[lit-ideas] Re: gigawatt chivalrous inflammatory handyman drainage
- From: Jlsperanza@xxxxxxx
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Wed, 7 Apr 2004 22:35:26 EDT
Geary writes:
>I must say JL's response, though learned indeed, is
>typical of schoolmen and marm's. He hopes that by
>determining the parts of speech of the words that he can
>determine then the subject of the phrase and thereby
>the meaning therein. With the insights provided by his
>Spanish google translator, Speranza suggests that the
>subject is 'gigawatt', not 'drainage' as most English
>speakers might assume. I have no problem with this as
>long as one realizes what nonsense it is.
-----
With all due respect, I think Geary is misunderstanding me. For the recordm
here are the five translations provided by Google Translator into German,
French, Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish:
chivalrous entzündliche handyman Entwässerung des gigawatt
drainage handyman inflammatoire chevaleresque de gigawatt
drenaggio handyman infiammatorio chivalrous del gigawatt
drenagem handyman inflammatory chivalrous do gigawatt
drenaje handyman inflamatorio chivalrous del gigawatt
Note that _all_ translations use 'gigawatt' in the genitive ('des gigawatt',
'de gigawatt', etc.). From what I gather that, had English a particle like
'de', it would use it, too.
In any case, what I suggested was _not_ that the subject is 'gigawatt', for
it is hard for something in the _genitive_ to be a grammatical subject. What I
was merely suggested -- with the insight the translations provide -- is that
the subject is indeed 'drainage', but that 'gigawatt' applied to _drainage_
(had wider syntactic scope) and not to 'handyman' (narrow scope). But I guess
you
knew that. And that's why I wrote that I guessed you knew that...
It would seem that, logically, 'chivalrous' _could_ refer to 'handyman'
('chivalrous handyman'). One problem there is that 'inflammatory' is in the
middle
('chivalrous inflammatory handyman') -- which would force you to apply
'inflamatory' to 'handyman' too, rather than 'drainage'?
Cheers,
JL
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