Actually, you succeeded, if the concept of success has any relevance. There is no right answer as to what should follow that paragraph. What I was after was evidence that chance of a native English speaker following that paragraph with the beginning of a disquisition on parental love was so improbable it would tend to 0. You and all those who responded provided me with such evidence. So if there is success, you are part of it.
As for the bunch of grapes : string of pearls. A Chinese text has a whole lot of statements that have to do with the general theme, but without a logical thread running from one to the other … just as all the grapes form part of the bunch, but no grape depends directly from another. In an English text, as a rule each sentence has links to the previous sentence, each paragraph links to the previous paragraph, so there is a thread of connection running right through the text, like the string running through a pearl necklace.
At this point you go and put the “Glen Miller Orchestra: A String of Pearls” on your music system!
The problem is that in both cases the “word” is defined identically as is the structure. This analogy was my first thought, but Mr X’s statement relating to the disjointed approach (conceptualization of thought?) makes it hard for me to grasp.
I feel … dirty.
Thanks. Having a flock of pigeons helps.
If my example is correct I “think” a better comp-sci model for explanation would be “systemic overview” vs “business logic” relative to application design. Systemic overview has disconnected processes that are all working to create an “application” while the “business logic” (aka process) is a linear description of event management.
That’s pretty much it, though the Chinese would probably be more like:
which I might turn into:
The point being that whether one chose my way of rendering it in English or yours, Jaysen, would depend on the linguistic context, what precedes the sentence and/or, most importantly what is going to follow. In Chinese the sentence would likely remain the same whatever the linguistic context.
Chinese doesn’t have a copula “verb to be” … It has an equative, as in “I am a teacher”, but not a copula as in this case. This is always taught as a Chinese peculiarity, explaining that Chinese adjectives are really a kind of verb. English linguistic imperialism … a much better way of looking at it is to ask, “Why does English have a copula?” The answer is much simpler and much more explanatory. But this is not the place …
Last year I lost over 30 birds to the hawks. There are 8 nesting pairs within half a mile. I try to look at it as them removing the not so bright ones, but raising them from eggs you get a bit defensive.
As for the hawks removing the not so bright ones, it reminds me of an evening in India when Zelie and I were driving back from Bangkok to the UK in 1974. To cut a longish story short, one evening we had to spend the night in a small village on the way between Bangalore and Bombay — I had a long-wheelbase Land Rover that I’d converted into a motor home. When travelling like that, you went to the local government resthouse, got hold of the chowkidar, who would open a bathroom for your use, and do things like go to the market for you (cheaper than going oneself, but of course he took his cut, and saved having to be bustling about in 100+F heat!). The village in question was the only place in the whole of India where the resthouse was not enclosed by a wall. We were just getting something ready for supper, when three people came over to talk. They were doctors from the district health centre about half a mile away across fields, who were happy to have people to talk to about different things.
Anyway, a couple of months earlier, there had been a devastating flood in Bangladesh in which thousands of people had lost their lives. We asked the doctors about it. Their answer was almost a shrug of the shoulders as they said, “It’s nature helping with the over-population problem.”
I don’t suppose you’re over-populated with pigeons, but to misquote Racine, it’s just le faucon tout entier à sa proie attaché.
Glad you’re feeling better. Is saying, “I’m not sure what this means” helpful or appropriate? Helpful, probably not; appropriate, questionable.
The thing is, they may merely wonder what it is you can’t understand. I’m afraid there is a tendency here in matters like this to think that if a foreigner doesn’t understand what a Chinese says, then that is a lack in the foreigner rather than a failing in their ability to express themselves in English … they can understand it, so it must be the foreigner’s problem.
This is all very interesting. My acquaintance with Derrida is slight, but I quite like him because if you manage to work him into essays on literature, you seem to get lots of extra marks! I suspect this might be because the marker is scared to suggest that you made it up and don’t know what you’re talking about, so gives you the benefit of the doubt.
I am intrigued, though. In English, you can tell if a text doesn’t flow well, whether in the language, logic or development of ideas – that is, you can tell when the string of pearls is broken, or when broken segments have been tied together clumsily, and this affects the quality of the overall piece. Presumably there are different rules or standards in a standard Chinese essay (or equivalent logically constructed piece of fiction) which enable readers to judge whether the progression or collection of ideas is valid and stylish? How can you tell if your bunch of grapes is complete, or if there are a few torn-off stalks where grapes should be, or if there are a couple of loose grapes rolling around on the plate, unattached?
For the pigeon examples…
“The pigeon on my deck, cooing gently, flaps its wings and looks around.” I would definitely follow this with something about the pigeon, because the bird is the focus of the entire first sentence – probably something about what the pigeon is looking for, or what the pigeon does next.
“There is a pigeon on my deck flapping its wings, looking around, and making soft noises.” Although I could follow this with something specifically about the pigeon, I actually see this sentence more as environmental description. I would be more likely to follow it with either further description of the environment, or something meditative inspired by the cooing sound.
And I’m desperate to know why English has a copula! Tell me, tell me!
Is it better to be more direct? e.g. “This sentence does not make sense.”
Are there other more appropriate/helpful ways to respond? Or do I just accept that I don’t understand and, ipso facto, that is my problem.
Point of fact: the farm is the loft where there 30 or so (normal count 150+) race birds eat, sleep, mate and … plant. Daily cleanings unless you have a system for control. I’m lazy so my first actions was to develop said system. Now I only have to harvest once a week.
Hmm. When I did my PG linguistics, we had a course on the history of linguistics. One of the exam questions was on Hjelmslev’s “Glossematics” … I thought it was an interesting, though immensely difficult theory to get to grips with. I answered the question on that, as I had realised the lecturer didn’t understand it himself so even if I didn’t get it quite right, he wouldn’t know. I got a very high mark on that question. I suspect working Derrida into literature essays is the same; the teacher doesn’t understand it either, so …
I think you’d have to ask an expert on Chinese writing for that. It came up in a discussion I had this afternoon with a young woman who translates English books — Guerillas by V.S. Naipaul was the last — whom I have helped with her translations of 4 books so far. She was saying that the Chinese text we were talking about, this same one, didn’t sound as if it was well written in Chinese. Perhaps next time we meet I should have it with me and we should spend time on this presumption of yours!
Thank you. Good examples. But I suspect, even if you did follow the second one with something about the pigeon, it would not be the same something as you would follow the first one with.
Well, we have to go down further into semantic analysis. Let’s take that one little fragment. The proposition behind it is that there is a something, designated “noise”, and that something has the quality of being “gentle”. “Gentle” is syntactically an adjective. In standard English, that proposition would be expressed by the sentence “The noise is gentle”. “Noise” is a noun. Now, for simplicity, we’ll leave out a discussion of the “the”, so “noise is gentle” has two lexical items and this copula. In a simple logical notation, the proposition would be the predicate “gentle” with its argument — what “gentle” is TRUE of — “noise”, i.e. GENTLE(NOISE).
But, one of the syntactic requirements of an English sentence is that it should be marked for tense — present or past — and tense can only be attached to a verb, so English has to supply a semantically empty verb form to carry the tense … the copula.
As Chinese doesn’t mark tenses, it doesn’t need a semantically empty verb form to carry it, and the same proposition can therefore be gramatically expressed by “Noise gentle”, with whether it refers to present or past time being determined by the context. So the Chinese word for “gentle” is not some kind of strange hybrid creature that is a verb if it follows a noun and an adjective if it precedes it … it’s simply an adjective. The time-frame will be established once at some point near the beginning of the text and will hold for all that follows until a new time-frame needs to be established.
For me, I try to explain why what they have written is incoherent; but I’m so used to dealing with these things and I can go back to the Chinese and see what it should be, given that I’m dealing with translation. Also, on the whole I can relate their incoherence to my experience of how Chinese is structured. That said, I have also had texts given to me where there has been no Chinese source and I have had to make a guess as to what they were trying to say in places.
For you, I should think the best way would be to make a guess as to what they seem to mean, write that more clearly and ask them if you have got it right. But whether you can give the amount of time necessary for that approach is only something you can know.
In relation to nothing at all (but because we are talking about language, I just thought I ought to add a clarification ) - the birds who took out Jaysen’s pigeons were probably falcons, not hawks.
The two are zoologically distinct: hawks are related to eagles and tend to kill on the ground, whereas falcons are related to parrots, are faster and generally smaller than hawks, and tend to take their prey in the air.
I’m sorry to say that it would be no surprise if the predators of Jaysen’s birds were peregrine falcons (depending of course on where he lives). In the wild, feral pigeons form a large part of the peregrine’s diet.
When I was young I kept a peregrine as a pet; it had been shot by a gamekeeper. I fed it on dead mice and raw steak. In the latter respect, it cost more to feed than I did.
) - the birds who took out Jaysen’s pigeons were probably falcons, not hawks.