Larry’s Pretty Good Journal

(Tangentially sparked by the previous post.) As a professional copy editor, I have a decent grasp of English grammar and syntax, but this one has me stumped.

Why is it that, for phrases in the form “{causative} {object} {verb},” when {causative} is “make” or “have” the verb is in stem form (“make him stop”) but when it’s “require” or “cause” it’s in infinitive form (“require him to stop”)? You can categorize most* other verbs of causation into these two bins.

Why these two separate syntaxes for what’s apparently the same structure?


* A sneaky one is “tell,” which takes an infinitive—except when it takes what looks like a stem but actually is an imperative in an unmarked direct quotation, “tell him stop.”

---L.

Subject quote from Metrical Feet: A Lesson for a Boy, Samuel Taylor Coleridge.

Not much of a theme here—just, yanno, some links:

An account of the Darien Scheme, Scotland’s one attempt at colonization (outside of Ireland).

Using reader reviews of All Systems Red as a study of how well people accept using non-gendered pronouns. (via)

Minesweeper Twist, on a non-rectilinear grid. (via)

---L.

Subject quote from Venice, John Addington Symons, and the rest is just as … shady, let’s call it.

A few links about this and that—mostly that:

The Chaos, a lament in verse about English orthography by Gerard Nolst Trenité. (via lost)

Running Up That Hill (Early Middle English cover). Bardcore FTW. (via)

Fjordlapse Norway: timelapse landscapes with fjords. (via)

---L.

Subject quote from The Lake Isle of Innisfree, William “Brother of the More Famous Jack” Yeats.

Links to share, two joyful and one annoying. You get to guess:

Any Rubic’s cube can be solved in 20 moves or less. You can use this fact to create a computer algorithm to solve it more efficiently, which can then be used for other problems such as decryption. NB: Starts with footage of a kid solving a cube in 4.73 seconds.

Examples of every letter in English being silent, except V. If you need more ammunition to help prove English orthography sucks. (via)

The video for ”Oração” (“pray”) by A Banda Mais Bonita da Cidade (“the most beautiful band in town”) is a 6-minute single-take tracking shot. Translated lyrics. (via)

---L.

Subject quote from The Girl From Ipanema, Stan Getz feat. Astrud Gilberto.

I’m sure there’s a sufficiently clever through-line tying these together that’s more substantial than links I want to point to and say, “Look! So cool! This!”, but I cannot discern it.

The perception of rhythm in language, a linguistics paper that proves its premise. (via)

A Visual Guide to the Aztec Pantheon (via)

Bach - Toccata and Fugue (BWV 565), classical guitar transcription by Edson Lopes. (via)

---L.

Subject quote from Amsterdam, Coldplay.

Links — two wordy, one wordless:

Dialect coach Erik Singer, with the help of a few linguists, gives a map tour of North American accents, including many non-white varieties and current, on-going changes: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3. (via a YouTube suggestion)

Where does the comma go in “God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen”? (via)

Live moon jelly cam. More live jellies. Relaxing. (via)

---L.

Subject quote from Feather Moon, Vienna Teng.

A few more random links of interest:

There is a type of wild duck called a smew. Really.

Nothing is moving in this picture except the arrows in the center. FREAKY. CW: intense visual image. (via)

A story about a necromancer that doesn’t know they’re a necromancer and thinks they’re just a really good EMT. (via, which has other fun stories)

Of interest to me, anyway. (SMEW!)

---L.

Subject quote from How Come You Don’t Want Me, Tegan and Sara, even though it doesn’t mention smews.

Thinking out loud -- well, on screen -- about a slow realization about Chinese translations.

One translation principle I hold to is that translations should, where possible, reproduce formal structures of the original text using analogous means in the target language. So if the text is a poem that has a meter, the translation should too. (Thus my irk over not rhyming these Chinese translations.) And when the text has the same meter throughout, the translation should too.

Classical Chinese poetry has meter: it's syllabic, a certain number of characters/words* per line -- and in the genres/forms I've focused on, with lines the same length throughout. I've been aiming in translation for loose iambic meter, taking that as a default metered line in English, with same number of beats throughout.

With 120-odd quatrains under my belt, I've found that most five-character lines can be tautly rendered in four-beat iambics, unless the language is especially compacted <glances at Du Fu and Li Shangyin>, when five beats may be needed to include all the basic surface sense. For the seven-character lines, typical is six-beat iambics, sometimes seven beats, and in one especially relaxed case, five beats.

This experience does not hold for the five-character regulated verse. What I'm finding, now that I'm focusing on this form, is that while four beats is usually good for the first and last couplet, I seriously struggle with the two middle couplets -- the antithetical couplets.

I haven't talked much about those yet. Between the two lines, each corresponding word has to match in syntactic role and semantic domain, with some of them directly opposed in meaning -- thus the "antithetical". To take an example from the last draft I posted, a character-by-character pony should show how it works:

灭烛怜光满，
披衣觉露滋。

go-out	candle	pity/sympathize with	light	expire
drape-over-shoulders	clothing	aware	dew	increase

What I'm finding is that, in handling these antithetical couplets, poets often lean hard on the caesura (pause) after the second character. Which is to say, a "regular" line is typically a single-clause sentence, with the initial two-character stich often a subject or an adverbial phrase. Antitheticals often have two clauses, with the initial stich either dependent or (as here) independent.

And fitting two complete sentences in a four-beat line is … challenging.

What I need to figure out is whether it's better to relax all the lines to five beats (potentially padding the other lines in ways that don't match the original) or commit to compacting down the middle lines (potentially over-compacting the syntax in ways that don't match the original). Or even mix and match solutions, depending on the poem.

Or, yanno, keep plugging along and get more experience.


* Not synonymous even at the time, but most words were a single character -- unlike modern Mandarin.

Subject quote from Gimme Five!, Sesame Street.

Circling back to Chinese pronunciation shifts, an example thanks to the Chinese Text Project’s pretty cool dictionary lookup tools. An example reconstruction using, as always, Wang Wei’s “Deer Enclosure.”

Text in simplified characters:

空山不见人，
但闻人语响。
返景入深林，
复照青苔上。

Modern Mandarin pronunciation (hover or click on characters in previous link):

kōng shān bù jiàn rén
dàn wèn rén yǔ xiǎng
fǎn jǐng rù shēn lín
fù zhào qīng tái shàng

(zh is /dj/, q is /ch/, x is /sh/)

Reconstructed Tang pronunciations (click on characters in previous link) based on T’ang Poetic Vocabulary, Stimson (1976) -- I don’t follow what’s up with the intermittent tone marks and probably won’t without the book in question, but this at least gives an example of the range of changes:

kùng shrɛn biət gèn njin
dhɑ̀n miən njin ngiǔ xiɑ̌ng
biæ̌n giæ̌ng njip shim lim
bhiòu jiɛ̀u tseng dhəi zhiɑ̀ng

Character by character relevant literal meanings:

empty | mountain | no | see | person
but | hear | person | talk | sound/echo
return | bright(ness)/shadow | enter | deep | forest
repeat/again | shine/reflect | green | moss | upon/above/rise

That last, in case you want to join in the fun and make your own version. (Though be careful, as 返景 can be read as an idiom meaning the time just before sunset, and all nouns could be singular or plural.) It is, after all, a popular thing to do.

---L.

Subject quote from All Things to All Men, The Cinematic Orchestra feat. Roots Manuva.

A history here, a history there -- pretty soon it adds up to real people:

Thanks to a dialogue for training cuneiform scribes c.1600 BCE, we know how to get your laundry done in ancient Mesopotamia. Also, pain-in-the-ass customers have been a Thing for a v-e-r-y long time. (via)

Wall chart of the evolution of the latin aphabet from Proto-sinaitic roots. (via)

Map of medieval afro-eurasian trade routes c. 11-12 centuries version 4. Zoomable version. (via)

---L.

Subject quote from Tony, Patty Griffin.