Is That a Fish in Your Ear?

Given the labyrinthine complexity of the variable terminologies and conflicting expert solutions to the conundrum of establishing what the word units are in perfectly ordinary English expressions, it seems fairly obvious that an ordinary user of a language such as English doesn’t need to know what a word is—or what word it is—in order to make sense. Wordhood is often a useful notion, but it is not a hard-edged thing.

Other languages undermine the wordness of words in a variety of different ways. German runs them together to make new ones. Lastkraftwagenfahrer (truck driver) is of course a single word in ordinary use, but it can easily be seen as two words written next to each other (Lastkraftwagen plus Fahrer, “truck” plus “driver”), or as three words run together (Last plus Kraftwagen plus Fahrer, “freight” plus “motor vehicle” plus “driver”), or as four (Last plus Kraft plus Wagen plus Fahrer, “freight” plus “power” plus “vehicle” plus “driver”). Hungarian also melds what we think of as many separate words, but in a different and equally elegant way. What a computer would count as a three-word expression, Annáékkal voltunk moziban, for example, would be expressed in English by around a dozen words: “We were [voltunk] at the cinema [moziban] with Anna and her folk” (that’s to say, friends or relatives or hangers-on, without distinction). The modest suffix -ék is all that is needed to turn Anna into a whole group, and the “glued-on” or agglutinated addition -kal says that you were part of it, too. Indeed, at my younger daughter’s wedding in London in 2003, in honor of her Hungarian grandparents I was able (after doing my homework) to raise a toast édeslányaméknak, which is to say in one word “to my dear daughter’s husband, in-laws, and friends.”

Classical Greek has no proper word for word; moreover, in manuscripts and monuments from the earlier period, Greek is written without spaces between words. But that does not automatically mean that Greek thinkers had no concept of a basic unit of language smaller than the utterance. There is evidence of word dividers in Greek written in Linear B and Cyprian, ancient scripts that predate the Greek alphabet, and in various other ways a notion of “basic unit” does seem to emerge even in a language that supposedly has no “word” for the unit thus distinguished.[45] Even Hungarians recognize that some “words” are more basic than others, that beneath the practically infinite welter of possible agglutinated and compounded forms lie nuggets that are the elementary building blocks of sense. Gyerek is Hungarian for “child,” and though it may almost never occur in that form in any actual expression, it is nonetheless the “root” or “stem” corresponding to the English stem word child. Without an operative concept of the meaning units of which a language is made, it would be hard to imagine how a dictionary could be constructed. And without a dictionary, how would anyone ever learn a foreign tongue, let alone be able to translate it?

NINE Understanding Dictionaries

Translators use dictionaries all the time. I have a whole set, with the Oxford English Dictionary in two volumes and Roget’s Thesaurus in pride of place, alongside monolingual, bilingual, and picture dictionaries of French idioms, Russian proverbs, legal terminologies, and much else. These books are my constant friends, and they tell me many fascinating things. But the fact that I seek and obtain a lot of help from dictionaries doesn’t mean that without them translation would not exist. The real story is the other way around. Without translators, Western dictionaries would not exist.

Among the very earliest instances of writing are lists of terms for important things in two languages. These bilingual glossaries were drawn up by scribes to maintain consistency in translating between two languages and to accelerate the acquisition of translating skills by apprentices. These still are the main purposes of the bilingual and multilingual glossaries in use today. French perfume manufacturers maintain proprietary databases of the terms of their trade to help translators produce promotional material for export markets, as do lathe manufacturers, medical specialists, and legal firms working in international commercial law. These tools assist translators mightily, but they do not lie at the origin of translating itself. They are the fruits of established translation practice, not the original source of translators’ skills.