In studying some Hindi recently, I came across an intriguing word: कल (kal),
which translates into either "yesterday" or "tomorrow" depending on
its context. Initially, I thought that this was pretty strange that a
word could essentially mean its own opposite according its usage. Then,
this morning I looked at the header for an article in the local section
of my newspaper The Gainesville Sun: "Suspicious pawn shop owner foiled
theft, officials say." Well, it wasn't quite 6 AM when I glanced at
this, so naturally I read it wrong in my bleary-eyed sleepiness. After
all, I tend to, justified or not, associate the idea of "pawn shop
owners" with "suspicious people", i.e. people meriting suspicion from
others. But no, the news here was that the owner was suspicious of
someone else and foiled a theft.
"Suspicious", like कल,
is one of those words whose context can drastically change its
meaning. In Hindi, one needs to either read the appropriate verb tense
form to determine whether "yesterday" or "tomorrow" is indicated or get
a sense of the intended meaning from the surrounding text. Likewise,
I'm "suspicious" that something very similar holds true for my English
example. But I am a native speaker of English and still have a problem
with "suspicious" and its ambiguity. I wonder if native Hindi speakers
feel the same about कल...
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We have a number of words like that in English. In the case of "suspicious", the word means the same thing in both usages, but it's a question of attaching the modifier correctly -- are you suspicious of someone else, or is someone else suspicious of you?
ReplyDeleteBut we have "cleave", which can mean either join or separate. We have "sanction", which can mean either forbid or authorize. We have "overlook", which can refer to looking at something or not looking at it.
Context is everything.
I wonder whether the difficulty in establish correct context to eliminate ambiguities (like your examples and others) isn't one reason why the online translators like Bing's are still so inadequate, often conveying a completely different meaning from the original text.
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