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

[Jacques Guy <jguy@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

20/08/2004 12:31:03 PM, Koontz John E <John.Koontz@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

>In a situation I'd look for some switch reference scheme - something that
>marks "same subject" vs. "different subject."

Of course. I found nothing of the kind for Rapanui. At least nothing
in the legends collected by Englert, which are the only corpus I
could lay my hands on (the texts collected by William Thomson
have been completed garbled by the printers).

>Sounds a bit like a purposive or subordinative ('e') vs. a consecutive
>('he').  

Yes, those are the terms that first came to my mind, but...

>Of course, those are just labels for what you said, but they're
>used, and sometimes labels help persuade us we've got a pattern.

exactly, so after a while, I suspected that using those terms
(purposive, subordinative, and so on) was leading me into
thinking that those particles were _really_ purposive etc.
when they could be something else. In other words, I feared
that the labels might help persuade me that I'd got a pattern.
The wrong pattern.

>Some sort of assertion marker?

I don't think so. I am pretty sure that the meaning is
immediate past or future. When you exclaim "Ka riva!"
you've just noticed something. I don't think you would
say that for something seen yesterday. But I am dealing
with dead texts, a finite corpus, small, even, so...
no certainty.


>> 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.

>Yes, but of course, the obscurity of the remark is only in the literal
>translation into English.

It took me a while to cope with the Japanese word order. Something
like six months. I thought I'd never make it. Then all of a sudden,
I could construct my sentences backwards. At about the same time,
I manage to cope with the lack of personal pronouns.

>I suspect it's perfectly grammatical and clear
>in Japanese, or at least that the pattern of ambiguity is normal and
>wouldn't cause comment.

It's perfectly normal and clear. I understood it without
even having to think about it. 




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