Elements of Style in English
in [Lisp]
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From: Stan Brown on 13 May 2010 04:45 Thu, 13 May 2010 08:56:59 +1000 from Peter Moylan <gro.nalyomp(a)retep>: > > Aleksej Saushev wrote: > > Stan Brown <the_stan_brown(a)fastmail.fm> writes: > > > >> the need for a verb to have a subject, are first-semester > >> stuff in any European language. > > > > Obviously, you don't know European languages. > > In fact, Stan's claim is easily refuted [*] by translating the English > "It's raining" into a few other languages. > > *In the traditional meaning of "refuted". I haven't yet caught up with > our news reporters, who believe that "refute" means "deny". :-) Granted, I oversimplified. Out of curiosity, though, which languages are you thinking of? > Still, we have to remember that Stan was addressing Xah Lee's claim to > be fluent in English. In that context, he makes sense. > > > Alright, let's see what they propose in literature section: > > > > http://learningrussian.net/russian-literature/ > > > > "Notes from the Underground." > > > > "? ??????? ???????..." - No verb. > > Although I take the rest of your point, I don't think this is a good > example. It doesn't take long for the learner of any second language to > discover that his/her intuition about the verb "to be" can never be > transported from one language to another. It's an exception to the rules > about verbs in just about any language. It seems other people can see actual text -- all I see is a series of question marks. It may be my newsreader, which occasionally shows its age. -- Stan Brown, Oak Road Systems, Tompkins County, New York, USA http://OakRoadSystems.com Shikata ga nai...
From: Tim Bradshaw on 13 May 2010 04:53 On 2010-05-12 22:15:36 +0100, Don Phillipson said: > You may have misunderstood modern English > linguistics, which starts with the basic distinction between > (1) Sentences = Grammatical constructions with verbs > (2)�Other things written or said, which have no verb and > need no verb. and then (3): almost nothing that people actually say is an instance of (1). (Though actually, they don't teach it like that at all of course.)
From: Cor on 13 May 2010 07:03 Some entity, AKA James Hogg <Jas.Hogg(a)gOUTmail.com>, wrote this mindboggling stuff: (selectively-snipped-or-not-p) >>> "Как дела ?" >>> >>> Surprise! A sentence without verb. >> >> oooops .... >> Just to pick a nit : делаetb : is doing something, >> which surely is a verb. ;-) > > Just to pick an even bigger nit: > The word дела is a neuter plural noun meaning "affairs". The question > means "How [are] things?" Yes, that too. or, how are your 'affairs' doing ? but which type of affair is it now ? with te lady nextdoor, the state of your bankaccount or in general. Like in some 'circles' in france one says: 'ca boule ?' one responds with 'en frites', and it really has nothing to do with throwing steel balls while munching on freedom fries. ;-) It's context and idioms etc that drives true meaning of words in any language wich makes translations a real hassle to get it right. Just look at the funny/poor results of computer-translations even we people can not get a simple greeting right in one go. ;-) Cor -- Join us and live in peace or face obliteration If you hate to see my gun consider a non criminal line of work I never threathen but merely state the consequences of your choice Geavanceerde politieke correctheid is niet te onderscheiden van sarcasme
From: Lars Enderin on 13 May 2010 10:47 On 2010-05-13 10:45, Stan Brown wrote: > Thu, 13 May 2010 08:56:59 +1000 from Peter Moylan > <gro.nalyomp(a)retep>: >> >> Aleksej Saushev wrote: >> .... Some text in English and Russian > It seems other people can see actual text -- all I see is a series of > question marks. It may be my newsreader, which occasionally shows > its age. > Aleksej's post has Mime headers: Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=koi8-r Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit The followups respected that. Your reader is apparently unable to cope, since it uses 7bit us-ascii. I suggest you try Thunderbird, for example.
From: Peter Moylan on 13 May 2010 11:09
Stan Brown wrote: > Thu, 13 May 2010 08:56:59 +1000 from Peter Moylan > <gro.nalyomp(a)retep>: >> Aleksej Saushev wrote: >>> Stan Brown <the_stan_brown(a)fastmail.fm> writes: >>> >>>> the need for a verb to have a subject, are first-semester >>>> stuff in any European language. >>> Obviously, you don't know European languages. >> In fact, Stan's claim is easily refuted [*] by translating the English >> "It's raining" into a few other languages. >> >> *In the traditional meaning of "refuted". I haven't yet caught up with >> our news reporters, who believe that "refute" means "deny". > > :-) > > Granted, I oversimplified. Out of curiosity, though, which languages > are you thinking of? To be honest, I made the comment without thinking very hard. It's possible that I was thinking of Esperanto, with Russian as a close second. >>> Alright, let's see what they propose in literature section: >>> >>> http://learningrussian.net/russian-literature/ >>> >>> "Notes from the Underground." >>> >>> "? ??????? ???????..." - No verb. >> Although I take the rest of your point, I don't think this is a good >> example. It doesn't take long for the learner of any second language to >> discover that his/her intuition about the verb "to be" can never be >> transported from one language to another. It's an exception to the rules >> about verbs in just about any language. > > It seems other people can see actual text -- all I see is a series of > question marks. It may be my newsreader, which occasionally shows > its age. > I see that you are using Microplanet Gravity, about which I know almost nothing. It seems to be using a 7-bit character encoding, which rules out just about everything except US-ASCII. Aleksej was using Gnus, which Windows users tend to dismiss as hopelessly old-fashioned, but which does a much better job of understanding MIME encoding. For some reason, the popular Windows newsreaders don't seem to be good at handling non-USA traffic. (The question marks were actually Cyrillic text, but I guess you've already figured that out from Alexey's address.) -- Peter Moylan, Newcastle, NSW, Australia. http://www.pmoylan.org For an e-mail address, see my web page. |