[lit-ideas] "Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darueber muss man schweigen": a tautology?

Thanks to R. Paul for his comments. 
We are considering Wittgenstein's closing utterance to his famous book, The 
'Tractatus' -- so-called. As Wittgenstein famously put it -- this was his 
D.Phil at Cambridge, incidentally:

(0) Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, daruber muB man schweigen.

-- and got an A+ from the examiners: Lord Russell and Professor Moore.

R. Paul provides (a) the C. K. Ogden translation

(1) Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.

-- compares it with F. P. Ramsey's dictum,

          (1') Whistle and I will be there.

-- and (b) the McGuinness/Pears translation:

(2) What we cannot speak about we must consign to silence.

R. Paul does not find either tautologous -- nor the original German; Fjeld 
and I disagree. Let's consider more closely the _logical_ form of (0):

For starters: 'daruber' is a trick of a word -- in German, and governs a kind 
of unnecesary parallel emphatic and rhetoric sentential structure. That is, 
'daruber' is a sort of quasi-demonstrative, and  refers to 'wovon'. In logical 
terms, 'wovon' and 'daruber' are _co-referential_. 

As R. Paul notes, Ogden was certainly being more _literal_ in his 
translation, which retains Wittgenstein's metaphorical (we suppose) _spatial_ 
idiom ('wo' 
= 'where' -- hence 'WHEREof'; 'da' = 'there' -- hence 'THEREof'), while 
McGuinness-Pears opt for a simpler, less rhetorical, direct-object rendering 
('what'), _sans_ antecedent.

In terms of logical form, what looks like a sentence involving subordination 
is actually of a simple structure. Thus, (2) seems equivalent to the more 
linear: 

(3) We must consign to silence what we cannot speak about.

where the grammatical subject is 'we' -- 'one' in (1); 'man' in (0). Ditto, I 
would think (0) is equivalent to

(4) Man muss schweigen daruber man nicht sprechen kann.

and (1) equivalent to

(5) One must be silent [of what] one cannot speak.  

In fairness to Wittgenstein,  it should be noted that his choice of a 
_parallel_ syntactic structure reminds one of things like

(6) Where Punch was, there was Judy.

-- which is _not_ (_prima facie_) tautologous. But perhaps -- and this is 
Fjeld's point -- (0) is more like

(7) Where the bachelor was, there was the unmarried male.

-- i.e. the _content_ of the utterance's first bit -- "we can not speak" -- 
and the _content_ of the utterance's second bit -- "we must consign to silence" 
-- seem to me to be in a relation of logical entailment.

For, to repeat Fjeld's point: 

how *can* (or even *could*) we (possibly) NOT consign to silence about what 
we can NOT speak?

I guess Fjeld and I would appreciate an example of a situation 
_contradicting_ (or providing a counterexample to) Wittgenstein's (0) -- If a 
counterexample 
can _indeed_ be found, then, perhaps, as R. Paul suggests, (0) would _not_ be 
tautologous, but merely contingential.

Cheers,

JL


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