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Language In The World

782 Words4 Pages
Man, as a perfect being on Earth, is different from other beings because of his intellect and speech abilities. Language is the most perfect tool for communication between people. Its development contributed to society 's development. Language expresses our thoughts and feelings. Language is, indeed, a complex form of communication between people. From the original, unarticulated forms used by the people of the past, to today 's modern language, it certainly went through major changes. Because there are so many languages in the world translation is necessary for understanding each other. But can every word be translated? Do untranslatable words really exist? There are about six thousand spoken languages in the world and all of them have slightly different ways of seeing the world. For instance Pirahã language has almost complete lack of numerals .The language contains no words at all for discrete numbers and only three that approximate some notion of quantity—hói, a "small size or amount," hoí, a "somewhat larger size or amount," and baágiso, which can mean either to "cause to come together" or "a bunch." (http://www.slate.com/blogs/lexicon_valley/2013/10/16/piraha_cognitive_anumeracy_in_a_language_without_numbers.html) There are many words that don’t have a one-to-one translation in a particular language. A great example is a Russian word toska. Russian writer Vladimir Nabokov says the following: "No single word in English renders all the shades of toska. At its deepest
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