VMs: Natural-language weirdoes. Was: excessive frequency of doubles...

[Jacques Guy <jguy@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

19/08/2004 10:29:03 PM, Koontz John E <John.Koontz@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:


>It seems to be a series of ritual instructions in the imperative
>mode.

Nothing of the kind. It's just a story of Tare and Rapahago,
two benevolent aku-aku (I think "undead" is as close as we
have it in English), who are fond of visiting mortals and
bringing them gifts of food. Since I wrote what you quoted,
I understand a bit more about the language. "He" is 
just a narrative pre-verbal particle. The subject is normally
left unexpressed, and that makes it extremely difficult to
figure out who does what to whom or what. In fact, most of those
legends are incomprehensible unless you already know the
story, all the more incomprehensible that the language
has no gender. Imagine Alice and the White Rabbit in such
a language. It would go like this: Alice, White Rabbit.
He/she saw him/her. Took watch out of pocket. Cried "oh
dear, I'm late!" Ran. Followed him/her. Saw him/her crawl 
into a hole. Followed, crawled into hole... and so on.

The pre-verbal particles are difficult. We have nothing 
similar at all. As I just wrote, "he" is just a narrative:
"and then... and then..." "E" is er... the relative future,
or delayed action. E.g. He oho i te hare e haka-uru
lit. narrative (he) go (oho) in (i) the (te) house (hare)
e (future) haka-uru (cook) = he/she went home to cook

That is different from "he oho i te hare he haka-uru"
= he/she went home and then cooked.

If I say "he oho i te hare e hakauru" that leaves it
open for something to happen before he/she has finished
cooking. If I say "he oho i te hare he hakauru", he/she
went home, cooked, and the story continues from there.

It gets worse... there is another preverbal particle, "ka",
and, as far as I could figure out, it means the immediate
future... or past (yes!) As a consequence, it is used for the
imperative, e.g. ka oho "let's go (now)", as well as
an exclamative: ka riva! "wonderful" literally, 
"[it was] good [just now, an instant ago]". Then you
have the relative past, "ku"... and... had enough yet?

Now tell me. Didn't those sentences sound like gibberish?
Worse still: doesn't the literal translation look like
gibberish?

Well, many other languages work like that.

Watch Kurosawa's "Kagemusha", and pay attention to the
opening scene, the very first words. What does Takeda
no Shingen say? "Yoku nite-iru". Literally: "Well to-be-
resembling". Who resembles? Resembles whom/what? It has
to be inferred. The equivalent English would be "He _is_
the spitting image of me". But in Japanese, no "he", no
"me", nothing.



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