I'm being lazy today, and I am just translating an article I wrote quite some time ago on my other (dead) blog, which explores the way words are interpreted with a cultural filter.
The full title for this post was The Bowl Theory, or The Dictionary Has its Reasons Which Reason Does Not Know [1]
Let us take the French word "bol". If you flip through (even virtually) a bunch of dictionaries, you will find the following definitions:
In French :
BOL
, subst. masc.
A. 1. Pièce de vaisselle de forme généralement hémisphérique servant à prendre certaines boissons
A piece of china generaly of a hemispheric shape, used to take in some beverages.
In English :
bowl
–noun
1.a rather deep, round dish or basin, used chiefly for holding liquids, food, etc.
In German, it's already a bit more complicated. Leo translates bol by Schale which my dictionary [2] describes in the following terms:
Schale
-n
1 - eine relativ flache Schüssel
''a relatively flat "Schüssel"[3]
2 - Tasse
A cup
Which brings us back to the definition of Schüssel, still in that Langenscheidts dictionary
Schüssel
-n
1 - ein tiefes, rundes Gefäß, das oben offen ist und in dem man Speisen auf dem Tisch stellt.
A deep and round recipient, often open at the top, which is used to serve food on the table (see image provided).
So. If you stop at the base definition of the word bol, you end up on roughly the same thing. A round and hollow utensil. So far, so good. However, it becomes complicated when you start using the word in every day life.
Imagine the simple sentence :
Tous les matins, je prends un bol de chocolat. (Every morning, I take a bowl of chocolate).
For a French person, no problem, it's a rather logical use of the word bol. It is even, one could say, the primary use of the word bol. In France, you drink a bow of coffee, or a bowl of tea, preferably with a croissant in the morning. Occasionally you have a bowl of soup, that works too.
Except that when you tell an English speaker I'm drinking a bowl of chocolate.
, they're bound to look at you funny. Because bowl in English speaking countries is more often used for soup than it os for coffee. For coffee at breakfast, you have cups or mugs, not bowls.
Let me not even speak about the Germans, which only know the Tasse (cup) for chocolate and have only heard about Schale or Schüssel in relation with fruits, icecream or even salad. Not to mention that they probably have never seen a bol as I know it.
All of this to illustrate how much culture influences language and the difficulty that you may face trying to translate a word without explaining the context. Even words that we might use on an every day basis carry way much more history and cultural influences than you'd think. I can't imagine what the British would do if I asked them for a bowl of tea, or the Germans if I asked for a bowl of coffee...
I'd be interested though, what the meaning of bol is in other languages. Are there more meanings of the word out there?
Notes
[1] This is actually a pun on a French phrase: "Le coeur a sa raison que la raison ne connaît pas" which I might explain one day or another.
[2] Langenscheidts Großwörterbuch - Deutsch als Fremdschprache (German as a foreign language)
[3] Dictionaries make a point of referring to an equivalent object to explain a word. If you don't know the definition of said object, you're dead. When of course said object does not refer in turn to the word you were looking for in the first place...
6 reactions
1 From digitalfemme - 08/10/2008, 15:53
The word bowl, bol and many OTHER words were sources for many great arguments with my German bf. I would use one English word and he would take it completely wrong. He would ask me what a certain word in English was and I would tell him, and he would not believe me. I had soon learned to just say nothing. :o)
2 From pfctdayelise - 08/10/2008, 16:21
Your talk of bowls reminds me of soup. In English soup is eaten but in Chinese it is drunk. Or is it the other way around? Now I've confused myself.
When I went to France for the first time just before Wikimania, I was so charmed when my friend brought me a bowl of hot chocolate for breakfast. how decadent, I thought. :)
3 From Andrew Whitworth - 08/10/2008, 16:40
Reminds me of the blog engrishfunny.com. It's a humorous, if crass, look at translation problems that arise between Asian languages and English. It always amazes me how even common concepts cannot be translated between two languages with any certainty.
4 From Jean-Sébastien Girard - 08/10/2008, 18:45
For what it's worth, asking for a bowl of stuff to drink will also get you odd looks in Quebec, unless you're in a fancy café or something. "Bols" (or "plats", which I think is fairly common too) are for soup or cereals. In fact, bowls specifically for drinking are a kind of novelty items, the closest I've seen are ramen bowls.
5 From notafish - 09/10/2008, 15:59
@Jean-Sébastien now, that's interesting! Remind me to do a post about how Québécois always pretend that the French speak some kind of terrible Franglish...
6 From Jean-Sébastien Girard - 09/10/2008, 18:01
Well, Our tablewares did have four hundred years to grow different :p I was just pointing the difference.
I'm fairly sure I would refer to an assiette à soupe as a bol too, if it had soup in it, anyway. But then we always served soup in "true" bols in my family (we used what would possibly be referred to in Europe as assiettes à soupe almost exclusively for pasta).