Inkless

using language to give your story a foreign context

In writing, adopting the perspective of a foreigner can give you an angle on a story that may provide you with much more insight. Particularly in speculative fiction, but also in other fiction, alien or unworldly characters can be very satisfying. And if you want to create truly foreign characters, you need to be able to think in a foreign way sometimes, and that will require research.

Rich Words

If you’ve ever studied a foreign language, you may notice that every so often you run across a word in that language that requires a long cultural explanation to define, or that illustrates a funny difference in the way people think, or that sound just perfectly right for what they mean. I’ve run into words like this in Russian, and (to a lesser extent, reflecting my weaker speaking ability) in Ukrainian and Japanese. An equally fun discovery is when there is not really a good word in another language for something in English.

Here’s a few of the words and phrases and expressions I enjoy. I’ll be adding to them periodically, as I encounter or remember more. If you’ve got one in a language you know, feel free to drop it in the comments!

Russian

• Blatt (блат): It means a combination of corruption related ideas like “inside connections”, “pull”, and “under the table deals”.
• Krysha (крыша): literally “roof”: one’s connections in high places that protect one from being persecuted by government officials or gangsters.
• Tovarishch (товарищ): The word Russian Communists actually used that was translated as “comrade” in English. Funny enough, the word originally meant “business associate” and comes from a Turkish word for “businessman” or “merchant”. The Communists were insulting each other all this time!
• Khaltura (халтура): This can have the innocuous meaning “side-job” or the more derogatory meaning of poorly done work.
• Belaya Vorona (белая ворона): literally, a “white crow”. In English you have a “black sheep”—the one strange, out of place person in an otherwise OK family. In Russian you have a “white crow”—the one good person in a group of bad folks. Perhaps “diamond in the rough” would be a better comparison.
• Khomyachit’ (хомячить): Literally “to hamster”. In the US, we wolf down our food, in Russian-speaking areas, they’re more disdainful of the practice.
• Seroburomalinoviy (серобуромалиновый): literally grayish-brownish-raspberry colored. It means motley or of no particular color.
• Privacy: While there is a word уединение (Uyedineniye) that gets translated as “privacy”, the word is more closely translated as “solitude”. There are significant implications if a person can express the idea of being alone, which is the main meaning of “privacy”, but not the idea of a right to be alone that is often the implied when this term is used in English (for example: “This reception is great, but I feel like we really ought to give the newlyweds some privacy!”—it doesn’t quite work with “solitude”, particularly since there are two of them).

Ukrainian

• Rozsmakuvaty (розсмакувати): The word “smakuvaty” (смакувати) without the prefix means to eat with gusto (a word with resonance by itself). With the prefix it means to eat something enough to get a taste for it. For example, it often takes people a while to get a taste for alcoholic drinks, so new drinkers usually try flavored mixed drinks instead of straight liquor until they have rozsmakuvati-ed alcohol.
• Kumivstvo (кумівство): A “kum” is a parent of your godchild, or a godparent to your child. Therefore, this is literally something like “godparent-ition”. It means the same thing as blat does in Russian: the corrupt use of one’s connections to obtain advantage.

Japanese

Many of the most fun words in Japanese are from among the astounding collection of onomatopoeias in the language. Not only that, but they have lots of ideophones (gitaigo in Japanese: 擬態語）, what I call resonances, words that sound like the ideas they represent. Lots and lots and lots of resonances.

• TsuruTsuru (つるつる）: This word was described in my class as meaning “very smooth—smooth as the head of a Buddhist priest”.
• DabuDabu (だぶだぶ）: This means baggy.

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