From: John W Kennedy (jwkenne@attglobal.net)
Date: Wed Apr 22 2009 - 12:58:14 CDT
On Apr 21, 2009, at 1:08 PM, William J Poser wrote:
> The problem of translation is even worse than you may realize. In the
> language of the area in which I live, for example, before I can decide
> how to say "it's raining" I need to know whether the speaker is on
> land
> or on water. nawhulhtih means "it is raining onto land". tawhulhtih
> means "it is raining into water". And in the relatively unusual
> situation
> in which the rain is falling into a cave or cellar we would have
> 'awhulhtih "it is raining into a hole". Similarly, we have najus
> "it is snowing onto land", tajus "it is snowing into water", 'ajus
> "it is snowing into a hole". And should we get into hail, we not only
> have those possibilities, but we have to double their number since we
> must distinguish between dense hail (e.g. 'indloo nawhulhtih = "it is
> hailing densely onto land") and sparse hail (e.g. 'indloo nanukat =
> "it is hailing sparsely onto land").
Some North American languages lack a word for "thing", and cannot
express anything without including an epistemological marker ("I
know", "people say", etc..). On the other hand, Indo-European
languages demand a temporal marker (though English is evolving a time-
neutral form by the distinction between "I walk" and "I am walking");
not all languages have that. Japanese is a minefield of registers,
together with specializations depending on whether the speaker is male
or female, juvenile or adult.
-- John W Kennedy "You can, if you wish, class all science-fiction together; but it is about as perceptive as classing the works of Ballantyne, Conrad and W. W. Jacobs together as the 'sea-story' and then criticizing _that_." -- C. S. Lewis. "An Experiment in Criticism"
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