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From: breuel@h-sc1.UUCP (thomas breuel)
Newsgroups: net.music.folk,net.nlang
Subject: Re: Re: Translations rhyming (orig Re: Welsh song)
Message-ID: <904@h-sc1.UUCP>
Date: Fri, 31-Jan-86 05:37:48 EST
Article-I.D.: h-sc1.904
Posted: Fri Jan 31 05:37:48 1986
Date-Received: Sat, 1-Feb-86 20:17:10 EST
References: <892@h-sc1.UUCP> <853@rtech.UUCP>
Organization: Harvard Univ. Science Center
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Xref: watmath net.music.folk:440 net.nlang:4120

||going to be noticed or significant. Far more serious, in my opinion,
||is the fact that (even young) German speakers usually do not
||encounter limitations in their vocabulary every day, and that
||therefore a poem made up out of non-sense words probably 
||sounds much more unnatural to German than to English ears.
|
|This comment puzzles me.  It implies that speakers of English have more
|vocabulary troubles that speakers of German.  Why would this be?  It's
|well known that English has a larger vocabulary than any other language,
|so the implication is that speakers of English don't know their own
|language as well as speakers of German do.
|
|Of course, what I've just said is an oversimplification.  English has a
|huge number of words, but most of these are not part of the everyday
|vocabulary because they are too specialized.  I don't know German, so I
|have no idea whether the same condition holds in that language.
|
|If it is true that nonsense words sound more unnatural to speakers of
|German than to speakers of English, could it be because English is a fluid
|language in which words are constantly being invented, whereas in German
|old words are adapted for new objects or ideas?  Again, I don't know German,
|so this is just a speculation.  Someone please enlighten me.

There are two main reasons why I *think* that non-sense words sound less
natural to German than to English speakers (no offense intended).
It appears to me that in German a much larger fraction of the vocabulary
consists of compound words and therefore derives from known roots.
Secondly, the vocabulary of the literary German language is probably
significantly smaller than that of the literary English language, which
means that an educated German can become fluent in it easier than
an English speaker in his literary language. 

Now, I can't state for a fact that my supposition is true. Perhaps you
could just take it as an example of what kind of bizarre phenomena *might*
limit the ability to translate literary works.

							Thomas.

PS: needless to say that the GEB German translation of the Jabberwock
sounds extremely unnatural to me, both as poetry and as a translation.