It is true that culture is reflected in language. This explain why some words are hard to be translated to another language. My attention was drawn to this fact yesterday after I tried to call the word police and soldier in my native dialect.
However, it's a trite knowledge that, even the richest language vocabulary wise, relay heavily on borrowed words from other languages. We can not have names for things we don't have sensual reality for them.
No wonder words and their meaning change with time. New invention, lifestyle and recent happening add vocabularies to languages.
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In the recent time, I always look out for words in English and also try to know the word in my language. I came to understand that, most of those words that are sentences or even compound sentences are words that are strange to the culture of the people using those sentence to explain a word.
What prompt me to write this post, is the fact that I don't know the word for police or soldier with my dialect. And when I was told the word, not really a word, but sentence I knew police or soldier are new phenomenon to my dialect.
The word "soldier" is called ( Bwada kawu da) in my dialect. which is translated as ( the person with a dry shoes). While the word "police" is called (Busibiyi da). Which is translated as ( the person with a small stick). From the above words, one can correctly guess that those words are new or unknown phenomenon to the culture in my dialect.
The words police and soldier in my dialect, are simply the description of the attributes of them. Soldier are known with wearing of big skin shoes, while police were known holding a Barton or sticks when going for arrest. I think that's how their names came about in my language.
Some new invention like computer, phones are even called by their English names even in our dialect. With a closer look at the vocabularies in a language, one can be able to say some things that are, or not available in a particular culture