An idiom is a phrase or expression that largely or exclusively carries a figurative or non-literal meaning , rather than making any literal sense. Categorized as formulaic language , an idiomatic expression's meaning is different from the literal meanings of each word inside it. Idioms occur frequently in all languages; in English alone there are an estimated twenty-five thousand idiomatic expressions. Some well known idioms in English are spill the beans (meaning "reveal secret information"), it's raining cats and dogs (meaning "it's raining intensely"), and break a leg (meaning "good luck").
39-710: All India Kisan Sabha ( abbr. AIKS ; lit. All India Farmers Union , also known as the Akhil Bharatiya Kisan Sabha ), is the peasant or farmers' wing of the Communist Party of India , an important peasant movement formed by Sahajanand Saraswati in 1936. The Kisan Sabha movement started in Bihar under the leadership of Sahajanand Saraswati who had formed in 1929 the Bihar Provincial Kisan Sabha (BPKS) in order to mobilise peasant grievances against
78-612: A language contact phenomenon, resulting from a word-for-word translation called a calque . Piirainen says that may happen as a result of lingua franca usage in which speakers incorporate expressions from their own native tongue, which exposes them to speakers of other languages. Other theories suggest they come from a shared ancestor-language or that humans are naturally predisposed to develop certain metaphors. The non-compositionality of meaning of idioms challenges theories of syntax. The fixed words of many idioms do not qualify as constituents in any sense. For example: How do we get to
117-558: A connection between what the idiom is meant to express and its literal meaning, thus an idiom like kick the bucket cannot occur as kick the pot . From the perspective of dependency grammar , idioms are represented as a catena which cannot be interrupted by non-idiomatic content. Although syntactic modifications introduce disruptions to the idiomatic structure, this continuity is only required for idioms as lexical entries. Certain idioms, allowing unrestricted syntactic modification, can be said to be metaphors. Expressions such as jump on
156-407: A database of words and their translations. Later attempts utilized common phrases , which resulted in better grammatical structure and the capture of idioms, but with many words left in the original language. For translating synthetic languages , a morphosyntactic analyzer and synthesizer are required. The best systems today use a combination of the above technologies and apply algorithms to correct
195-466: A great deal of difference between a literal translation of a poetic work and a prose translation. A literal translation of poetry may be in prose rather than verse but also be error-free. Charles Singleton's 1975 translation of the Divine Comedy is regarded as a prose translation. The term literal translation implies that it is probably full of errors, since the translator has made no effort to (or
234-408: A joke which dates back to 1956 or 1958. Another joke in the genre transforms "out of sight, out of mind" to "blind idiot" or "invisible idiot". Idiom Many idiomatic expressions were meant literally in their original use, but occasionally the attribution of the literal meaning changed and the phrase itself grew away from its original roots—typically leading to a folk etymology . For instance,
273-456: A literal translation in preparing his translation of Dante 's Inferno (1994), as he does not know Italian. Similarly, Richard Pevear worked from literal translations provided by his wife, Larissa Volokhonsky, in their translations of several Russian novels. Literal translation can also denote a translation that represents the precise meaning of the original text but does not attempt to convey its style, beauty, or poetry. There is, however,
312-419: A routine form, others can undergo syntactic modifications such as passivization, raising constructions, and clefting , demonstrating separable constituencies within the idiom. Mobile idioms , allowing such movement, maintain their idiomatic meaning where fixed idioms do not: Many fixed idioms lack semantic composition , meaning that the idiom contains the semantic role of a verb, but not of any object. This
351-548: A sa voiture et sa voiture, ses serviettes et ses serviettes, sa bibliothèque et les siennes. " That does not make sense because it does not distinguish between "his" car and "hers". Often, first-generation immigrants create something of a literal translation in how they speak their parents' native language. This results in a mix of the two languages that is something of a pidgin . Many such mixes have specific names, e.g., Spanglish or Denglisch . For example, American children of German immigrants are heard using "rockingstool" from
390-405: A secret. Transparency is a matter of degree; spill the beans (to let secret information become known) and leave no stone unturned (to do everything possible in order to achieve or find something) are not entirely literally interpretable but involve only a slight metaphorical broadening. Another category of idioms is a word having several meanings, sometimes simultaneously, sometimes discerned from
429-404: A serious problem for machine translation . The term "literal translation" often appeared in the titles of 19th-century English translations of the classical Bible and other texts. Word-for-word translations ("cribs", "ponies", or "trots") are sometimes prepared for writers who are translating a work written in a language they do not know. For example, Robert Pinsky is reported to have used
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#1732848406502468-456: Is a translation of a text done by translating each word separately without looking at how the words are used together in a phrase or sentence. In translation theory , another term for literal translation is metaphrase (as opposed to paraphrase for an analogous translation). It is to be distinguished from an interpretation (done, for example, by an interpreter ). Literal translation leads to mistranslation of idioms , which can be
507-470: Is changed or it is meaningless. When two or three words are conventionally used together in a particular sequence, they form an irreversible binomial . For example, a person may be left high and dry , but never left dry and high . Not all irreversible binomials are idioms, however: chips and dip is irreversible, but its meaning is straightforwardly derived from its components. Idioms possess varying degrees of mobility. Whereas some idioms are used only in
546-403: Is non-compositional: it means that Fred has died. Arriving at the idiomatic reading from the literal reading is unlikely for most speakers. What this means is that the idiomatic reading is, rather, stored as a single lexical item that is now largely independent of the literal reading. In phraseology , idioms are defined as a sub-type of phraseme , the meaning of which is not the regular sum of
585-415: Is true of kick the bucket , which means die . By contrast, the semantically composite idiom spill the beans , meaning reveal a secret , contains both a semantic verb and object, reveal and secret . Semantically composite idioms have a syntactic similarity between their surface and semantic forms. The types of movement allowed for certain idioms also relate to the degree to which the literal reading of
624-623: Is unable to) convey correct idioms or shades of meaning, for example, but it can also be a useful way of seeing how words are used to convey meaning in the source language. A literal English translation of the German phrase " Ich habe Hunger " would be "I have hunger" in English, but this is clearly not a phrase that would generally be used in English, even though its meaning might be clear. Literal translations in which individual components within words or compounds are translated to create new lexical items in
663-513: The Construction Grammar framework. A relatively recent development in the syntactic analysis of idioms departs from a constituent-based account of syntactic structure, preferring instead the catena -based account. The catena unit was introduced to linguistics by William O'Grady in 1998. Any word or any combination of words that are linked together by dependencies qualifies as a catena. The words constituting idioms are stored as catenae in
702-1264: The zamindari attacks on their occupancy rights, and thus sparking the farmers' movements in India. Gradually the peasant movement intensified and spread across the rest of India . All these radical developments on the peasant front culminated in the formation of the All India Kisan Sabha at the Lucknow session of the Indian National Congress in April 1936, with Swami Sahajanand Saraswati elected as its first president. The other prominent members of this Sabha were N.G. Ranga , Ram Manohar Lohia , Jayaprakash Narayan , Acharya Narendra Dev and Bankim Mukerji, and it involved prominent leaders like E.M.S. Namboodiripad , Indulal Yagnik , Sohan Singh Bhakna , Z.A. Ahmed , Pandit Karyanand Sharma , Pandit Yamuna Karjee , Pandit Yadunandan (Jadunandan) Sharma , Rahul Sankrityayan , P. Sundarayya , Yogendra Sharma and Bankim Mukherjee . The Kisan Manifesto, released in August 1936, demanded abolition of
741-535: The "natural" sound of the translation. In the end, though, professional translation firms that employ machine translation use it as a tool to create a rough translation that is then tweaked by a human, professional translator. Douglas Hofstadter gave an example of a failure of machine translation: the English sentence "In their house, everything comes in pairs. There's his car and her car, his towels and her towels, and his library and hers." might be translated into French as " Dans leur maison, tout vient en paires. Il y
780-527: The Arabic phrase في نفس المركب ( fi nafs al-markeb ) is translated as "in the same boat", and it carries the same figurative meaning as the equivalent idiom in English. Another example would be the Japanese yojijukugo 一石二鳥 ( isseki ni chō ), which is translated as "one stone, two birds". This is, of course, analogous to "to kill two birds with one stone" in English. According to the German linguist Elizabeth Piirainen,
819-761: The Congress, under the presidency of Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose , the rift became evident and by May 1942, the Communist Party of India , which was finally legalised by the government in July 1942, had taken over All India Kisan Sabha all across India, including Bengal where its membership grew considerably. It took on the Communist Party's line of People's War and stayed away from the Quit India Movement which started in August 1942, though this also meant losing its popular base. Many of its members defied party orders and joined
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#1732848406502858-435: The German word Schaukelstuhl instead of "rocking chair". Literal translation of idioms is a source of translators' jokes. One such joke, often told about machine translation , translates "The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak" (an allusion to Mark 14:38 ) into Russian and then back into English, getting "The vodka is good, but the meat is rotten". This is not an actual machine-translation error, but rather
897-437: The bandwagon , pull strings , and draw the line all represent their meaning independently in their verbs and objects, making them compositional. In the idiom jump on the bandwagon , jump on involves joining something and a 'bandwagon' can refer to a collective cause, regardless of context. A word-by-word translation of an opaque idiom will most likely not convey the same meaning in other languages. The English idiom kick
936-411: The bottom of this situation? The fixed words of this idiom (in bold) do not form a constituent in any theory's analysis of syntactic structure because the object of the preposition (here this situation ) is not part of the idiom (but rather it is an argument of the idiom). One can know that it is not part of the idiom because it is variable; for example, How do we get to the bottom of this situation /
975-599: The bucket has a variety of equivalents in other languages, such as kopnąć w kalendarz ("kick the calendar") in Polish, casser sa pipe ("to break one’s pipe") in French and tirare le cuoia ("pulling the leathers") in Italian. Some idioms are transparent. Much of their meaning gets through if they are taken (or translated) literally. For example, lay one's cards on the table meaning to reveal previously unknown intentions or to reveal
1014-402: The claim / the phenomenon / her statement / etc. What this means is that theories of syntax that take the constituent to be the fundamental unit of syntactic analysis are challenged. The manner in which units of meaning are assigned to units of syntax remains unclear. This problem has motivated a tremendous amount of discussion and debate in linguistics circles and it is a primary motivator behind
1053-588: The context of its usage. This is seen in the (mostly uninflected) English language in polysemes , the common use of the same word for an activity, for those engaged in it, for the product used, for the place or time of an activity, and sometimes for a verb . Idioms tend to confuse those unfamiliar with them; students of a new language must learn its idiomatic expressions as vocabulary. Many natural language words have idiomatic origins but are assimilated and so lose their figurative senses. For example, in Portuguese,
1092-534: The expression saber de coração 'to know by heart', with the same meaning as in English, was shortened to 'saber de cor', and, later, to the verb decorar , meaning memorize . In 2015, TED collected 40 examples of bizarre idioms that cannot be translated literally. They include the Swedish saying "to slide in on a shrimp sandwich", which refers those who did not have to work to get where they are. Conversely, idioms may be shared between multiple languages. For example,
1131-481: The idiom "to get on one's nerves" has the same figurative meaning in 57 European languages. She also says that the phrase "to shed crocodile tears", meaning to express insincere sorrow, is similarly widespread in European languages but is also used in Arabic, Swahili, Persian, Chinese, Vietnamese, Mongolian, and several others. The origin of cross-language idioms is uncertain. One theory is that cross-language idioms are
1170-470: The idiom has a connection to its idiomatic meaning. This is referred to as motivation or transparency . While most idioms that do not display semantic composition generally do not allow non-adjectival modification, those that are also motivated allow lexical substitution. For example, oil the wheels and grease the wheels allow variation for nouns that elicit a similar literal meaning. These types of changes can occur only when speakers can easily recognize
1209-438: The lexicon, and as such, they are concrete units of syntax. The dependency grammar trees of a few sentences containing non-constituent idioms illustrate the point: The fixed words of the idiom (in orange) in each case are linked together by dependencies; they form a catena. The material that is outside of the idiom (in normal black script) is not part of the idiom. The following two trees illustrate proverbs: The fixed words of
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1248-431: The meaning of a whole should be constructed from the meanings of the parts that make up the whole. In other words, one should be in a position to understand the whole if one understands the meanings of each of the parts that make up the whole. For example, if the phrase "Fred kicked the bucket " is understood compositionally, it means that Fred has literally kicked an actual, physical bucket. The idiomatic reading, however,
1287-430: The meanings of its component parts. John Saeed defines an idiom as collocated words that became affixed to each other until metamorphosing into a fossilised term . This collocation of words redefines each component word in the word-group and becomes an idiomatic expression . Idioms usually do not translate well; in some cases, when an idiom is translated directly word-for-word into another language, either its meaning
1326-741: The movement. Prominent members like N.G. Ranga, Indulal Yagnik and Swami Sahajananda soon left the organisation, which increasingly found it difficult to approach the peasants without the watered-down approach of pro-British and pro-war, and increasing its pro-nationalist agenda, much to the dismay of the British Raj. AIKS led nationwide protests against Farmers' Produce Trade and Commerce (Promotion and Facilitation) Act, 2020, Farmers (Empowerment and Protection) Agreement on Price Assurance and Farm Services Act, 2020 and Essential Commodities (Amendment) Act, 2020. Literal translation Literal translation , direct translation , or word-for-word translation
1365-475: The phrase "spill the beans" (meaning to reveal a secret) is first attested in 1919, but has been said to originate from an ancient method of voting by depositing beans in jars, which could be spilled, prematurely revealing the results. Other idioms are deliberately figurative. For example, break a leg is an expression commonly said to wish a person good luck just prior to their giving a performance or presentation, which apparently wishes injury on them. However,
1404-404: The phrase likely comes from a loan translation from a phrase of German and Yiddish origin, which is why it makes no literal sense in English. In linguistics , idioms are usually presumed to be figures of speech contradicting the principle of compositionality . That compositionality is the key notion for the analysis of idioms emphasized in most accounts of idioms. This principle states that
1443-538: The proverbs (in orange) again form a catena each time. The adjective nitty-gritty and the adverb always are not part of the respective proverb and their appearance does not interrupt the fixed words of the proverb. A caveat concerning the catena-based analysis of idioms concerns their status in the lexicon. Idioms are lexical items, which means they are stored as catenae in the lexicon. In the actual syntax, however, some idioms can be broken up by various functional constructions. The catena-based analysis of idioms provides
1482-479: The target language (a process also known as "loan translation") are called calques , e.g., beer garden from German Biergarten . The literal translation of the Italian sentence, " So che questo non va bene " ("I know that this is not good"), produces "(I) know that this not (it) goes well", which has English words and Italian grammar . Early machine translations (as of 1962 at least) were notorious for this type of translation, as they simply employed
1521-526: The zamindari system and cancellation of rural debts; in October 1937 it adopted the red flag as its banner. Soon, its leaders became increasingly distant with Congress and repeatedly came in confrontation with Congress governments, in Bihar and United Province. In the subsequent years, the movement was increasingly dominated by Socialists and Communists as it moved away from the Congress. By the 1938 Haripura session of
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