Polyglottal Telephone XVIII *Results posted!*

[Vijay]

Seriously, though, good luck!

[Viktor77]

Ok, I recieved the last text. I'll begin compiling soon and the results will be posted momentarily!

[Viktor77]

Ok, I'm having serious problems with KneeQuickie including my entire username disappearing. I contacted Neek but until then I don't want to keep you all waiting so I've posted the results on the main post of the thread!

[gufferdk]

Well that got messed up. It seems like i managed to corrupt the structure of the second sentence... and i apparently mistook Vorzug for Versuch How that happened I am not totally sure

[finlay]

I like that the pronouns swapped round in half of the sentences and plurals were added here and there because of ambiguity in japanese sentence structure.

[Pole, the]

Hah. I knew I had read this fragment somewhere before, it was just already too mangled for me to recognize it.

It appears that the text I have translated is almost exactly the same as Hwhatting's. On one hand it isn't surprising, as Polish is my native language. On the other, Hwhatting did a very good job, as he managed to write the text in Polish; all the things that were unintelligible were present there either before Hwhatting's turn or intriduced as results of the Croatian translation.

Then the text became much more twisted during the Esperanto turn. One reason could be the fact that I haven't been using Esperanto for a quite long time and sometimes I used calques that could sound weird for an Esperantist. Another could be the sole ambiguity introduced by Esperanto derivation. For example, I quite like how my broken perfect construction konfidintaj estas "have confided" turned into elements of two separate phrases "… confided … are". Also, I confused the PoS ending in publikigatoj, turning "published" into "publications".

[Vijay]

Guys, that was amazing! Great job!

[Viktor77]

These two sentences stayed remarkably intact:

You say that my article isn't definite; I am ready to make it as clear as I can. Perhaps I am right in thinking you want me to; very well.
You could say to me that my writing is not clear but he thinks that I currently could not write enough. Maybe he thinks that he wanted to improve me - you are correct.

Paritcularily the first half of the first sentence was incredibly stubborn. I enjoyed seeing how it never changed. I was also happy to see the "very well" hung on even though in French I had given it a very basic translation of "d'accord.

The Pole, I wondered if anyone would recognize the text! It wasn't as obscure as I wanted it to be but it was a subject that I figured would cause all sorts of confusion since it deals with major figures and murder.

After the Croatian translation the last sentence flipped from talking about the lack of a right to kill to an obligation to a kill and I enjoyed that change quite a bit.

[Vijay]

After the Croatian translation the last sentence flipped from talking about the lack of a right to kill to an obligation to a kill and I enjoyed that change quite a bit.

Don't you mean the Japanese one? That's because jūs/iūs in Latin can mean both 'right' and 'duty' (as well as 'law' and 'court of law').

[Viktor77]

After the Croatian translation the last sentence flipped from talking about the lack of a right to kill to an obligation to a kill and I enjoyed that change quite a bit.

Don't you mean the Japanese one? That's because jūs/iūs in Latin can mean both 'right' and 'duty' (as well as 'law' and 'court of law').

Ah ok I read it in haste and saw the wrong change. The Latin text definitely altered things. I think it made things vaguer.

[Vijay]

Yeah, Latin tends to do that.

[Ser]

I think jūs primarily means "right" (something one is entitled to legally), and then "duty" only in a very indirect way... "Duty" would usually be officium (as in Cicero's book Dē Officiīs 'On Moral Obligations, On One's Duty'). (On top of 'right, law, court of law', jūs jūris can also mean 'soup, sauce', but that's probably just an instance of a homophone...)

I intended to use permīrum, but my fingers seem to have typed permīrābilem... which isn't even in the right gender.

I don't know why finlay translated āmōlior as 'to prevent', when it means 'to remove, get rid of'. Maybe it's just his dictionary. Using L&S or even Whitaker's Words would've given him the right translation... On the other hand, later on I didn't realize that āmōlīrī likely cannot be used as a passive the way I intended, because it's a deponent verb: hōs decem vel centum were supposed to be the patients of āmōlīrī, not the agents as Finlay reasonably parsed them.

I had no idea how to render the apodosis of the contrary-to-fact condition on Isaac Newton in an accūsātīvus-cum-īnfīnītīvō construction... and I ended up using something ungrammatical. Later on I learned that Latin uses fuisse + the future active participle for that, so I should've used Neutonō jūs futūrum fuisse... et obligātiōnem quidem (and later on ...Neutonum tum habitūrum fuisse jūs...). See §589 of Allen and Greenough's grammar for the details. Finlay understood my ungrammatical sentence correctly anyway.

I don't know why I used the infinitive after jūs instead of the gerund (jūs necandī... fūrandī). I swear my Latin is better than this. ;_;

[Vijay]

I don't know why finlay translated āmōlior as 'to prevent', when it means 'to remove, get rid of'. Maybe it's just his dictionary. Using L&S or even Whitaker's Words would've given him the right translation...

The ol' Wiktionary says it can figuratively mean 'prevent', too.

[gufferdk]

I just thought that it would be fun to see who is better - man or machine.
I took the original text and put it through google translate in excactly the same order that we did it and this is the result:

So the only ...... is a man without a conscience, who are not entitled to any of the judges of the obstacles that have to use the law in the public's right, "special", or because they (sometimes perhaps, what people do well), the effect of using you have to say, I can say, can not be determined, it is not enough to do in this, yes, it shows that he is ready. That may be right to think what he wants to do, and that's enough. Newton, Kepler found that, to go to work, which now made a key to create hundreds, or 2 or Newton's life can be the things they say. Of the 12 people to remove or people report ... all of mankind was discovered. However, it is a right hand to the left side of the Newtonian law not from the fact that every day, to fly to the market to cut the soul.

Who do you think won? I think we did.

[Vijay]

I agree, we definitely won. Our version is also funnier. In a good way!

[finlay]

I don't know why finlay translated āmōlior as 'to prevent', when it means 'to remove, get rid of'. Maybe it's just his dictionary. Using L&S or even Whitaker's Words would've given him the right translation...

The ol' Wiktionary says it can figuratively mean 'prevent', too.

That's probably where I got it. My other dictionary doesn't have that meaning – I should have gone with that. In this particular instance, I repeated the meaning I'd given it earlier in the paragraph (trying to make sense of the first sentence).

I may also have had L2 influence from Japanese in that choice, thinking ahead to what I thought I should be translating it into or something.

[Vijay]

I guess I just need to learn about what the implied subjects and objects of verbs are in Japanese.

[Viktor77]

I must thank the Polyglottal Telephone. Because of it I told my students today that "polyglottal" was a word in English. Then they looked it up and I had to apologize.

[jmcd]

Merriam Webster and Collins both recognise its existence.

[Viktor77]

Merriam Webster and Collins both recognise its existence.

Odd. My students didn't find it in their online Collins' dictionaries.

[finlay]

I guess I just need to learn about what the implied subjects and objects of verbs are in Japanese.

You and native speakers both. As far as I know, a lot of court cases are fought over this. The small print of contracts leaves nothing up to chance!

You get some hints, sometimes, if the subject isn't stated. If it's a formal register the form of the verb or even the choice of lexeme will be different for 1st and 2nd person subjects. ~よ seems to imply 1st or maybe 3rd person, in the sense that when would you be telling someone else about their own actions and they don't already know about it?

Also as far as I can tell, 〜てほしい generally means "(I) want (you) to do it" rather than 〜たい "(I) want to do it". I think you translated this the other way round than I intended.

Also sometimes you get a construction like 〜は〜が(eg.好きだ) where the semantic object takes が and the semantic subject takes は, even though we're also taught that が is always the subject of the sentence. When translating to English, the は part would be the subject. わかる or できる (and other potential verbs) use this pattern too. I tried to do it with ほしい but I'm not sure if it works like that lol.

[Vijay]

Omg I completely forgot about 〜てほしい vs. 〜たい! Yeah, all that makes sense. And I knew about that construction with 好きだ but not the other verbs I don't think. Thanks!

[Vijay]

Bumping this thread for just a moment, because I don't know how important or not it is to have these results posted on KneeQuickie instead of here

[Neek]

RE: KneeQuickie,

I replied to Viktor's post. Pretty much because of the Spammening, I shut down all user accounts. You have to reregister with an application that I have to manually go in and approve. There's nothing wrong with the wiki (except a weird bug now where I can't upload images. What the hell, mang.) But if you go on there and register, I'll approve it and we can start porting over the old stuff from the spam-filled archive.

[clawgrip]

I guess I just need to learn about what the implied subjects and objects of verbs are in Japanese.

You and native speakers both. As far as I know, a lot of court cases are fought over this. The small print of contracts leaves nothing up to chance!

You get some hints, sometimes, if the subject isn't stated. If it's a formal register the form of the verb or even the choice of lexeme will be different for 1st and 2nd person subjects. ~よ seems to imply 1st or maybe 3rd person, in the sense that when would you be telling someone else about their own actions and they don't already know about it?

Also as far as I can tell, 〜てほしい generally means "(I) want (you) to do it" rather than 〜たい "(I) want to do it". I think you translated this the other way round than I intended.

Also sometimes you get a construction like 〜は〜が(eg.好きだ) where the semantic object takes が and the semantic subject takes は, even though we're also taught that が is always the subject of the sentence. When translating to English, the は part would be the subject. わかる or できる (and other potential verbs) use this pattern too. I tried to do it with ほしい but I'm not sure if it works like that lol.

Japanese has a general tendency to mark the stimulus/theme as the subject in verbs of perception, etc., or use adjectives where English would use a verb or an -ing/-ed pair, and then place the experiencer as topic.
e.g.
Adjectives of opinion (that translate as verbs or pairs of adjectives in English):
好き、つまらない、面白い、恐い、 etc.

Verbs of perception/ability/etc (whose subjects would be objects in English)
分かる、出来る、知る、見える、聞こえる, etc.

The last two are interesting because they place the theme as subject when the action is involuntary, so they are equivalent in use (if not meaning) to English "see" and "hear". When the action is purposeful (i.e. equivalent to watch/look at and listen), the verbs 見る and 聞く are used instead, and the themes are placed as object.