As someone that studied the culture and reads biblical hebrew I can attest that king james is far removed from it. English does not think of language the way hebrews did. And then there's gnostics and roman politics that shaped the collection of stories that make up the bible, at the very least. Those stories did not all originate in hebrew culture, which is itself borrowing stories that have been mistranslated from prior and contemporary cultures. It all reads like a giant mess, because it is that. No mystery in god's ways. Tribalism, obfuscation, borrowing, omission, long dead politics. As an example, the torah texts have a kind of self-checking mathematical hash running in them. They make sense narratively, but also gemmatrically. That got lost. Both ways.

same with the Quran. It has rhyme into it that's so beautiful nothing in Arabic poetry comes close to it. In English you don't get any of that

@@yousef3375 what's the point if it rhymes, it doesn't make hateful nonsense any better

@@yuliasergeevna2310 nothing hateful about it. And it does matter if it rhymes because we have nothing to compare it to no Arabic works is like it some words used are not even in the Arabic language and became after. Its a genius work that till this day nobody has produced like it.

@@yousef3375 it is hateful because it is full of hate, always talking about how allah hates disbelievers and how he will torture them by putting an iron chain into their anus and taking it out of their mouth (69:32). and it's full of this, even if such thing rhymes, it doesn't make it good. Any other book is better than quran

@@Istanislav1 Практически ничего ...

Having read some 1860-1920 russian novels I have to say, one has to work hard for it. Even if you grew up with the language, even if your family is all academic and stuff. You just don't know what they were thinking and what they were riffing on. Milton and Shakespeare are probably in the list of things they understood better than we do them right now. Салют.

[I am guessing that you are not a native English speaker, and that perhaps you are a speaker of Russian, because you did not use the indefinite article "a" in front of the word "simplified".] No, the issue is not "simplification". The issue is that structural qualities of the Russian language, especially of Russian poetry, are impossible to translate into English. To take the most famous example, Pushkin's Evgeny Onegin, that novel-in-poetry is based upon a stanza, invented by Pushkin, of alternating lines ending with masculine and feminine words. There is no word- gender in English, so it is impossible to convey the affects of the gender-changes and the affects of the gender-based sound differences. Another untranslatable aspect is that Russian is an "agglutinative", "synthetic" language and English is "analytic". In Russian, many words are modifiable by changing the prefixes and suffixes in ways that would require additional words in English. Again, this makes poetry translation between the two languages impossible. Vladimir Nabokov made this point regarding the un-translate-ability of the craft of poetry when he did his own translation of Onegin purely as a literal, semantic translation, foregoing the attempt to reproduce the art of poetry in Pushkin's Russian including cadence, inflection, assonance, and rhyming, Nabokov's translation created a sensation, a firestorm in the world of Russian-English translators, because so many people wanted to maintain the fantasy that Russian poetry, and especially Onegin, could be translated, in some meaningful way for retaining its artistry, into English.

@@thinkerly1 I agree almost 100% with you and actually everybody has to becouse it is so objectively. I am always surprised how well Shakespeare translates into Slavic languages including rhytming and rhyming (and of course a little bit of “magic” is lost anyway but only a little). Of course it is not a translation in pure sence of the word meaning. Translation of poetry is always “translation” it actually is re-creation of the work. The most evident example of this (for me so far) is Clockwork orange “””translation””” into Czech. It is basically very different book than the original (and it is nor even poetry). For your information my father side 100% Russian my mother family side Grandfather - Polish, Gradmother Slovak/American. I was born and raised in Czechoslovakia we spoke Slovak, Polish, Russian and Czech at home. I have university degree in business Russian and English. For me if you speak Slovak, Czech, Russian or Polish is like if you spoke the same language (which in certain way it is). Btw russian, czech, slovak and polish are at least as good analytically as english. I do not want to sound that I look from above at english which I love and use on everyday basis and I even write poetry in it I just experienced so many times the situations where I could not explain to Brits that what they want me to translate can not be done without the partial loss of the meaning. Taking aside that my english is not perfect.

@@thinkerly1 You're right on all accounts. (The article is dropped for newspaper titles and the like, not so?) Russian is a very rich language. I'm not opposing the richness and beauties of cultures. The untranslatable aspect I do oppose. I've done some translations, back in the day. It is not correct to say that there isn't a tool, or an invention that could be used to put things across. The fact is though, that the further your invention is from the common vernacular the less likely your readership will be to follow along with it. That I will give you. But there isn't such a thing as untranslatable poetry. Anything one man came up with can be understood by another, given sufficient effort; and put into any language, given sufficient command of it and some inventiveness. That is my experience and I sand by it. Unless the translator is missing some point in the author's creation, due to whatever, unless information is literally lost on them it won't be lost in translation given enough care.

The Russian language has about 10 times more words than English. I think that says a lot.

​@@morfeichegчел, не позорься....

@@morfeichegThis is false. Actually, English vocabulary has more words than Russian. The power of Russian language comes from its structure, not number of words.

I'm inclined to think culture influences language more than the other way around. I thought "Languages Of Pao" was a good read, but I disagree with its premise.

It seems your appreciation of world literature is based on Cliff notes books.

@@ashkiler It seems you have a tin ear for humor (even or perhaps especially if it's humor that you deem subpar or otherwise dislike)! 😬

@@pattube It seems the only person who thinks you're funny is you.

@@ashkiler It seems like you're just grumpy and cantankerous oldie who could learn not to take things so seriously every once in a while. 🙃

@@ashkiler It seems like you could learn to take things a bit more lightly rather than be such a grouch. 🙃

Охуенно, спасибо!

@@donothingclub99 пожалуйста

I don’t really understand how language is replicating DNA, and I heavily disagree with language being able to convey thoughts in a form of telepathy. A conversation with anybody will show that you cannot convey many thoughts through language, language is very archaic and simple.

@@AypherDo you really believe that? McKenna always said the world is made of language. That's actually a biblical concept, even though McKenna wasn't religious. I'll give you a few facts about about language you probably don't know...BTW humans are the only beings on the planet with language. If it was simple and archaic all the creatures would speak. Now, do you realize that everything that is a thing was a word before it was a thing? The things that you make in your life you make them because of the things that you tell yourself. Words matter, not only do words matter but words ARE matter. This is an aside but it's fascinating. In Hebrew, the word things doesn't just mean things as in material things, it also means matter. As in the universe is made of matter. But it also means to speak. So to speak and things in Hebrew is the same word. "In the beginning was the word, and the word was with God, and the Word was God. When God created everything he spoke it into existence, and since we are made in his image, we can also create things with our words. No other species on the planet can do that. Give yourself a little more credit.

Fat men

well it should highly depend on which language you're translating into. typically if the languages share a heritage and have close ties, things shouldn't be much difficult

I think English is easily translated into Russian, but Russian into English is difficult to translate.

​@@user-rm5xd4il6cit's not easy. Plenty of really awful translations, quite easy to carry english word order in russian, which would be correct from rules of language, but would sound wrong and meaning would also be lost. And ofc words don't mean same things in other languages and phrases often carry more meaning than words on their own. Hard to catch it, even harder to convey correct meaning. There's more complexity in russian in some places and a lot less in others - so translator have to generate complexity and simplify, often simultaneously. Not an easy task, given that most people are not ready that good even in their native language.

@@Daokl prevalence of awful translations has nothing to do with the difficulty of the task and everything with the backwards, insane tradition of Russian academic translators. Ego driven idiots loved to impose their own "sacred knowledge" upon the translated, using the fact that very few people spoke English or had access to books in English in the Soviet era. What's even worse, despite the fact that the times have changed, a lot of traditional translated terms remain in the culture, stuck with us. Like dwarfs being for some idiotic reason translated as gnomes, despite the fact that those are absolutely different being in the folklore, are still causing clashes among Russian speaking fantasy fans. Or names being translated. It's one thing to leave an asterisk with the translator's explanation of the original wordplay, but reading about Frodo Sumkins (sumka = bag)... They were like amateurish fan translators of today that put their stupid jokes in the text because they believe everybody must share their genius sense of humor, yet simply due to their position on the timeline, they still influence modern translations. PS: honestly, though, the more languages I learn, the more I start to believe that a good translation is a myth. They just don't exist. The only way to truly share the whole written meaning of an original work is to read it in its original form.

What languages do you speak?

I'm interested, how does this can be translated as society? I know that "мир" (peace) is also 'world', but I didn't know about society.

@@Iv4Bez "на миру и смерть не страшна" типичный пример использования слова мир в начении "общество".

@@andreykaminskiy2391 ок спс

Nowhere on Earth "Mir" translates as SOCIETY! It translates as Peace OR World. Society in russian is Obshchestvo/narod.

​@@andreykaminskiy2391в какой Вселенной-то?! Вы буквально не поняли смысла фразы "на миру и смерть красна". Тут вообще ничего про общество нет. Смысл фразы в том, что лучше умереть естественным образом, а не насильственным. Чушь какую-то развели.

Fat man

His last name sounds SIMILAR to Tolstyj - "Fat", but because there's a difference in one letter, the meaning is completely changed.

@@Alexandra_Indina the great russian writer Lion Fat 😁