The Semantics of Blame. I Am Soliciting Your Opinion.
In Russian, "it is my fault," is translated as "я виноват”. However, "fault" in English, meaning a deficiency, is best translated separately, out of context, as "недостаток", whereas "виноват" is best translated as "guilt" or "blame" (consider "виноватый", meaning guilty, or "винить", meaning to blame, etc.). In other words, in contexts where English speakers say "it is my fault", meaning something bad happened because of a personal shortcoming, Russian speakers say "I am guilty", or "I am to blame", with shades of a higher power passing judgement.
The interesting question is, who cares? (If the answer seems clear to you, and the answer is, "not me," then no need to read any further -- there are no funny anecdotes later in this post, just more of the same.) Does this indicate an actual difference in the attitudes towards responsibility for undesirable incidents? I think it's unlikely that the language reflects the culture, since cultural attitudes change so many orders of magnitude faster than language does. But the reverse seems at least plausible - that it affects a person's psyche subtly to say "blame" instead of "fault" (or vice-versa) all their life.
As tempting as it is to relate a list of anecdotes supporting the fact that it does, I think the only way to really address this question is to look at our own attitude towards the word "fault". When we say, “it is my fault”, does the alternate meaning of “fault”, that is, “deficiency”, echo in our minds, or has “fault” acquired a separate meaning here, that is, only “I did this bad thing” with no semantic overtones? I’m interested in your opinions.
Personally, my vote goes to no overtones, that is, that “fault” is a word borrowed from earlier times to fill a different semantic need, and this whole observation is meaningless. But I’m a calloused engineer, and I’m interested to hear the opinions of this blog’s literary readership. Does this blog have any literary readership?
The interesting question is, who cares? (If the answer seems clear to you, and the answer is, "not me," then no need to read any further -- there are no funny anecdotes later in this post, just more of the same.) Does this indicate an actual difference in the attitudes towards responsibility for undesirable incidents? I think it's unlikely that the language reflects the culture, since cultural attitudes change so many orders of magnitude faster than language does. But the reverse seems at least plausible - that it affects a person's psyche subtly to say "blame" instead of "fault" (or vice-versa) all their life.
As tempting as it is to relate a list of anecdotes supporting the fact that it does, I think the only way to really address this question is to look at our own attitude towards the word "fault". When we say, “it is my fault”, does the alternate meaning of “fault”, that is, “deficiency”, echo in our minds, or has “fault” acquired a separate meaning here, that is, only “I did this bad thing” with no semantic overtones? I’m interested in your opinions.
Personally, my vote goes to no overtones, that is, that “fault” is a word borrowed from earlier times to fill a different semantic need, and this whole observation is meaningless. But I’m a calloused engineer, and I’m interested to hear the opinions of this blog’s literary readership. Does this blog have any literary readership?
6 Comments:
I agree with you, in the no-overtones camp. This goes right along with my pet-peeve of certain feminists objecting to the letters m-a-n in the word "woman". It's total BS to think that somehow the connection of the words infects our thinking that women are somehow dependent on men.
On the other hand, I think these may have some cultural insights burried in them. Even if we don't currently ascribe meaning to the choice of "fault" vs. "guilty", these may still show signs of the culture when "fault" did become popular. Maybe "fault" was the politically correct word in early enlightenment English, and showed one's sophistication in taking personal responsibility for ones actions.
But, at this point in time, I think it has lost that significance. This is the same reason, as a non-theist, I've given up my fight against "God bless you" after sneezing -- it's just politeness and caring, not a statement of religious doctrine.
First, I disagree that cultural norms change faster than language. Spoken language (for example, the English spoken in high schools in America) changes quite rapidly to reflect social norms. The publishers of dictionaries have difficulty keeping up (or are executing an unasigned responsibility of stabilizing the langauge ... a different thread of discussion). Within this context, it think that the langauge reflects the culture. In cases other than the one you are referring to here, if there is no easy way to express some concept in a language, it often reflects the fact that the language users just don't think that way. If they "needed" to express a concept, because it is involved in the way they operate in their culture, they would have invented an expression for it. This position may not be completely applicable to the "fault" situation you describe, but it is applicable in so many other cases that I would assume that it also applies here.
Without doing a lot of research on the history of usage of both terms, my immediate impression of each term is quite different. To say "it's my fault" implies to me that it was an accident over which I had little conterol, while to say that "I am to blame" or "I am guilty" signifies personal responsibility. It wasn't something that "just happened," like my bumping into you and saying excuse me. I can appreciate your implication of the implication of a higher power passing judgement in this case, but it certainly follows the popular thought that it is easier to say that one is a victim of circumstance, heredity, environment or whatever than to simply take responsibility and get on with it!
It is my fault - Moya oshibka, vina
it is not ya vinovat which mean i am guilty.
It seems I've heard it said both ways. Aiman, our resource center worker (who majored in Russian literature), backs me up though - she says that both "я виноват" and "моя вина" can be used, according to her, without much differentiation in meaning. This could be a regional difference, too.
Either way, the argument remains the same - both "вина" and "виноват" have the same associations of guilt, as opposed to the English "fault".
A friend from home has promised a copy of the OED entry for "fault", by the way.
Actually, Ryan, you've hit on one of the most treasured tenets of modern linguistics: the Whorf Hypothesis. Simply put, it's the idea that the structure of our language literally shapes our worldview, by way of how it forces us to construct our thoughts uniquely through the different mechanisms of language.
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