Transcription
A series of Tweets by @Foone, each replying to the last:
Here’s the question I always have with universal translators in sci-fi: how do they know when to stop translation? Like say an alien asks about deserts on earth, and the human lists “the sahara desert, gobi desert and kalahari desert” Alien: You just said “desert” six times.
(“Sahara” is Arabic for “desert”. “Gobi” is Mongolian for “desert”, and “Kalahari” is Tswana for “desert”)
Man, the aliens are going to think we’re so bad at naming. Cause really, aren’t we?
Brit: Behold, the beautiful River Avon!
Alien: Ahh, the River River. You humans have such a knack for naming things.
“Here we are in Chad, looking upon the mighty Lake Chad!”
"Ahh yes, the land of Lake, bordering the Lake Lake. Another fine human name. "
“And here’s Nyanza Lac, in Burundi. As you can tell by the fact that it’s named Lake Lake in Bantu & French, it’s a la… actually this one’s a city. A city named Lake Lake”
Not sure if that’s specifically an English issue or if other language work the same way, but I do know that, in French, I would just say “le Sahara” and would only say “le désert du Sahara” if I’m talking to someone who really sucks at geography.
Same for rivers, I would just say “l’Avon” unless I suspect my interlocutor doesn’t know it’s a river, in which case I would probably simply add “you know, the river in Great Britain”
Without actually doing any research or analysis, I feel like in English we’d say “the Sahara” slightly more often than “the Sahara desert”, but both are pretty common. I don’t think I would ever just say “the Avon”, but I would just say “the Thames”. So I think it comes down to how large the object looms in my mind, whether it feels acceptable not to include the descriptor.
Wikipedia’s article on tautological names has some French examples, including the Lac de Gaube, Châteaudun, Montcuq, Côtes-d’Armor, and Col de Port.
Oh we definitely have tons of tautological names for places, France has a big history of different cultures mixing and old languages merging together. What I meant is we don’t tend to add nouns to describe things, like in “X river”, “Y mountain” or even “Z fruit”.
Torpenhow Hill = hill-hill-hill hill