Linguistic difficulties in communication

Тема 7.

Being common for all the humanity, the world is reflected in the mentality and culture of every nation in the unique, specific way depending on difference in reality. This reflection is fixed in the national language and forms the linguistic and cultural world view, specific for every language. While studying a foreign language, this primary world view of the native language is overlapped by the secondary world view of the foreign language. This causes rearrangement of the national thinking and personality bifurcation.

Such a transformation of national mentality is directly connected with different categorization of the surrounding world and this affects language usage. Lingua-conceptual system of a foreign language is perceived through that of the native language. If some parts of the primary (native) and secondary (foreign) systems coincide, it makes understanding and interpreting much easier and vice versa differences of these systems may worsen communication or sometimes break it.

Such difficulties mainly form the language. Language differences are more evident as compared to cultural ones and they can be found at all language levels: phonetic, grammatical, lexical, and syntactical. This can be illustrated as follows.

Native speakers of many European languages having more or less simple letter-sound correlation (German, Spanish, Italian, Greek, Slavonic languages) experience substantial difficulties when mastering reading in such languages as French and English due to a large number of non-pronounced letters and difficult reading rules. For instance, English word knighthas 6 letters in writing and only 3 sounds in pronouncing: 2 consonants and 1 diphthong. It is even more difficult to study languages incorporating ideography (Chinese, Japanese) where one sign denotes a whole word, and sometimes additional grammar meaning.

Grammatical differences hindering cross-cultural communication may be illustrated by the following example. Countability is a grammatical category that shows lack of coincidence in the Russian and English languages. The Russian words совет, знание, новость are countable and have plural forms советы, знания, новости , whereas the corresponding English words advice, knowledge, news are considered to be uncountable and their using in plural forms is a serious error often made by Russian learners of English. The grammatical category of definiteness/indefiniteness for nouns is expressed through articles in some languages (English, French, German, Spanish) and through words or word combinations in others (Slavic languages). For example, the words with the definite article the post(English), die post (German), la poste (French) are translated into Russian by the word combinationsэта почта (this post), известная почта (known post), определенная почта (definite post), ближайшая почта (the nearest post), наша почта (our post) etc. However, even in the first group the languages differ in grammar characteristics of articles: in German, French, and Spanish articles possess characteristics of gender and number whereas in English the definite article the possesses none of these characteristics though the indefinite articlea/an has the characteristics of number. Such grammatical dissimilarity in expressing the same grammatical meaning causes substantial difficulties not only for studying foreign languages but also for communication.

Dissimilarities in vocabulary are the most insidious and complex. It is vocabulary that makes the conflict of cultures very explicit and vivid because this part of language contacts directly with the real world. This conflict can be found at different language levels; in a word meaning, in word combinations and phraseological units where the cross-cultural influence is maximum. Every word possesses its own lexical and phraseological valency which is fairly national and hence requires special attention.

One of the most evident difficulties lies in the fact that vocabularies of different languages differ in non-equivalent words (lacuns). Such words resulted from differences of the real world surrounding peoples and these words denote things and phenomena specific only for the given ethnic community and they have no equivalents in other languages, for example, the Russian words матрешка , самовар , the Japanese word sake, the Spanish word machete, orthe word from American Indian canoe. Foreigners cannot understand these words without special explanation because there are no such things in their life. But on the other hand, the native language of the foreigner has no any image of these things to distort the perception of the unknown thing because of native language interference.

The part of the vocabulary that contains "equivalent" words causes much more difficulties than non-equivalent or partially equivalent words. The fact is that the reality equivalence (correlation with the definite concept) creates the illusion of language equivalence and this misleads the learners. They can use a word not taking into account its semantic ties, stylistic character, and other peculiarities of language functioning in foreign speech.

Linguists, interpreters, and the teachers of foreign languages know very well that it is hardly possible to speak about lexical equivalence without bearing in mind national cultural background. A word as a language unit is correlated with some object or phenomenon of the real world. These objects and phenomena may be quite different in different cultures, for example, a house for the Chinese, the English, American Indians, and Eskimos. The differences of these real objects in form, structure and usage together with the scope of semantic meaning form the invariant concept of "a house" which gives the possibility for the word to exist and to be translated into other languages. Thus, language equivalence is backed up with conceptual equivalence supplemented by the equivalence of cultural notions.

The Russian linguist Barkchudarov, while illustrating the semantic scope of the meaning of the Russian word дом and the English word house, showed that these words coincide only in two meanings - " a building as a place of residence " (a stone house) and "a dynasty"(the House of Romanovs). All the rest of the meanings differ. The Russian word дом has the meaning "a place where one was born or habitually lives and to which one usually has emotional ties" i.e. the meaning of the English word home.Another meaning of дом in Russian is "an institution, organization" which can be translated into English in different ways depending on the type of the institution: orphanage, commercial firm, lunatic asylum.In its turn the English word house has a number of meanings that the Russian word lacks: "chamber, department" (the House of Commons), "theater" (opera house), "audience" (appreciative house), etc. Дом and house differ not only in the scope of semantic meaning but also in usage. In Russian the word дом is a must in any mail address but in English no such an equivalent and hence translation could be found - simply the number of a house is in pre-position to the name of a street but not in post-position as in a Russian address.

Some more implicit difficulties of the language barrier may be illustrated through word combinations, misleading words ("interpreter’s false friends"), and socio-cultural connotations.

Word combinability, i.e. the ability of a word to combine or not to combine with other words, is national and specific for every language. This causes serious difficulties in various aspects of dealing in foreign languages: communicating, studying and teaching. For example, the meaning of the English word flat- "smooth and level" is conveyed in the most accurate way by the Russian word combination плоская поверхность having the meaning "a flat surface". This is the only coincidence with the Russian combinational model for the words плоский, ровный. All the rest variants of the natural combinability for the word flat are unpredictable and should be learned individually: спущенная шина - a flat tyre, туфли без каблука - flat shoes, расстроенная скрипка - a flat violin, батарейка села - the battery is flat. Either side of these pairs represents combinational model of the correspondent language and requires special attention, individual learning, as it may cause additional difficulties in communication. Let’s take as one more example a wide-spread word ‘book’ and its equivalent книга. In English-Russian dictionaries a list of regular word combinations with this word is given but only one of them is translated with the help of ‘книга’: