Peter:It's you I'm talking with, but it feels like talking with Humpty Dumpty.
Languages just don't act like that, unless you are through the looking
glass talking with Humpty Dumpty.
People who wish to communicate choose words according to theirNonsense. There are many words which have multiple meanings and still communicate. In English, to pick an example at random, "bear". Or if you want two meanings which are the same part of speech, "lie". If I say "he is lying", I can tell only from the context which meaning is intended, but only rarely (and then usually intentionally) is there any ambiguity.
commonly understood meanings, or as we say here, according to their
semantic domains. If he wants to communicate, he does not use words in
weird, unique senses. A word cannot have multiple meanings and still
communicate.
Translating is a different matter. It is rare that the semantic domainThanks for reminding us of this important point.
of a word in one language has the exact semantic domain of a
corresponding word in another language. For example, (WP in Biblical
Hebrew referred to all flying creatures, not limited to birds.
Sometimes a translator will use terms that seem unrelated to the terms
used in the original text in order to get the meaning across in a
fluid, readable manner while a literal translation may not make sense
in the target language. But I'm not talking about translation, but
about finding the meanings of terms in a language.
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