Idiomatic language: linguistic and cultural aspects
Before describing the specific features of English idiomatic expressions one needs to clarify the term idiom. An idiom is a set expression (or phrase) whose meaning cannot be deduced from a literal definition of its parts, and instead refers to a non-literal or figurative meaning which is only known through conventional use.
It is likely that every human language has idioms, and very many of them; a typical English commercial idiom dictionary lists about 4,000. When a local dialect of a language contains many highly developed idioms it can be unintelligible to speakers of the parent language; a classic example is that of Cockney rhyming slang. But note that most examples of slang, jargon and catch phrases, while related to idioms, are not idioms in the sense discussed here. Also to be distinguished from idioms are proverbs, which take the form of statements such as, “He who hesitates is lost.” Many idioms could be considered colloquialisms.
In linguistics, idioms are constructs of natural language which contradict the principle of compositionality which more formal languages follow. They are typically classified as figures of speech.
For example, the colloquial English phrase to kick the bucket means to die. A listener knowing only the meaning of the words “kick” and “bucket” would not be able to deduce what the expression actually means. Though the phrase can literally refer to the act of giving a kick to a bucket, the literal interpretation is a rarity when native speakers use the phrase, and students of a new language can often be frustrated by their use.
So the following features are essential to constitute an idiom:
1) Non-compositionality of meaning: The meaning of an idiomatic collocation cannot be totally derived from the composition of the meanings of the conjoined components.
2) Non-substitutability: We cannot freely substitute for a word or even a grammar form in an idiom with a related word or form.
3) Non-variability: We cannot freey modify an idiom or apply syntactic transformations.
The term idiom hence tends to refer to groups of words which are overtly confusing to those not familiar with the term itself and its cultural background. Hence the cultural aspect is a matter of crucial importance for analyzing idioms, their conceptual content, for adequate understanding the realities of life they reflect.
Idioms and Culture
Language is a wonderful thing. Its semantic sphere encodes all available knowledge about the history, culture, habits and ways of a particular nation. This information is expressed through language means, mostly wods and phrases. The latter, especially idioms, possess the highest cultral value as they are flesh of the flesh of the national culture.
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Nowadays it is a recognized fact that language is closely connected with the culture of the nation and can be understood through culture in the broad meaning of the term: the collected knowledge and wisdom of the people, their values and stereotypes, peculiarities of their mentality are all reflected in the language. From this point of view, Phraseology is “a treasure-house of the language” (A.V. Kunin).
Idioms are termes which require some foundational knowledge, information, or experience, to use only within a common culture where parties must have common reference. As cultures are typically localized, idioms are more often not useful for communication outside of that local context. However, some idioms can be more universally used than others, and they can be easily translated, or their metaphorical meaning can be more easily deduced.
The most common idioms can have deep roots, traceable across many langyages. To have blood on one’s hands is a familiar example, whose meaning is obvious. Many have translations in their languages, some of which are direct. For example, get lost! (i. e. go away or stop bothering me) is said to have originated from a Yiddish expression.
Many idiomsare in fact colloquial metaphors. According to Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary metahors are figures of speech in which a name or descriptive term is transferred to some object different from, but analogous to, that in which it is properly applicable. I.A. Richards quoting form Aristotle’s Poetics said that the greatest thing by far is to have a command of metaphor and he defined it as a ahift carrying over a word from its normal use to a new one. In a sense metaphor, the shift of a word, is occasioned and justified by a similarity or analogy between the object it is usually applied to and the new object (12).
While many idioms are clearly based in conceptual metaphors such as “time as a substance”, “time as a path”, “love as war” or “up is more”, the idioms themselves are often not particuarly essential, even when the metaphors themselves are. For example “spend time”, “battle of the sexes”, and “back in the day” are idiomatic and based on essential metaphors, but one can communicate perfectly well with or without them.
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In phrases like “profits are up”, the metaphor is carried by the component “up” itself. The phrase “profits are up” is not an idiom but a free collocation. Practically any word denoting somethng measurable can be used in place of the word “profits”, for example: “crime is up”, “satisfaction is up”, “complaints are up” etc. True idioms are stable word-combinations with-combination with a complicated semantics which generally involves some cultural knowledge.
Interestingly, many Chinese characters are likewise idiomatic constructs, as their meanings are more often not traceable to a lteral (ie. pctographic) meaning of their asembled parts, or radicals. Because al characters are composed from a relatively small base of ~214 radicals, their assembled meanings follow several different models of interpretation – from the pictographic to the metaphorical to those whose original meaning has been lost in history.
Idioms are cultural references can be accommodated in a broader definition of realia, i.e. lexical items designating elements specific to a partcular culture. See for exampe the folowing definition, originally by the Bulgarian scholars Vlahov and Florin, andquoted by B. Osimo in an online course on translation theory (14): (idioms) are words (and composed expressions) (…) representing denominatios of objects, concepts. Typical phenomena of a given geographic place, of material life or of social-historical peculiarities of some people, nation, country, tribe (sic), that for this reason carry a national, ocal or historical color; these words do not have exact matches in other languages.
Set against this definition, our examples appear to designate objects or concepts typical of a given cuture: traditional British culture – British cuisine- in the case of Christmas pudding, or American sci-fi in the case of quantum leap. Neither of them has “exact matches” hatever this means) in other languages. Both phrases carry some “local colour”. Even more than with single-word realia, when dealing with set phrases like the ones in out examples, language professionals are keen to search for a cultural equivalent, as it witnesses for example by the many multilingual lists of idioms circulating in interpreter-training institutions.
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Culture can be defined as a “design for living’ and as the “shared understandings that people use to co-ordinate their activities”. Members of a society must share certain basic ideas about the world works, what is important in life, how technology is used, and what their artefacts and their actions mean. Whereas social structure refers to the practical/instrumental aspects of the social relation, culture refers to the symbolic/expressive aspects of social relations.
Another definition of culture was suggested by Goseriu. Culture is the historical objectivity of the spirit in shapes that last, in shapes that turn into universe. The spirit is nothing else thanactivity capable of creation, it is creativity itself, not something that creates but the creative activity as such, energy, that activity which is anterir to the concept of any dynamism, of any learned or experimented technique. And man creates culture, he is a creator, he is endowed with energy to the extend to which it goes beyond what man has leanrnt, beyond what he has gained through experience, language. Art, religion, myth, science, and philosophy. This sum of forms is what we call culture in so far as they are achieves at in history as products of man’s creative activity.
Every language has its own linguistic style or what W. Humboldt called “Weltansicht”. i.e. a vision of the world. He also demonstrated that language determines thought as well as a particular vision upon the universe. Any linguistic system comprises within itself an analysis of the exterior word, an analysis which is its own and which is different from that of the other languages or from the other stagesknown by the particular language.
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Tht is why it is a utopia to imagine that two words from two different languages presented in the dictionary as the trnslation of the other one refer to exactly the same things. Every language was formed within a definite lndscape and dependng on a distinct and non-repeatable experience. It is a fallacy to assume, for example, that the English expression to call a spade a spade is to be rendered as such into other languages. We need to take into account the fact that when trying to traslate, we should preserve the semantic as wel as the stylistic equivalencies of what has been expressed in the source text.
The Russian school of Phraseology admits a broad interpretation of its volume and includes idioms, semi-idioms, phraseomatic units, as well as communicative units – provers and sayings.
Proverbs and idioms play a special role in the process of verbalizng the conceptual picture of the world. Concerned mostly with the empirical side of life, they will largely represent the nation’s “naïve’ model of reality, conceptualized knowledge of common, every say life experience. As a specific type of communicative phraseological units, proverbs possess an apparent didactic chracter. Expressing generalized knowledge of life and wisdom of the nation, they sometimes allegorically, sometimes directly state the basic maral values of the nation and norms of behavior accepted in the given culture.
Idioms and proverbs convey their message allegorically, which means that their meaning is created on the basis of a trope mechanism (metaphor, simile, hyperbole etc). The main fnction of any trope is to create some new concepts, and any trope being an allegory gives rise to a net of associations, through which the reality perceived by human mand, is realzed in the language form.etaphor is the most frequently used device hich evokes bright images in man’s mind thus makes the dydactic message of a proverb more emphatic.
Since proverbs convey collective knowledge of the nation, generalized and accumulated in the national culturefor generations, thiir menaing mostly revolves around certain basic concepts which constitute the pople’s conventions, accepted norms and stereotypes. That is why many proverbs are based on a specific type of metaphor which has acquired stability in the language sustem. In othe words, representing a further stage of mtaphorization ( and probably the highest level of abstraction in imagery existing in language), a symbol verbalizes a stable concept.
Words- symbols evoke steady imaginary associations, characteristic of a given language in the consciousness of a native speaker, that is why one of the definitions of a symbol is “an image which has obtained a certain stbility”. A symbol functions as a certain emblem of a designated concept representing a “packet” of relevant information. For example, the thistle is a symbol of Scotland, the hearth is a symbol of home and family, the lamb is a symbol of meek and harmless character etc. Even a single word-symbol is characterized by a very high degree of informativeness. It’s evident that as a componet of an idiomor proverb such a symbol will acquire additional expressiveness and, in its turn, will facilitate the conveyance of the conceptual content fixed in the meaning of the corresponding phraseological unit. In proverbs such symbols usually stand for particular values, or traits of human character, either praised or criticized. For example, in the proverb You can take a horse to the wter, but you can’t make him drink the component “horse” has a symbolic meaning which stands for an independent, self-representing person.
Every nation has its own peculiar idioms and proverbs which registered the country’s historic events, customs and traditions, as well as particular reaities of the national culture, including the specifics of the people’s mentality. But at the same time many of the vocabulary units that appeared in one particular country became world-widely used because of being vivid and true to life and covering the ideas common for all the people in the world. In any case, language is not seen as an isolated phenomenon suspended in a vacuum but as an integral part of culture.
Thus, he famous English phrase to carry charcoal to Newcastle has a corresponding analogue in many European languages: Russian- e здить в Тулу со своим самоваром; Greek “to carry an owl to Athens”etc. The meaning to carry something to the place where it is not needed because it is available there in reat amounts. Newcastle is the center of coal mining in England;Tula was traditionally famous for its high-quality samovars; similarly, Athens has been known since ancient times for abundance of owls. Moreover, the owl is a wide-spread symbol which stands for wisdom, and it’s known that it was used as an emblem of ancientAthens, the cultural centre of ancient Greece. However, in English the owl does not symbolize wisdom, at least in seriousness. This is manifested, for examle, in the similes as wise as an owl and as stupid as an owl, both denoting stupidity.
So the mantioned idioms connote peculiarities of the corresponding natonal culture.
The English proverb Poverty makes strange bedfelows back to England of the Middle Ages when separate beds were uncommon and people of the same sex had to share one bed. This tradition remained till the 17th century.
There’s gold in them there/thar is a humorous expression of Amrican origin which is used in order to say that someone is making a lot of money from a situation ( often used in newspapers, on television news). This given idiom comes from the time in the late 19th – early 2th centuris when people were looking for gold in the western US. When gold was found people were supposed to have said, “there’s gold in them/thar hills”.
It should be mentiomed that proverbs and syings stand out among other set phrases as having apparent evauativeand didactic character. Literal or allegorical, they all express moral judgment which comes from the peopl’s moral law, their knowledge of life and the world. Some of them arouse as a creation of the people, some were coined by some peculiar pubc figure.
Thus, never marry for money, you’ ll borrow it cheaper is a Scottish proverb.
The saying Time is money is strongly associated with the English-speaking culture with ts work ethics and common appreciation of foth time and money. However, the expression is not originally Engish. The English just borrowed the maxim which perfectly fitted in the dydtem of values.
While the famiiar maxim may seem ike an invention of out hectic and impersonal modern society, it actualy come to us with the Greeks. Antiphon, an orator who rote speeches for defendants in curt cases. Recorded the earliestknown version of the saying in Maxim (430 BC)
As “The most costly outline is time” Centuries later, the notion of time’s value appeared in English as”Time is precious”, which was in Sir Thomas Wilson’s A Discourse UponVsurye (1572) and John Fletcher’s The Chances (1647). A century after Fletcher, Benjamin Franklin rendered the exact wording of the current version in Advice to a Young Tradesman (1748_, and the saying afterward came into wise use (Wise Words…).
Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790. American scientisxt, publisher, diplomat) also coined the aphorism If you would know the value of money try to borrow some which reflected the attitude to borrowing, common in the English-speaking culture, so well that it became very popular and soon took root in the language, i.e. turned into a proverb.
The internatinal character of certain proverbs is mostly determined bt their originatng from the common source. They bear the common cultural element resulting in full correspondence of their meanings and images.
Thus, the popular saying the love of/ lust for money is the roof of all evil has an equivalent in all European anguages because it goes back to the Bible and reflects the Christian attitude to money: St. Paul wrote a letter to a young Christian, and said that the root of all evil is the love of money. (I Timothy 6:10). The King James Version faithfully expresses the thought of the passage, saying that greed is the source of all evils. However, the morale of the proverb goes contrary to the system of values current in modern consumer society with its greed for material wealth and things. So modern Bible translators have adapted this verse which, they know, might be offensive to most modern people. So the Bible society came up with an ingenious solution for the Todays’s English Version. They wrote:” The love of money is a source of all kinds of evil”, which distorts the original sense of the proverb. This is a bright illustration of the fact that proverbial language is conditioned by the historical development of aech ntion in the course of time and differences in their perception of the surrounding reality.
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