Fuddland

There was an interesting post from The Man in Blue the other day, extending the concept of separating style from content — which is the point and goal of using CSS and structured markup — to investigate the difference between meaning and language.

Essentially when you speak/write you are communicating meaning using a semantic construct, such as the English language. “I’m hungry” has the same meaning whether you say it in English or Chinese, it is merely the way that the writer represents it that differs.

[…]

Just as style sheets allows us to alternately view XML as a graphical web page or as text on a palmtop, if we encoded our communications as pure meaning then we should be able to write “language sheets” that display that meaning in a particular language.

[…]

Could you imagine opening up Opera and visiting a web page with your custom language sheet, being oblivious to what native language the author might arbitrarily communicate in?

I don’t think he’s seriously suggesting this will be possible anytime soon, if ever, and one of the commenters does point out that a lot of meaning relies heavily on cultural references which may not have equivalents in other languages. This is particularly true of proverbs:

• “Je kan nooit weten, hoe een koe een haas vangt.” — literally “You never know how a cow catches a rabbit”. [Dutch]

• “Ordít, mint a fába szorult féreg.” — Shout like a worm stuck in a tree. [Hungarian]

• “Qabda trab, erba’ kaptelli u harja f’wicc kull ma kelli.” — A handful of dust, four capitals [as in the top of a pillar] and shit on all I possessed. [Maltese]

• “Siellä mies kuin pyy ja sääret kuin sääskillä.” — There’s a man who looks like a partridge with legs like a mosquito. [Finnish]

I’d hate to see what Microsoft Language Explorer 1.0 makes of those.

#1

lump | 2004 / 02 / 08 – 08:42

I’m not sure what point you were trying to make at the end: I use all of the English translations of those proverbs in daily conversation. Especially the Finnish one.

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