I agree with Jeffry: we use fair too, but not in a one-to-one way. Sometimes fair is translated with 'honest', sometimes with 'reasonable', sometimes with 'just' - because those words are longer in Dutch. On average Dutch takes more words than English to convey the same thing, though there are also words that cannot be translated one-to-one in English either.

Sometimes the English word is used because there is a whole cultural concept implied. Usually those are associated with the Brits; things like 'fair play' and 'understatement'.

However, the original comment was that "fair" has no one-to-one translation in any ther language.

To me, it is odd that "fair" in English means both "just" and "light-skinned" or "light-haired".

I am not sure how common that particular dual meaning, or derivation (?) is in other languages.

rofl

Additionally, even if the word were new or even if synonyms do not appear in other languages, it hardly follows that fairness is a foreign concept in our society or out of it. Word-for-word translation is only one way to capture meanings. Word-to-sentence translation can probably capture the meaning of the word fair in other languages (specifically those that lack the word).

I guess I just don't get how the sparse and inaccurate linguistic facts Wilson marshals militate against the legitimacy, historicity, or value of fairness.

Legally, the term 'fair', as we use it now, is just a new term for equity. Within equity courts the common law has wrestled with fairness, or more precisely, the refusal to enforce unfairness, for several hundred years. So while 'fairness', with its multitude of now unrelated meanings, is impossible to translate, every culture has an equivalent to 'equity.' Certainly every European nation uses a version of the term, which derives from Latin.

But "justo" in Brazilian Portuguese means fair (more than just, in the latter's sense of justice) pretty much along the lines of what we mean in the USA when we say something is or is not fair.

Likewise, the fact that a certain element of our language reflects something we can observe in the nature world does not mean that that observation will necessarily be reflected in every language. For example, Dutch (if I remember correctly) has a word for the empty space inside of an unfilled container such as a cup. Obviously, we know that this space exists and can observe it, but we simply refer to it indirectly with phrases such as "this cup is empty." But if you were Dutch, I guess it would seem really strange that you couldn't refer directly to that empty space with a noun. Being able to do so would make explaining the art theory concept of negative space much easier.

Likewise, I would be really shocked if it were suggested that another language had no word that shares some shades of meaning with our word "fair." However, within English, "fair" shares meanings with closely linked concepts such as "just" without being 100% synonymous with them. For example, it seems necessary for us to state to our children that life is not fair, but it seems obvious even to a child that life is not just.

So that translator, for example, could spit back the Spanish word for "just" when asked to translate "fair," but it is possible that Spanish (or French, etc) parents don't have to explain to their children that life isn't fair, because the manner in which they explain the rules of social behavior never make it seem to children (or adults) that life is fair.

However, I suspect that all parents have to deal with their children attempting to manipulate their understanding of the rules of social behaviour in a similar manner, but the devil of the results for the experience of parenting may well be in the details.

What in the great purple hell are you guys talking about???

Nothing, go back to your cartoons.

Or is the constant that they all have fairness "issues"?

(The Martains might also notice those fairness issues broadly among earths social species.)

But even here in the US we have different concepts or definitions of "fair". A union member defines "fair" as everyone in a particular position getting the same outcome. Management defines "fair" as the rules being applied the same to everyone in a particular position no matter what the outcome.

That's not because they have differing definitions of what is "fair", they differ on the application of it. The union worker sees outcome as the goal of his working, and so he wants equality in that. The manager sees opportunity as the goal of employing the worker, and thus aims only to be fair in the application of that.