Important notice from the GRAMMAR POLICE. Plz read. This means you.
rufio:
Quote from: Liz on 2009 July 02, 19:53:14
For instance, someone might say, "You very lucky have money." That's not very good English, but it is a direct and accurate translation of the Cantonese sentence into English words. There was a weird learning curve I had for months where I would get frustrated because I couldn't figure out quite how to say, "I want to go to the diner to eat dumplings." I mean, I could say, "I want go diner eat dumpling," but I couldn't figure out the rest. Finally I got it through my head that there really is no "rest", that all the "to the" and other such phrases just aren't needed. Conversely, I imagine it must be incredibly frustrating for a native Cantonese speaker to be translating every single word perfectly but still be considered awkward and incorrect in her English speech.
Interesting - there really aren't any function words in the Cantonese sentence?
Word-for-word translation isn't a good method for any language though. If it were, machine translation would be leagues ahead of where it is now.
DrNerd:
Quote from: rufio on 2009 July 02, 22:26:44
Quote from: Liz on 2009 July 02, 19:53:14
For instance, someone might say, "You very lucky have money." That's not very good English, but it is a direct and accurate translation of the Cantonese sentence into English words. There was a weird learning curve I had for months where I would get frustrated because I couldn't figure out quite how to say, "I want to go to the diner to eat dumplings." I mean, I could say, "I want go diner eat dumpling," but I couldn't figure out the rest. Finally I got it through my head that there really is no "rest", that all the "to the" and other such phrases just aren't needed. Conversely, I imagine it must be incredibly frustrating for a native Cantonese speaker to be translating every single word perfectly but still be considered awkward and incorrect in her English speech.
Interesting - there really aren't any function words in the Cantonese sentence?
That's pretty common in a lot of Asian languages. It's not so much that the words don't exist, it's that they're totally unneeded, like you can have sentences in English with "understood" subjects, like "Take out the trash." They also tend to have trouble with "count" and "non-count" nouns.
rufio:
Quote from: DrNerd on 2009 July 03, 03:05:11
That's pretty common in a lot of Asian languages. It's not so much that the words don't exist, it's that they're totally unneeded, like you can have sentences in English with "understood" subjects, like "Take out the trash."
Most languages have very different ideas about the kinds of things that need to be marked (and where they get marked) than others (unless they're very closely related, of course). It just seems kind of odd to me that purpose clauses ("[in order] to eat dumplings") and allatives ("to the diner") don't seem to be marked here. It might actually make sense to just treat motion verbs like "go" as transitive and have the "object" actually be the goal of the motion (hence something like "I go diner"), but the clause thing is strange. Japanese doesn't mark relative clauses (other than with word order) but it does mark other ones. I'd think there was something marked on the second verb, except that IIRC Chinese languages are extremely isolating.
If I had hopes that I'd get a real answer, I'd ask Liz to translate some other sentences into Cantonese (or glossed Cantonese, anyway).
Quote
They also tend to have trouble with "count" and "non-count" nouns.
Probably because they lack number, and the count/non-count distinction has to do with pluralization. Although, at least in Japanese (probably Chinese too, AIUI) you could probably make the argument that all nouns are simply non-count.
professorbutters:
Quote from: J. M. Pescado on 2009 July 02, 15:27:57
With practice, you can even learn to recognize the distinct flavors of patois that foreigners have. For instance, Italians mutilate English in a distinctly Italian way, whereas Germans are entirely different: Germanian-English is always very stiff, and excessively formal, characterized by a rigid adherence to rules, whether or not they are present or correct, whereas Italian-English have this kind of babblative flow to it. A classic example of "Germanian-English" is FatD from here and around: His English is always extremely rigidly correct: While there are no apparent errors in it, in that his learning is very good, it's simply too stiff and formal, even in an extremely informal context. A side effect of this is that he was very good at hiding being 12.
You can see this in Shakespeare's plays, where there are characters who aren't supposed to be English speakers. The most famous is probably the bilingual "love" scene at the end of *Henry V*, where the French princess Katherine blows off a compliment with "O Dieu! les langues des hommes sont pleins de tromperies." Henry asks her lady in waiting, "What does she say? That men's tongues are full of deceit?" and Alice responds, "Oui, dat de tongues of de mans is be full of deceits. . . dat is de princess." It's an almost word for word rendering of French into English.
There's another character in *Love's Labors Lost* who is a Spanish traveller. Often the character is acted with a thick, almost indecipherable Spanish accent, but that doesn't fit the way he actually speaks, which is extremely fancy and formal, with at least three alternative words employed for the same thing. The guy adores language, and he can't resist showing it off: "see! See! LOOK how fabulous my English is!" (Just ignore the fact that the play is supposedly set in France for now--everybody speaks English.) Plus the stereotype of what Spaniards are like was different: it wasn't all castanets and Carmen and ole; it was more Phillip the II, formal and stuffy with very starched clothes. So his speech is hypercorrect. Or Shaw's Professor Higgins is right: foreigners speak English beautifully. It's native English speakers who crucify the language.
Jelenedra:
Japanese and Chinese are similiar that way. You don't need things like "to the" in the language because it's implied. It helps that they have words(?) that do thinks like mark the subject of the sentence and another to imply what the verb is doing.
I went to the park.
Watashia wa paaku ni ikiimashita.
Directly translated: "I park went."
Wa marks the subject, I. And ni lets you know that iku (go) is the verb. The 'mashita' verb form lets you know it was past tense. If it was "itte" it'd be a command to go to the park. If it was "ikiimasu" then you are going to the park.
Now, ad a "ka" to the end of the sentence? It automagically becomes a question. "I went to the park?"
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