The purpose of words is to convey meaning, and therefore it stands that all words have meanings that are commonly agreed upon by those who speak the language and know/use those words.
Knowledge of any language – even your native tongue – is never truly complete. There are for example many cases where domain specific words exist that aren’t more generally known and used. Just as one illustration, even if you’re a native English speaker, you’re unlikely to be immediately familiar with the word karyokinesis unless you’ve studied cellular biology at some point. Even beyond domain specification, education and environment may also result in different subsets of more general words being used. Some may find the word esoteric to be esoteric itself whereas others may give no further thought to its use than the word cat.
Those situations aside though, if you’re able to read this article, you can likely agree that you know the meanings of the words strong, skip, and house (to pick an adjective, verb, and noun somewhat randomly) and that if you use these words with other people that speak English you will have a mostly common understanding of the terms. You would not expect that when you talk about your house, your conversation partner answers with anecdotes about how their house sleeps on the end of their bed at night and has a very loud meow.
If I were to ask anyone that speaks both German and English for translations of these three words, they’d probably give me stark, springen, and Haus. And in many cases where these English words appear in text or speech, these German translations as given will be perfectly appropriate. However, not all cases. Go to any online translation dictionary website and you’ll find that strong could be stark, kräftig, fest, hart, derb, and many more.
So, what’s going on here? Some people may look at this list of possible translations and think that German contains a lot of unnecessary words. Why have so many words that all mean the same thing? Others may look at it and think that English is very imprecise, since it has one general word instead of multiple more precise words.
Both of these thoughts are of course incorrect, but both do hint at the real truth going on. That truth being that the underlying meaning of words is different in different languages. There is in fact no word in German that means exactly the same as the English word strong, but equally so there is no word in the English language that means the exactly the same as the German word stark.
Thinking about it briefly, you might expect that while this holds true for adjectives like strong which are reasonably loose and broad in scope, it can’t possibly be the case for more concrete concepts like nouns. Surely house and Haus must mean the same thing after all. Actually, no! The German word Haus is far more generic than the English house and encompasses many types of buildings that would not typically be referred to as houses in English, including apartment complexes and office blocks. Technically it does not include large halls and industrial buildings such as factories which are more correctly referred to by the even more generic Gebäude (building), but in common speech it isn’t uncommon to even hear those called Haus as well.
This concept is called semantics. A semantic value is the underlying meaning of something whether that thing be a word, phrase, or anything else. Formally in the study of linguistics, semantics can be further divided in to different branches and ideas such as formal semantics, lexical semantics, conceptual semantics, and compositional semantics just to name a few; but those details are for another article another day.
It is worth a final note that semantics is only one aspect of meaning. Aside from semantics, a perhaps more important concept for understanding meaning is that of pragmatics: the meaning conveyed by context. If I’m sitting down at dinner and my son spills an entire cup of apple juice on me, I may exclaim something like, “well isn’t that great” and/or, “how lovely”. I am using the words ironically, as in reality I mean that it most certainly is neither great nor lovely to have apple juice spilled on me. The semantic meaning is not the same as the intended meaning. I may then further employ a metaphor and call my son a “mucky pup”. Again, the semantic meaning alone doesn’t help here as my son is not literally a dog, just a messy child. Both irony and metaphor are components of pragmatics rather than semantics.
As a side note, I do find it humorous that just as stutter has too many ‘t’s and lisp has a very cruel ‘s’, pragmatics is essential for determining that pragmatics in this context is talking about the linguistic concept and not a group of pragmatists.
In the field of translation, some pragmatics are critical such as common metaphors that may exist in one language but not others; whereas others such as irony may present fewer difficulties. Regardless, both semantics and pragmatics are key to dealing with translation in general, and in the broader concept of linguistics and meaning are both interesting and useful to fields as diverse as neuroscience, computer science, sociology, and big data analytics.
Thoughts on anything and everything 