New Grammatical Person

[Škjakto]

I propose a new 4th person perspective, based on impersonal pronouns such as "One should work."

[Vijay]

That's just third person.

[linguoboy]

It's called the "impersonal". Plenty of languages have it, though the two I'm most familiar with are Irish and Welsh.

You wouldn't use it to translate your example. (Common equivalents would translate back literally as "It is right (for a person) to work" or "(There is) necessity (for a person) to work".) But "One works" would be:

Irish: Oibrítear. (Cf. Oibríonn sí "She works".)
Welsh: Gweithir. (Cf. Mae e'n gweithio "He works/is working".)

[ObsequiousNewt]

I propose a new grammatical person, used exclusively to refer to me.

[Zaarin]

And the term "4th person" is already used as shorthand for obviative and empathetic pronouns.

[zompist]

The 5th person is the guy who really didn't want to play bridge anyway and will just sit in a chair and read.

[linguoboy]

The 5th person is the guy who really didn't want to play bridge anyway and will just sit in a chair and read.

Also known as the "chaperonal".

[Zaarin]

The 5th person is the guy who really didn't want to play bridge anyway and will just sit in a chair and read.

Also known as all of Jane Austen's heroines...

[Vijay]

The 5th person is the guy who really didn't want to play bridge anyway and will just sit in a chair and read.

Also known as all of Jane Austen's heroines...

Heheh, I've never read Austen, but my dad has, and there are only two things I remember him ever saying about her stories: "none of these people ever seem to actually do anything" and "they never actually say what they're eating! They just say 'and then we had supper'."

[Zaarin]

The 5th person is the guy who really didn't want to play bridge anyway and will just sit in a chair and read.

Also known as all of Jane Austen's heroines...

Heheh, I've never read Austen, but my dad has, and there are only two things I remember him ever saying about her stories: "none of these people ever seem to actually do anything" and "they never actually say what they're eating! They just say 'and then we had supper'."

There are a few specific food descriptions in Mansfield Park. :p If you enjoy mocking people's folly, you'll probably enjoy Jane Austen. I highly enjoy her incisive wit and organic plots, at any rate. I also may or may not have a crush on Anne Elliot. >_>

[Xephyr]

I never quite understood why certain authors (George R.R. Martin and Brian Jacques come to mind) feel the need to describe in minute detail what all the characters eat during each meal. My eyes tend to just skip over all that, especially since (owing to my own particular cultural culinary experience) I generally don't know what half the foods they mention even are.

[Zaarin]

I never quite understood why certain authors (George R.R. Martin and Brian Jacques come to mind) feel the need to describe in minute detail what all the characters eat during each meal. My eyes tend to just skip over all that, especially since (owing to my own particular cultural culinary experience) I generally don't know what half the foods they mention even are.

I think it depends. Food can be very evocative and sensuous, and it can be a grounding element even in fantasy, even if the food itself is fantasy (I think Morrowind--albeit in a very different medium--did this very well: I may not know what they taste like, but ash yams, saltrice, and scrib jelly all added to Morrowind's lived-in feel that neither of Bethesda's newer games managed to capture). The Christmas feast in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight also comes to mind. But it obviously should employed in moderation; spending too much time describing anything gets old.

Excessive description of anything isn't really something Jane Austen can be accused of. Off-hand, she says Elizabeth has nice eyes (but we're not told what color), chiefly because Mr. Darcy admires them; we're told Anne is fair-skinned (or, when the narrator is feeling less generous, pale); we're told that Emma Woodhouse, Marianne Dashwood, and Jane Bennett are the picture of beauty--but not why; we're told that Fanny has light brown eyes (in contrast to Mary Crawford's dark eyes); and that's all the personal description I can recall. I think she describes Jane Fairfax more minutely than any other character: thin, pretty, elegant features, but lacking in complexion. Oh, and I think she says that Harriet Smith is plump and has fair hair.

[----]

The Redwall series is an exemplar of good food descriptions--as a child (the intended reader demographic, I would say) I had no idea what a cordial was, but it didn't matter because the sensuous character of the description that Zaarin notes was very present. The fine details of what foods were present (details such as what a cordial actually is) were much less relevant than the image of practically unreasonable levels of bounty produced.

[Nortaneous]

redwall is the only fantasy series i've ever bothered to read aside from the one where witch harvard sends a frenchwoman to western maryland to find Jesus the Magic Dragon, so

(Jesus the Magic Dragon has numerous sidekicks, such as: the fellow who spent half the series possessed by the Dagger of Satan, the bard with an unusually high number of distinct units of facial hair, Ishi, and a furry)

[Vijay]

One of my favorite books ever is technically a cookbook but mostly reads like a story and is not exclusively about food (although it mostly is).

[Pole, the]

I never quite understood why certain authors (George R.R. Martin and Brian Jacques come to mind) feel the need to describe in minute detail what all the characters eat during each meal. My eyes tend to just skip over all that, especially since (owing to my own particular cultural culinary experience) I generally don't know what half the foods they mention even are.

It's called a fetish.

If I had to write a novel, I bet, half of it would be a grammar reference of the language used by the characters and a half of the rest would be in-detail description of the variant of MMP used in the conworld.

[ObsequiousNewt]

I never quite understood why certain authors (George R.R. Martin and Brian Jacques come to mind) feel the need to describe in minute detail what all the characters eat during each meal. My eyes tend to just skip over all that, especially since (owing to my own particular cultural culinary experience) I generally don't know what half the foods they mention even are.

It's called a fetish.

If I had to write a novel, I bet, half of it would be a grammar reference of the language used by the characters and a half of the rest would be in-detail description of the variant of MMR used in the conworld.

I am presuming this is not measles/mumps/rubella

[Pole, the]

I am presuming this is not measles/mumps/rubella

Oops, I meant MMP.

[Qwynegold]

Speaking of George R. R. Martin, in the Swedish translation they never use the word "eat". Instead they only "break the fast". Is this in the original as well? I'm constantly wondering what fast. Are they supposed to fast all year around?

[Salmoneus]

Speaking of George R. R. Martin, in the Swedish translation they never use the word "eat". Instead they only "break the fast". Is this in the original as well? I'm constantly wondering what fast. Are they supposed to fast all year around?

People fast while they're asleep. In older days the fast would probably have been longer, from early dinner to a few hours after getting up (got to go milk those cows first). So the expression arose, "to break fast", meaning to have the first meal of the day. This became "to breakfast", and then a noun developed, "breakfast" to describe this process.
So they should only break fast when we would say they breakfast, or that they have breakfast. It's just putting a space between the words to sound old-fashioned. [Or perhaps just to avoid sounding modern - it's hard to say "let's do breakfast" and not sound contemporary, so instead they say "will you break fast with me?"

[Qwynegold]

Ah, I see. In Swedish the word for breakfast has nothing to do with fast. I'm thinking that the translation is unidiomatic. :/