![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
I'm sure most of you can't imagine why in the world anyone would want to translate something into a made-up language. Esperanto and similar artificial languages have the goal of leveling international problems by doing away with a major block toward mutual understanding, namely language differences, without favoring an existing language. I never put a lot of faith in that philosophy, because same language does not equal same culture nor mutual respect, and no matter how easy the inventors and supporters claim the artificial language is to learn, they still take some learning. Unfortunately, many people resist learning with a fiery passion. Having a language like Esperanto that is heavily Latin biased does very little to help a native speaker of Russian, Thai, Finnish, or Japanese learn the language.
I don't think my language could bring about world peace in a zillion years. So I'm not worried about who else can pronounce it and how comfortable others would be with it. It's intended as an artistic language not a replacement for natural languages. But being a linguist, it isn't good enough for me to be able to translate a whole bunch of sentences. A language is a complete system where by, given the correct vocabulary, you can translate any sentence. That's a heck of a lot more difficult than it sounds. Which is why the act of translating becomes important.
You can run through hundreds of sentences and never have a problem with translation and then trip over a sentence that just stumps you. I'm not talking about slang or idioms here. As I mentioned in the last part, those can also cause abrupt halts till you figure out what the idiom really means. Here I mean modes of expression that clearly have a meaning in the original, that translated word for word don't mean the same thing, because you haven't yet made allowance for them semantically in the language.
Example from Harry Potter and the Sorceror's Stone, Chapter 11 - Quidditch
"It was Snape," Ron was explaining, "Hermione and I saw him. He was cursing your broomstick, muttering, he wouldn't take his eyes off you."
Ignoring the fact the last bit is a run-on sentence, there is something interesting and for me instructive about the section I've put in bold. Now I've had a way to express the conditional mood in my language for a good long time, but this clearly isn't conditional though 'would' can be a conditional form. Though 'would' can be a subjunctive form, I don't think that understanding of subjunctive reveals the meaning either. When in doubt, I usually try translating into Russian to see what results. Russian has no subjunctive, which makes it closer to my language than English is. Translated more or less word for word into Russian using the conditional form gives a pretty good translation. So why doesn't it work in my language? Because from the beginning I did not assume that Indo-European usages would necessarily make sense in my language. And this time they really don't.
Ron is saying here that Snape's intent was to keep his eyes on Harry. It's not that he didn't take his eyes off him, but that he would not. You can certainly argue that Ron shouldn't make that kind of assumption, but that doesn't get us through expressing the meaning of the sentence.
If I use conditional in my language I get, 'he, doubtfully, did not take his eyes off you.' which whatever it might mean doesn't express the right thing.
So after many years of working happily without it I discovered that my language needs a form to express intent. Because of the structure of the language that's fairly easily to create. So now using the intent form I get something like, '...he was intent on not taking his eyes off you.' without using the word 'intent.' What no doubt seems trivial to most of you seems like a giant step forward toward completeness for me. That in turn helps my understanding of language in general.
When you know that the inventor of the first modern European 'universal' language, Volapuk, stuck his followers with trying to learn over 1700 forms for all the verbs, you can understand that just covering all the bases isn't the same thing as making a language that really has a life of its own. Any artistic language ought to have such a separate life.
I don't think my language could bring about world peace in a zillion years. So I'm not worried about who else can pronounce it and how comfortable others would be with it. It's intended as an artistic language not a replacement for natural languages. But being a linguist, it isn't good enough for me to be able to translate a whole bunch of sentences. A language is a complete system where by, given the correct vocabulary, you can translate any sentence. That's a heck of a lot more difficult than it sounds. Which is why the act of translating becomes important.
You can run through hundreds of sentences and never have a problem with translation and then trip over a sentence that just stumps you. I'm not talking about slang or idioms here. As I mentioned in the last part, those can also cause abrupt halts till you figure out what the idiom really means. Here I mean modes of expression that clearly have a meaning in the original, that translated word for word don't mean the same thing, because you haven't yet made allowance for them semantically in the language.
Example from Harry Potter and the Sorceror's Stone, Chapter 11 - Quidditch
"It was Snape," Ron was explaining, "Hermione and I saw him. He was cursing your broomstick, muttering, he wouldn't take his eyes off you."
Ignoring the fact the last bit is a run-on sentence, there is something interesting and for me instructive about the section I've put in bold. Now I've had a way to express the conditional mood in my language for a good long time, but this clearly isn't conditional though 'would' can be a conditional form. Though 'would' can be a subjunctive form, I don't think that understanding of subjunctive reveals the meaning either. When in doubt, I usually try translating into Russian to see what results. Russian has no subjunctive, which makes it closer to my language than English is. Translated more or less word for word into Russian using the conditional form gives a pretty good translation. So why doesn't it work in my language? Because from the beginning I did not assume that Indo-European usages would necessarily make sense in my language. And this time they really don't.
Ron is saying here that Snape's intent was to keep his eyes on Harry. It's not that he didn't take his eyes off him, but that he would not. You can certainly argue that Ron shouldn't make that kind of assumption, but that doesn't get us through expressing the meaning of the sentence.
If I use conditional in my language I get, 'he, doubtfully, did not take his eyes off you.' which whatever it might mean doesn't express the right thing.
So after many years of working happily without it I discovered that my language needs a form to express intent. Because of the structure of the language that's fairly easily to create. So now using the intent form I get something like, '...he was intent on not taking his eyes off you.' without using the word 'intent.' What no doubt seems trivial to most of you seems like a giant step forward toward completeness for me. That in turn helps my understanding of language in general.
When you know that the inventor of the first modern European 'universal' language, Volapuk, stuck his followers with trying to learn over 1700 forms for all the verbs, you can understand that just covering all the bases isn't the same thing as making a language that really has a life of its own. Any artistic language ought to have such a separate life.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
From:
no subject
Well, maybe... either seriously geeky or really deep(ly geeky).
From:
no subject