Positive Liberty

According to this article, a group of linguists has determined the world’s three most difficult words to translate.

Third place: Naa, which is “used in the Kansai area of Japan to emphasise statements or agree with someone.” It would, um, indeed be a hard word to translate, except that English apparently has a most precise equivalent–indeed.

Frankly, I’m puzzled why naa made the list at all. Consider the French word moeurs, which means “the sum total of manners, cultivation, moral values, and sensibility of either a culture or an individual.” Rousseau wrote about moeurs all the time, and he’s been every translator’s nightmare for the last two centuries. In my own translations, I’ve used the word “customs” or “habitudes,” and I usually just grumble at those who point out that the latter word is also French. Others have tried using “manners” and “morals,” yet none of these fully capture the big picture.

Naa.

Second place: Shlimazl, which is Yiddish for “a chronically unlucky person.” And yet the plain-old English ne’er-do-well seems to work just fine, as does the equally prosaic jinx.

First place really seems hard, though, and unlike the other two, the difficulties are perfectly clear from the definition in the article. From the Tshiluba language spoken in southeastern Congo comes the word ilunga.

Ready to feel your head spin? (“Of course. Why else do I read Positive Liberty?)

Ilunga means “a person who is ready to forgive any abuse for the first time, to tolerate it a second time, but never a third time.”

A while ago, I heard a vaguely similar way of life described as the Silver Rule. In contrast to the Golden Rule, the Silver Rule may be stated,

Do unto others as you would have done unto yourself–but only for the first time. After that, give like for like and value for value.

In the Iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma, the Silver Rule scores remarkably well against all other rulesets, while another, only slightly modified ruleset–one that Wikipedia inelegantly calls “Tit for tat with forgiveness”–scores the best of all. “Tit for tat with forgiveness” sounds even closer to an ilunga:

The strategy is simply to cooperate on the first iteration of the game; after that, do what your opponent did on the previous move. [But] when your opponent defects, on the next move you sometimes cooperate anyway with small probability (around 1%-5%). This allows for occasional recovery from getting trapped in a cycle of defections.

In other words, it’s just plain common sense, and tonight, I discovered a new way to describe my moeurs: I’m an ilunga.

Can someone see about getting this into the OED?

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