Because it feels like an important distinction

[tcepsa]

Was talking with a friend today about language and translation, and the trickiness that comes with it, because you've got both what the individual words mean, and then what the speaker actually means when they say something. For example, I can say that the phrase "chotto mate" in Japanese means "wait a sec" in English. But it doesn't actually mean "wait a sec." What it really means is the same thing that a person means when they say "wait a sec."

Perhaps this is more of an English-specific problem. The problem is that we often don't mean what we say--by which I mean that what we say can have several different meanings, the literal one of which is often not the one that we mean.

~grin~ Or maybe this is just me being mean-spirited...

Comments

[reedrover]

It's certainly not English-specific. The English-specific problem is how many words we have and how often they change depending on cultural context as well as historical context.

Take the "n-word" debate if you want an example of both. What clique or social crowd a person is in, as well as that person's intended object, determine both the inflection of the word (it's intended meaning) and its reception. In historical context, it's even more complicated...