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

tangentially...

[nminusone.livejournal.com]

It's not even limited to idioms; the way you model many concepts in Japanese is quite different from English, far more so than the difference betweeen say Spanish and English. The seeming passivity of things like suki, wakaru and the oft-used -te form, the relatively fine gradiations of kudasaru and kureru, and so forth.

And it may be a trite or overused example, but I still find the difference between "gambatte" and "good luck" to speak volumes about the respective cultures.