Do or do not, there is no should
In the movie Amistad, some characters (an American and a translator) have this exchange :
- That's what you said!
- All right! Yes, I said it! I said it, but I shouldn't have. What I should have said...
- I can't translate that.
- You can't translate what?
- I can't translate "should".
- There's no Mende word for "should"?
- No. Either you do something, or you don't do it.
- What I meant to say, what I meant...
- Not in the way you mean it.
- Try and understand me.
- "Meant" is the same as "should". You're misunderstanding the language.
Is this true for Mende? Or more broadly, are there languages that don't have the concept of "should have"?
Posted Feb 15, 2022, 6:26 AM UTC
215
I dunno Mende, but modals rarely have a direct translation in other languages, so when translating them you tend to use grammatical equivalents.
Even though it could be true that a certain language doesn' have a word for "should", it most definitely does not mean it doesn't have a way to express the concept.
I can definitely see a language lacking a clear translation for "should" and having a cultural taboo or something that makes it difficult to clearly communicate the concept. And there are certainly attestations of linguists claiming that such-and-such language's speakers don't communicate X concept at all, even when reworded. But generally speaking, I'm extremely suspicious when linguists or anthropologists claim such things, since they tend to play into racist stereotypes of the people who speak those languages as speaking a language that is somehow lacking compared to most world languages.
With an expression that carried a lot more cultural baggage, like "sorry" or "thank you", I'd be more likely to believe that there wasn't a good way to communicate the concept at all. But just expressing a counterfactual like this? Even if I read it in a linguistics paper I'd be extremely dubious.