What color do you see on the left side of the board?
(Audience) Blue.
Right. What color do you see on the right side of the board?
(Audience) Blue, light blue.
(Laughter)
Okay, let's say this is dark blue and light blue,
does everyone agree?
(Audience) Yeah.
Okay, so what would you call them in general?
(Audience) Blue.
All right. Now, are there any people who speak Russian?
Yeah?
Great. See a couple of hands.
All right, so what would you call the color on the on the left in Russian?
Cиний.
So what about the color on the right?
(Audience) Rолубой.
Uh-huh. Now, what would you call them together?
(Laughter)
I got you trapped because in Russian
you can't call them together.
In Russian, you can't say just "blue."
You have to either say "синий," dark blue,
or "голубой," light blue.
Now, I know that there are two or three Armenian speakers too, right?
So I'm giving you a sentence, and you translate it to Armenian.
"I have an uncle."
(Audience member) Ես քեռի ունեմ.
See, now Nana said "Ես քեռի ունեմ,"
but she's not correct.
(Laughter)
Because "I have an uncle" can mean
"I have an uncle from my mother side,"
or "I have an uncle from my father side."
What Nana said is "I have an uncle from my mother side."
But I can say "Ես հորեղբայր ունեմ,"
which would mean "I have an uncle from my father's side,"
and that would also be a correct translation.
So Armenian, just like Russian doesn't allow you to say just "blue,"
Armenian doesn't allow you to say just "uncle."
You have to specify what uncle you are talking about.
There are these differences in languages,
but when I was reading "Harry Potter" by J.K. Rowling in Armenian,
I generally understood what was going on in the book,
even though it was a translation,
even though there were these differences in languages.
I read the same book, almost the same book,
as English people did.
And you might be wondering why I was holding this ruler, right?
Well, the reason is that translation is like measurement.
So when you measure something, let's say it's 20 centimeters,
but, most of us know that it's not 20.
It's 20 plus or minus 0.005.
Yeah.
Chemistry, physics, 10th grade.
(Laughter)
So it's very similar to translation.
When I read "Harry Potter," I was also seeing the same 20 centimeters,
but there was this small uncertainty.
Because languages are different for a reason,
you can't just move ideas between them without losing something.
So I lost that 0.005, but it's so minor, that it doesn't really, really matter.
But is there a case where it's not just 0.005,
but it's one centimeter or maybe even 10?
Well, do you think this person over here is a boy or a girl?
(Audience) Girl.
Yeah, most of you said "girl," and you were correct.
But -
she's actually the main character of Harper Lee's "To Kill a Mockingbird,"
and when I was reading this book,
there was something really weird.
I couldn't understand the gender of the main character until about page 60,
because the author was only giving clues,
and the author was even confusing me by quotes like:
"I swear, Scout, sometimes you act so much like a girl, it's mortifying."
And when you say, "You act so much like a girl it's mortifying,"
we understand that the person is not supposed to act like a girl, right?
Or Scout was saying, "I beat him up one time but he was real nice about it."
Beating up and girls?
In 1960? They are miles away, really?
(Laughter)
So that's why the author really confused me,
and I was thinking, "Maybe my English is too bad,
maybe I don't understand this book correctly,"
but then I realized that this is an essential part of the theme.
Because halfway through the book,
this character comes whose name is Aunt Alexandra.
So she's Scout's aunt, and she tries to make a girl out of Scout.
So first in the book, Scout identifies herself as just a child.
I'm not a girl, I'm not a boy, but just a child.
But then, Aunt Alexandra trains her into a girl,
and at the end of the [book], you can see Scout wearing dresses
and drinking coffee with her auntie and her friends.
So just like Scout reveals her gender,
discovers her gender,
the reader does the same, so we have the same journey
as the main character does, we really live with her.
But then, let's take a look at this example:
So when I say, "Mariam went home" in English, Russian, or Armenian,
I know that I'm talking about a girl because Mariam is the name of a girl.
All right, now let's change Mariam with a pronoun, with "she."
"She went home," I know that it's a girl.
"Она пошла домой," I know that it's a girl.
But when I say "Նա գնաց տուն," it's just a question mark
because in Armenian, as Nana probably knows,
the pronoun "նա" represents both boys and girls.
But even if I really want to hide the gender of a person,
and I just give Mariam a nickname, let's say "Scout" -
so "Scout went home" - I don't know if it's a boy or a girl.
"Մեձաչքանին գնաց տուն," I still don't know.
But then when I say, "Глазастик пошла домой,"
"Глазастик пошла домой, пошла домой," I know that it's a girl.
Because, just like you can't say just "go" in Russian,
you cannot say just "went" in Russian,
or just any verb in Russian,
because you have to either say "пошёл," or "пошла."
"Пошёл" would be about boys, and "пошла" would be about girls.
So when I want to translate this sentence into Russian,
I have to say "Я избил его," or "Я избилa его."
And, wait ...
So does this mean that in Russian you cannot hide someone's gender?
Yes, it does.
And when I was reading the Russian book, guess what?
The gender of Scout was revealed since the very first page.
So if I were to discuss this book
with my Russian friend,
who doesn't know about the "hiding of Scout's gender,"
we would have complete different understandings of the book.
So it's no longer 0.005 - it's already a huge difference,
because my friend didn't get that part of the theme that I did.
That is why reading "Harry Potter" in Armenian,
and reading "To Kill a Mockingbird,"
Убить пересмешника, in Russian, are a bit different.
Because even though there are the differences in "Harry Potter" too,
they don't matter so much.
But Harper Lee decided to use this uniqueness
that English has and the opportunity that it gives her to convey a theme.
So when you read it in Russian,
you don't really get the theme that she wanted to convey.
Another example of this would be "Room," by Emma Donoghue.
But before going into the book, I want to tell you something.
For example, this ruler would be feminine in Russian,
because it's "линейка,"
and if it finishes with "а," then it's feminine, or with "я."
So that's how Russian works.
Spanish works the same way; German works the same way.
These languages have a thing that's called "grammatical gender."
In this book, in "Room" by Emma Donoghue,
a mother and her son are trapped in a room for five years
and her son has never seen the world outside of the room,
so it's logical to think that he should be a little bit weird.
How is the weirdness expressed in the book?
Well,
he thinks that all the objects around him have genders.
So for example, this rug wouldn't be just "it";
it would be a "she."
He has kind of a Russian mind, but it's really weird for English people,
because when you say "rug, she" in English,
then "rug" is personified.
When he says, "We've been making labyrinth since I was two.
She's all toilet roll insides taped together in tunnels
that twist lots of ways,"
now labyrinth is "she."
Fine. Now let's try to translate this to Russian.
First of all, "лабиринт" would be "he" because it finishes with the letter "т."
But that's not what really matters.
You can argue that it doesn't matter
if you think of labyrinth as "she" or "he."
The thing is that in Russian it's completely natural
to say that "лабиринт" is "he" because that's what people do.
So the thing that is seen as weirdness in English in Emma Donoghue's book
is seen as a complete normal thing in Russian.
That is why I want to connect it
to this thing that Roman Jakobson has said:
"Languages differ essentially in what they must convey,
and not in what they may convey."
So in Russian, I must convey the gender of a person;
in Armenian, I must convey the side of my uncle.
I can't just hide it.
So now I have a question for you:
Is it really the same book?
Thank you.
(Applause).