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Untranslatability is the property of text or speech for which no equivalent can be found when translated into another (given) language. A text that is considered to be untranslatable is considered a lacuna, or lexical gap. The term arises when describing the difficulty of achieving the so-called perfect translation.
In the Foreign Service Institute’s language classification system, the most difficult languages are at Category 5. These take 88 weeks or 2,200 hours of classroom time to reach proficiency.
The term antonym (and the related antonymy) is commonly taken to be synonymous with opposite, but antonym also has other more restricted meanings. Graded (or gradable) antonyms are word pairs whose meanings are opposite and which lie on a continuous spectrum (hot, cold).
In addition, languages often have words that don’t translate easily into other languages, and certainly not with an exact word-to-word match. Proposals have been made to create a set framework for wordnets. Research has shown that every known human language has some sort of concept resembling synonymy, hyponymy, meronymy, and antonymy ...
In some languages, a word stem associated with a single event may treat the action of that event as unitary, so in translation it may appear contronymic. For example, Latin hospes can be translated as both "guest" and "host". In some varieties of English, borrow may mean both "borrow" and "lend".
In terms of lexical opposites, a marked form is a non-basic one, often one with inflectional or derivational endings. Thus, a morphologically negative word form is marked as opposed to a positive one: happy/unhappy, honest/dishonest, fair/unfair, clean/unclean, and so forth.
In the dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four (also published as 1984), by George Orwell, Newspeak is the fictional language of Oceania, a totalitarian superstate.To meet the ideological requirements of Ingsoc (English Socialism) in Oceania, the Party created Newspeak, which is a controlled language of simplified grammar and limited vocabulary designed to limit a person's ability for critical ...
Measuring complexity is considered difficult, and the comparison of whole natural languages as a daunting task. On a more detailed level, it is possible to demonstrate that some structures are more complex than others. Phonology and morphology are areas where such comparisons have traditionally been made.