Linguist Forum

Specializations => Typology and Descriptive Linguistics => Topic started by: zaba on April 04, 2014, 09:13:33 AM

Title: How would you gloss a 4-tier spatial deixis system?
Post by: zaba on April 04, 2014, 09:13:33 AM

So let's say you're translating a language to English. Inconveniently enough, this language has some words which are tough to translate. To make things worse, your job is to choose a one-word translation which is accurate (even if it sounds weird)

hemem = here (proximal)
hor = there (medial)
han = further away (distal) << one word translation needed!  :'(
hamam =  still further away (obvial) << one word translation needed!  :-[

Title: Re: How would you gloss a 4-tier spatial deixis system?
Post by: Daniel on April 04, 2014, 03:31:19 PM

Quote

To make things worse, your job is to choose a one-word translation which is accurate (even if it sounds weird)

Sounds like a terrible job!!


There are two kinds of translation I can think of:

1. Glossing
You would want a one-to-one match for words to glosses. But here you can use non-idiomatic phrases such as DEM.distal or even just DEM1. Coming up with something else isn't helpful.

2. An idiomatic translation. Here you wouldn't translate these in this way. You'd just use "here" for the first one then "there" for the rest!