

"No Word for Looting"? - telemachos
http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=3031

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angus77
I should probably double-check this with a Japanese first, but I think the
words 「強盗」 and 「略奪」 don't mean "looting" in the sense of people snatching
whatever they can from stores after a disaster. My (possibly incorrect)
understanding is that 「強盗」 is forcible robbery, and 「略奪」 is the kind of
looting an army or band of pirates would pull off during a raid.

Of course, words take on different (and sometimes surprising) meanings in
different contexts, and I'm not a native speaker.

~~~
jrockway
Yeah, and EDICT is pretty weak Japanese dictionary, IMHO. One-word
translations lead to misunderstandings. Having gone to school in Japan, I
found EDICT useless whereas a random paper dictionary or denshi-jisho would
actually help me find the right word.

So anyway, I would not use EDICT as my sole source for "there is no word" or
"the correct word is..." If I cared, I would probably read through the
Japanese newspaper coverage until I found a word that seemed relevant in both
dictionary definition and actual context. If there is no word for the
phenomenon or it never happened, then you wouldn't be able to prove
anything... but if there is a word and it did occur, then you would have
something a little more solid than "I googled for Japanese dictionary and
found some words in them."

~~~
Paulomus
Really, I always found it pretty useful. I guess this might be because when
doing J->E translation I already had context from the source text. Still the
WWWJDIC results at least link to ALC (which does give lots of context) or to
Japanese Wikipedia entries (which can compare to the English version of the
same article)

For arguments sake: <http://eow.alc.co.jp/%CE%AC%C3%A5/EUC-JP/> has lots of
usage examples of 略奪 in context suggesting it does in fact mean looting.

~~~
angus77
Thanks for the link! Somehow I'd never come across that site before (I guess
because I've got a good densi jisyo. The only times I check out words online
is when I want more context; in which case I go to the Japanese Wikipedia).

The question left open, though, is whether that's the word reporters normally
_would_ use. It's not clear in the examples whether or not the word is being
used hyperbolically. I mean, just because you _can_ say "Muhammad Ali
annihilated his opponent" doesn't mean that "annihilate" is a synonym for
"defeat".

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kamechan
my wife is a native (from tokyo), who has only been in the states for a few
years. when i asked her about this she said she'd read the article and was
surprised that we thought this way. that is to say, that we assumed that
because the japanese didn't have a word for something, they didn't loot. she
said they don't loot because they have respect for each other.

of course i immediately asked her what the word for looting is. she said,
"ryakudatsu - when the crisis happens and people don't have stuff so they go
to the store and steal."

she said there is another word sometimes said casually as well "dorobou -
thieving", but it's generally not used except when someone is breaking into
other people's homes.

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Vivtek
For maximum metareferentiality, read the comments - patio11's joke that
Japanese has no word for over-preparation is cited as a similar linguistic
confusion (I defended Patrick's honor, of course).

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intellectronica
It doesn't matter at all whether a language has a word for describing
something. Any human language can describe all concepts that other human
languages can describe.

~~~
frisco
That's not true. There's lot of cases of particularly charged words in certain
languages lacking a direct emotional analog in others. See
<http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/3830521.stm> for one example; Russian has
many like this, too. There's even languages that aren't "complete" in the
semantic sense; see:
[http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/04/16/070416fa_fact_...](http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/04/16/070416fa_fact_colapinto)

~~~
angus77
"Shlimazl" sounds to me like it could be translated pretty easily into
Japanese: 「ついていない」. The phrase uses no noun, though, so would that disqualify
it?

I get sick of hearing foreigners going on about how there's no translation of
the word "should" in Japanese. Well, yes, there _isn't_ a word for "should in
Japanese. The concept behind the word is conveyed through a grammatical
construct, however; not having "a word" for "should" doesn't impede a Japanese
from expressing "shouldness" in the least.

Piraha is a language that people love to bring up in these kinds of
discussions. You should keep in mind, though, that what's been said about the
language (and culture) are not without controversy.

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bpd1069
Word or no Word, its part of the culture, atleast from my small sliver from
way over here in the US.

Remember the scenes from 'Grave of the Fireflies'? During the fire-bombings,
the boy, Sieta, would run and loot the homes of fleeing civilians. Powerful
imagery indeed, but he was looting.

~~~
rheide
In that case, was invading other countries also part of their 'culture'?

~~~
bpd1069
My point was to highlight the subtlety of the CNN statement, alluding that the
very concept of looting is alien in the Japanese culture, so much so that a
word does not exist for the act. It is false, of course but the announcers
lack of syntactical skill is used to make a semantic interpretation of the
Japanese, and directs the audience to make a equivocation: African-Americans
loot.

No one here is saying it, but as an African-American, that is what I heard.

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BoppreH
When I read the original article, I took it as a joke playing on the snowclone
of "X doesn't have a word for Y".

