"i didn't say he stole the money." this doesn't say much, but when a word is stressed takes on a new meaning, so one should be careful to capture the stress in writing.
I didn't say he stole the money. - someone else said it, not me
i DIDN'T say he stole the money. - you think I said it, it wasn't me.
i didn't SAY he stole the money. - I never said such a thing, might have suggested it's a possibility, but never said it.
i didn't say HE stole the money. - I said someone else stole it.
i didn't say he STOLE the money. - I might have said he took it, like borrowed, but definitely didn't say he stole it, who knows?
i didn't say he stole THE money. - not the money in question, another money.
i didn't say he stole the MONEY. - he stole something else besides the money.
So the same sentence can mean something very different and to really make sure the reader get's the meaning, will need more context than in spoken language.
While obviously everyone's native tongue seems the most expressive to them, I can't shake off the feeling that written (and often even spoken) English is just lacking a lot of the nuance and expressiveness of other languages. It's just more factual and dry and lacks a lot of implied texture, even after having learned and used it for decades. (But perhaps I'm just still not advanced enough to notice it.)
For example in Hungarian, most of the above emphasis differences would have to be reflected in word order and would therefore be visible in writing.
This makes translation also quite difficult, because English likes to play with this ambiguity a lot: "I won't kill you." "Oh thank God!" "... Johnny, my assistant will." - this is hard to express the same way in Hungarian, because you'd have use a different word order in the first sentence if you negate the "I" vs. if you negate the "kill". (Or more precisely: you'd include the "I" if and only if it's emphasized, otherwise the "I" pronoun has to be omitted in Hungarian.)
Your lede and finish are somewhat contradictory, don't you think? English can't both lack nuance and expressiveness, and be difficult to translate because of the nuance and expressivity!
Languages hide their expressive power in different places, rather. Hungarian is primarily an agglutinative language, while English is historically a fusional language, which lost most of its inflection and is mainly analytic in its modern form.
In conclusion, the first clause of your first sentence is bearing most of the load.
> Your lede and finish are somewhat contradictory, don't you think? English can't both lack nuance and expressiveness, and be difficult to translate because of the nuance and expressivity!
Depends on what "nuance" exactly means here. What I meant is specifically the kind of logical and structural ambiguity like what "NOT" refers to or what "TOO" refers to. For example "I ate lunch, too..." can be continued as "... not just my friend" or as "...not just breakfast". In Hungarian this wouldn't be possible because the grammar is less ambiguous. The word order would tell what the "too" refers to, similar with "not".
English feels distinctly "Tarzan-like", it feels like words put next to each other. Most of the difficulty in learning English comes from the strange orthography and the difficult phonology and, yes, some of the grammar too, like tenses. But students can start building correct sentences from day one, because there is not much complexity in the grammar. High fancy prose in English is mostly about using rare words and synonyms, not through intricate grammatical structure.
As I said one effect in the opposite direction is the richness of tenses in English. All the "I had been going" or "I used to go" and "I have gone" and "I am going" kind of complex tenses do not exist in Hungarian. So it may be that we just notice the parts of our native language that have no equivalent in the second language, while discounting things we don't "need" as extraneous complexity and fluff. For example in Hungarian if you want to tell a story with complex timelines, you can't rely on tenses alone as in English, you have to give more explicit times or say "before that" and "meanwhile" and similar temporal phrases explicitly.
Yes, that's what an analytic language is: words put next to each other.
English is also a creole language, synthesized from an Anglo base stratum with French imposed by the ruling class. This has a simplifying effect on a language: as you point out, English is simple to pick up, and devilish to master.
I will say this: Hungarians offer this complaint about English more often than can be explained by chance. Russians and Germans as well, two heavily inflected languages. I gather that Hungarians are justly proud of their language, and wish I had a spare decade to see what all the fuss is about!
One aspect of this analytic ambiguity which I treasure, is the facility with which humor can be expressed in English. Even the silly Groucho Marx kind, like "One morning I shot an elephant in my pajamas. How he got in my pajamas, I don't know."
It's simple: when you want to express any those different meanings in writing, you don't just transliterate what you would say orally. It's as simple at writing "that" instead of "the." Except, obviously, when the ambiguity is deliberate.
That is so cool. I speak indian languages such as Tamil and Hindi. I am not aware of such a usage that you are referring to. Can you give me an example? I am not able understand how word order makes clear the word that the speaker wants to emphasize. Is it peculiar to Hungarian?
Good keywords to search for are "topic" and "focus" and "topic-prominent languages".
Basically word order reflects the informational structure of the sentence, as opposed to grammatical structure. So what was known before, what is the new information, what is the surprising bit etc. East Asian languages like Japanese do this as well and are perhaps better known for this internationally.
I didn't say he stole the money. - Nem (not) én (I) mondtam (said-I), hogy (that) ellopta (he-stole) a (the) pénzt (money-accusative).
i DIDN'T say he stole the money. - Én nem mondtam, hogy ellopta a pénzt.
i didn't SAY he stole the money. - Mondani nem mondtam, hogy ellopta a pénzt. (Needs a bit of different structure)
i didn't say HE stole the money. - Nem mondtam, hogy ő lopta el a pénzt. (See how ő=he/she has only appeared now, it was implied by the conjugation before)
i didn't say he STOLE the money. - Nem azt mondtam, hogy ellopta a pénzt.
i didn't say he stole THE money. - Nem azt mondtam, hogy A pénzt lopta el. (This one is unusual already in English, we'd explicitly say "that money", not just "THE money").
i didn't say he stole the MONEY. - Nem azt mondtam, hogy a pénzt lopta el.
----
Imagine if English had versions like:
Not I said he stole the money.
I not said he stole the money.
I not said stole he the money.
I not said the money he stole.
Or something like that. Depending on which part is negated the order would be different. However since English morphology is very simple, you can't shuffle the words around because grammatical structure is only encoded by the words' position in the sentence, there are no significant conjugations and declensions to mark words according to their role in the sentence.
I always find it weird that English texts and speach tend to emphasis different word in sentence that I am used to in my mother tongue. In Polish it's simple, just like in your example, the word that is in bold is the one you are trying to get attention to.
But in practice I hear often in English media and books something completely else, where a word next to it has the accent/emphasis, not the one that is CLEARLY arising from context.
I tried to consult that with local English teachers and people coaching others in communication in that language, but they just had no idea what I am talking about.
In your example it would be:
"i didn't SAY he stole the money" when it's perfectly clear from context that the person denies such situation ever had place and was not involved in it in any way.
In TV it's just weird, but maybe I'm dumb, or person speaking is weird. But in books it's stated with bold font or "<<word>>" and the context is clear. I saw that espacially in books from 1940-1970, modern reeditions from UK and US have all those bold text left intact.
I think there's also a difference between the way I (an English person) would place the emphasis in a sentence compared to the way I hear Americans speak. One thing that frequently makes it more difficult for me to understand is an adjective/noun phrase with the emphasis at the start, so the important part (the noun) is nearly swallowed.
Thanks for your input, this may be it! I checked my old books I mentioned and although my editions are sometimes from UK, the authors are either originally from US or lived there.
I wish I was taking notes while reading, to show examples now :)
"i didn't say he stole the money." this doesn't say much, but when a word is stressed takes on a new meaning, so one should be careful to capture the stress in writing.
I didn't say he stole the money. - someone else said it, not me
i DIDN'T say he stole the money. - you think I said it, it wasn't me.
i didn't SAY he stole the money. - I never said such a thing, might have suggested it's a possibility, but never said it.
i didn't say HE stole the money. - I said someone else stole it.
i didn't say he STOLE the money. - I might have said he took it, like borrowed, but definitely didn't say he stole it, who knows?
i didn't say he stole THE money. - not the money in question, another money.
i didn't say he stole the MONEY. - he stole something else besides the money.
So the same sentence can mean something very different and to really make sure the reader get's the meaning, will need more context than in spoken language.