Musings of a dilettante

Disclaimer: I'm far from any sort of philosophical logician (I refused to take Logic in college, it's like math with words and god knows math hates me), and this is just from the weird, crinkly layers of my mind, so bare with me.

Since I'm a bit obsessed with sociolinguistics (or, how the study of a language manifests itself through and/or reflects the society and customs of that particular culture), I recently stumbled upon something interesting in my mind (somewhere you definitely do not want to be.) Just as an interesting observation, though (in my humble opinion), for example, I thought about this phrase:

English: What's the problem?

Italian: "Qual è il problema?" meaning "Which is the problem?"

German: "Wo ist das Problem?" meaning "Where's the problem?"

You might think, "What the hell is the difference?" (and possibly, subsequently, "God, who gives a flying f%"k?!") Ah, but you see, I think there is a difference, and it's huge. Thevarious 'sfumature' or nuances of these three utterances give a whole different frame of understanding of the situation and possibly of the big picture overall, culturally and therefore linguistically (if you believe that a nation's culture and language are superglued together, as I do.)

The connotation of the English utterance "what's the problem" may suggest a few things: mainly, it refers to the the recognition of the problem: 'yes, there is a problem, I don't know what it is exactly, please tell me what it is.'

The Italian saying "which is the problem" recognizes that there is not only one problem, but many, and a need to distinguish and specify which problem is to be given attention by the asker.

The German version does not recognize the immediate existence of a problem. The interrogative pronoun 'where' automatically registers as a word used to find a specific location of something. Now, if you're needing to find something and asking where it is, then you obviously don't know where it is in the first place. And if you don't know where the problem is, can you be empirically sure it exists in the first place? No.

So are they really all the same question? Or is there a deeper, more complex meaning here?


*Obligatory chin scratch*