96
K. M. A. BARNETT
The 22 syllables or 15 words of English and the 8 syllables or 4/5 words of Cantonese are as near as may be the complete equivalents one of the other. A qualified statement about the present is followed by a mild negative imperative about the near future, with a deprecatory hint of the speaker's present status. The Cantonese adds the information that those addressed are two in number.
The sentences are as near as may be complete equivalents one of the other. Yet only in two cases does a word in the one stand for a word in the other, and only in one case does a syllable stand for a syllable. The order of presentation differs sharply.
Such variety in the manner of marshalling thoughts into speech (or writing) whilst fascinating to a student of comparative linguistics, must be frustrating to those mechanistic simpletons who think translation is just a matter of rearranging words. I call them the Leg Before Wicket school.
When I was younger and less tolerant of stupidity I used to reply with scant courtesy to people who asked me “What language do you really think in?” Nowadays, realizing that the question conveys a genuine if unintended compliment, so few are the people who really think anyhow, that I treat the enquiry rather more gently than it deserves. Of course, nobody thinks in any language: if it ever became possible to record thought processes the necessary code would be far too intricate to be called a language; with strange leaps and skips, logical steps left out, others duplicated and triplicated, and the whole criss-crossed with echoes, recollections, and a sort of scanning device which (when the thought is accompanied by speech, hearing, reading or writing) continually flashes its Stop! Caution! Go! messages to warn you against ambiguity, repetition, contradiction or other socially disutile paths.
This process becomes so habitual, so reflex, with us that in relaxed, unguarded conversation with an intimate friend we may seem to ourselves to be thinking aloud; and such a conversation can be largely unintelligible to a third party, or even to ourselves if recorded and played back much later.
But even the record of such a colloquy, I suggest, would not really reproduce, much less reveal, the patterns of thought which underlay it: at most it would sketch, would adumbrate, a simplified version of one only of the many threads in the pattern of thought:
96
K. M. A. BARNETT
The 22 syllables or 15 words of English and the 8 syllables or 4/5 words of Cantonese are as near as may be the complete equivalents one of the other. A qualified statement about the present is followed by a mild negative imperative about the near future, with a deprecatory hint of the speaker's present status. The Cantonese adds the information that those addressed are two in number.
The sentences are as near as may be complete equivalents one of the other. Yet only in two cases does a word in the one stand for a word in the other, and only in one case does a syllable stand for a syllable. The order of presentation differs sharply.
Such variety in the manner of marshalling thoughts into speech (or writing) whilst fascinating to a student of comparative linguis- tics, must be frustrating to those mechanistic simpletons who think translation is just a matter of rearranging words. I call them the Leg Before Wicket school.
When I was younger and less tolerant of stupidity I used to reply with scant courtesy to people who asked me “What language do you really think in?” Nowadays, realizing that the question conveys a genuine if unintended compliment, so few are the people who really think anyhow, that I treat the enquiry rather more gently than it deserves. Of course, nobody thinks in any language: if it ever became possible to record thought processes the necessary code would be far too intricate to be called a language; with strange leaps and skips, logical steps left out, others duplicated and triplicated, and the whole criss-crossed with echoes, recollections, and a sort of scanning device which (when the thought is accom- panied by speech, hearing, reading or writing) continually flashes its Stop! Caution! Go! messages to warn you against ambiguity, repetition, contradiction or other socially disutile paths.
This process becomes so habitual, so reflex, with us that in relaxed, unguarded conversation with an intimate friend we may seem to ourselves to be thinking aloud; and such a conversation can be largely unintelligible to a third party, or even to ourselves if recorded and played back much later.
But even the record of such a colloquy, I suggest, would not really reproduce, much less reveal, the patterns of thought which underlay it: at most it would sketch, would adumbrate, a simplified version of one only of the many threads in the pattern of thought:
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