[lit-ideas] The Old Contemptibles Are Back
- From: Jlsperanza@xxxxxxx
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Sun, 14 Oct 2007 13:15:04 EDT
McCreery -- Japanese Made "Mekuerdige"
McCreery writes:
>In Japanese, for example, the sentence
>
> "The cat chased the rat who ate the cheese"
>
>comes out as
>
> "The cat cheese-eating rat chased.
>
>Learning to speak [Japanese] can feel very
>awkward, indeed.
Exactly. I hope it's an enjoyable awkward feeling. Think of the reverse, and
the millions of Asians who had to settle in Anglophone America and start to
process the syntax from left to right as the Americans are more and more
doing.
"Why can't they ever learn _our_ language?", they complain. I trust they are
_trying_.
And there's also a sense of _pride_. I'm sure many an Asian thinks that the
way _she_ *says* a sentence reflects the *exact* +natural+ order in which she
thinks she is thinking.
Geary has a solution for this.
Take:
"The cat chased the rat who ate the cheese"
He says. "Adding what the rat has consumed is not relevant to the primary
communicative intention of the utterer. So we can leave that out. This becomes:
"The cat chased the rat".
"Now, to avoid relative embedded clauses -- while we encourage 'embedding'
at the Ministry, we don't _enforce_ it --, we parataxize. Parataxis, as the
Asians should know, is a way of avoiding subordinated syntax. The whole
discourse, in Japanese (but I'll say it in English) becomes:
"The cat chased the rat. The rat ate the cheese"
J. L. Speranza interrupts,
"But that is hardly the same thing. Consider:
"She had a child. She got married"
"That's hardly the same as:
She got married. She had a child".
---Geary responds: "Well, yes, there's contextual ambiguity as to the event
reported in the second independent sentence taking temporal procedence over
the first one."
Now, I wonder if in McCreery's clumsier rendition,
"The cat cheese-eating rat chased.
it is +explicitly+ said that the 'cheese-eating' was peformed by the rat
_before_ being chased.
Consider Ritchie's bomb:
The old contemptibles bomb-dropping terrorists attacked.
This would be Japanese for -- in Geary's paratactical version:
The terrorists dropped bombs.
The old contemtibles attacked _them_.
But if the events are 'co-reportable' and the temporal sequence is merely
_implicated_ (as per implicature, as Grice has it -- see Strawson, Introduction
to Logical Theory, "and and &") then we have to be very careful before we
engage in a vicious circle with things like:
The old contemptibles attacked them.
Then the terrorists dropped bombs.
Cheers,
JL
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