I'm especially interested in this course because I grew up in a house filled with a variety of languages. My first language was Spanish, and since then, I've learned English, Hebrew, French, and some Italian. Although I feel most comfortable speaking Spanish, I've found that there are certain expressions, ideas, emotions that I have to express in the other languages; there's a certain gap in translation that occurs because each language is so different. It's literally impossible to ever translate a phrase perfectly from one language to another; each language is supplemented with the flavor of its culture, encompassing so much more than dictionary definitions. I'm fascinated by this richness of language!
2 comments:
You mention that "every single word has a specific connotation and denotation." Does specific imply "singular"? That is, might a word have several different connotations, or different connotations for different people, or different connotations for a single person at different times...? This begs the question, how does a word acquire its connotation or denotation???
I was thinking specific to each culture--a foreigner may use a word that by dictionary definition is correct, but sounds strange anyway because there is a specific context in which native speakers use the word. So yes, a singular connotation for a particular culture. Does that make sense?
And in terms of how does a word acquire a specific connotation...I think there's a variety of ways--the most obvious I can think of is when a word is used in a popular book, movie, article, etc.
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