphrey Bogart, say it again, Sam, but only at the right time.

*Always add captions to pictures to allow the blind to enjoy your posts.

Digital Idiot Savant

The world of translation for both the general public and professionals is the midst of a revolution.  Machine translation has taken off.  Google Translate may be its most public form but far from its most important use. Corporations such as Nestle and Amazon are using and developing better forms of machine translation. 

To explain the process, phrases and sentences are compared with company-prepared glossaries, known Internet-accessible translations and grammar rules to create translated documents. Of course, as anybody that has ever used Google Translate can testify, the results are sometimes ludicrous but more and more often quite satisfactory.

Recently, I post-edited a very long machine translation of a complex tender offer in French.  I felt I was dealing with an idiot savant in the sense that genius and stupidity were randomly mixed. While for confidentially reasons I cannot provide specific examples, I can say that a perfect translation of a complex sentence would often be followed by an irrelevant translation of a simple sentence. The same word would be translated differently in consecutive sentences. The grammar ranged from Oxford correct to awful first year ESL student. In short, unlike human translation, there was no rhyme and reason to the quality of the translation.

This required me to treat each sentence as completely isolated in terms of my confidence level in the translation. When editing human translation, it is a bit like observing the driver ahead of you: you quickly get a sense of whether to trust or avoid him/her. Here, my mind had to refuse to trust any translation based on the previous segments. Even harder psychologically, I could not even say to myself “what an idiot” or “what a good translator” because the translator was digital. All in all, it was a very different editing experience.

Many translators fear that machine translation is the end of the profession. The probable truth is the opposite. Translation is one of the fastest growing professions in the world thanks to the world-village phenomenon, among other reasons. It is clear that machine translation handles certain jobs, especially large masses of text and very standard email messages, much more efficiently and cost-effectively than human translation. However, technical translation of all kinds, including medical and legal, requires the human brain both with and without computer help. As we have all experienced, there is nothing more intelligent and stupid than a computer.

The Joys of Russian (Translation)

I have the pleasure of translating of several languages into English.  Working from Russian is by far the most challenging and tiring.  The reason is that each sentence is small jigsaw puzzle required serious thought of a grammatical nature.

The reason for this is the problem of word order.  Western European Latin-based languages are word order rigid for the most part.  The difference between The dog chases the cat and The cat chases the dog has nothing to do with the words and entirely to do with which noun is before the verb.  In other words, as Chomsky describes in this theory of universal grammar, the actor is before the verb and the receiver of the action is after the verb. 

Slavic languages, by contrast, use endings to mark the grammatical function, i.e. subject, direct object, indirect object, possessor, etc.  For example, in Russian, the various forms of the word книга [kniga] (book) include книгу [knigu], книге  [knigye], and книгой [knigoy], to mention a few.  Therefore, the actual word order of sentence is mainly a matter of style, not actual content.  The subject can be at the end of a sentence and still be understood.  Dostoevsky is quite fond of sentences going on for ten lines or so with the subject at the end.  I, as a student of the language at the time, was not so happy.

Moreover, any phrases describing those nouns are placed before the adjective, the opposite of English.  To demonstrate, the English sentence The police car whose lights are flashing is trying to catch the car that is speeding down the road becomes Whose lights are flashing police car is trying to catch the speeding down the road car in Russian.

The end result of this word play is that translator tackles each sentence in Russian by figuring out what the subject, verb, and object are and then adding the other elements.  In other words, each sentence is a logic puzzle of varying complexity in itself.  Believe me.  This can be hard work.