All robbers are thieves, but not all thieves are robbers. (And 'stealer', though it does exist, is just about never used.)
The Chinese seem to be completely unaware of these useful distinctions. You find the word pickpocket (a stealthy thief who tries to remove things from your bag or your pockets without you noticing) occasionally, but burglar (a thief who breaks into a building to steal things) is completely unknown; and, in general, robbery is much more commonly used than theft (while burglary is never seen), and the perpetrators of such crimes are invariably called robbers rather than thieves. The difference is simple enough (and I'm sure there must be similar variations in the Chinese lexicon): robbery involves confrontation and threats or actual violence, whereas theft can occur without the property owner's knowledge - robbery is a kind of theft, but theft+violence.
We also sometimes run into problems about how to use the verb forms with direct and indirect objects - we steal (or rob, or burgle) something (from someone): He stole a watch from me. He robbed some money from the bank.
It's not really conceivable that a person could ever be the direct object of one of these verbs* (well, we have another specialised term for 'stealing people' - kidnapping!).
[This image from The Chinglish Adventures Of Chairman Mao, a blog by an American English teacher who was working in China last year, and has recently visited us here on Froogville and left a couple of comments.]If I'm really going to be thorough on this topic, I suppose I should mention the following points as well:
With steal, you can use a direct object only (the thing stolen); but with rob, you always need to specify the victim/source of the stolen property as well; and with burgle, the lone direct object is usually the place stolen from, not the thing stolen: They burgled her apartment last week.
And thieve is archaic, and rarely used. It is applied to the activity or profession of being a thief in general, not to a particular act of theft (and is thus usually intransitive, used without objects): He's been thieving again. He thieves for a living.
* Ah - the awkward distinction that catches out ESL learners! Rob (and burgle, though more rarely) can also take the victim as a direct object (instead of the thing stolen); steal cannot: Someone robbed Jeff. They're robbing the bank. They've burgled me.
Thus, if we want to create a passive construction, with the crime victim becoming the subject of the sentence, we can say
They are being robbed.
or
We've been burgled.
but with steal, we have to use the more roundabout
I've had something stolen (from me).
It's a little tricky, I know, but do your best.
8 comments:
I remember hearing plenty of people use rob instead of burgle. But to be fair, there are plenty of native English speakers who don't know the difference.
There is in fact a deliberate provocation in this post. I'm intrigued to see if anyone will pick up on it.
Many people would claim that the rob something from somebody (or somewhere construction is a recent invention, and WRONG - that you should only use steal in this way. Although I don't regularly range myself among the descriptive grammarians, on this one I feel that there is nothing offensive or unclear about the usage, and it seems to be becoming so common that the complaints of the prescriptive faction are pointless. The more "correct" construction - to rob somebody OF something seems to be becoming less and less common.
These are great examples of why English has to be so maddening for ANYONE -- especially a non-Indo-European native speaker -- coming to it from the outside.
I checked on the etymology of the words rob, burgle, thief, and steal. They all date to the 13th century or older (mostly older). They have nothing in common to signify, say, that they are even verbs or nouns. The verbs conjugate and the nouns decline according to utterly disjointed rules. It's a wonder that even English speakers ever "get" it -- hard to imagine, even, that it can be classified as an act of rote memory.
Especially interesting is "burgle"... which is a back-formation from "burglar," i.e. it didn't exist at all until somebody noticed the "-r" and thought, "Eureka! A burglar must be someone who... burgles."
If you really want to drive your students crazy, try to teach them the nuances of purloin, filch, snitch, pilfer, swipe, and pinch, too. (Who cares about all the Eskimo words for snow? Check the English terms for "forced transfer of property" if you want to see how a REAL civilization works!)
But surely you're not (that) sadistic?
Does etymology work in the Chinese language, too? maybe according to different rules? (Etymology -- at least in English -- seems closely related to the alphabet and phonetics.)
Yes, I love that about burgle. How old is it?
My favourite of these words is probably embezzle, but mug (slang for committing a street robbery - do you use this in the US?) is the only other one I considered using here. I didn't want to get too 'advanced' in this. Most Chinese never get beyond a middling 'intermediate' level in their English - and the misuse of rob for steal is almost ubiquitous (the opposite kind of error we see in that Chinglish sign from Matthew is a freakish rarity).
I suppose etymology in Chinese works on a number of different levels. The individual characters have evolved (or been consciously created) over time, often incorporating various elements of older characters. New words are mostly formed by the novel conjunction of pairs (or triplets or...) of characters. And then the meaning of individual characters (or character groups) shifts over time, as with languages that use alphabet-scripts.
The difficulty with character-based writing is its very limited ability to show phonetics. Some characters seem to carry a bewildering array of possible meanings, often wildly dissimilar from each other - and I can't help but think that, in some cases at least, a word/meaning has simply been ascribed to that character for convenience's sake, or on an approximation of the presumed pronunciation (It it sounds like this, it must be this character - even if it means something completely different...).
And why do the English have so many words for taking someone else's property?? Are we a peculiarly kleptocratic nation?!
Yes, we use mug that way here, too.
(Which of course has nothing to do with the alternate meaning -- a heavy ceramic hot-beverage cup. And mugger has even less to do with the Harry Potter muggle for someone who can't do magic. The translators must really have fun dealing moving ad-hoc words like that from English to Chinese!)
According to the "Dictionary.com Unabridged" dictionary, allegedly "Based on the Random House Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2009," burgle came along in 1870-75. (Those clever mid-Victorians.) No specific source cited, so it may just have sprung up from the underworld or something... although the silly sound of it suggests Lewis Carroll could have had a hand in it. Or Edward Lear.
(Oh, and while checking that I came across another verb from burglar: burglarize, which probably classifies as something like a front-formation. It's also from 1870-75, but specifically cited as an Americanism.)
I don't know but imagine that your friends over there might say (re: your second comment) it's got something to do with a focus on property. Their not sharing that focus -- or not traditionally doing so, anyhow -- may be why the nuances of property-taking are lost on the Chinese. To go back to the Eskimo thing, a Samoan must be completely bewildered why Eskimos need more than a couple words, tops, for "frozen white stuff which falls from the sky and accumulates on the ground."
Thanks for the information/thoughts on Chinese etymology, Froog. Not only spoken but, um, written (?) Chinese is pretty much a mystery to me.
Have you checked online for Inuit dictionaries? I've often heard that that "37 different words for snow" story is bogus, but I've never got around to trying to investigate it.
I suddenly recall that in Jamaican patois 'thieve' (or 'teef', as they charmingly pronounce it) is used in the same way as 'steal'.
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