04-30-2012, 06:00 PM | #226 | |
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This small digression on the difficulties of translation has managed to hammer home to me once again the importance of knowing the grammar of your mother tongue well before attempting to learn a foreign language, especially a dead one with complex morphology. Try teaching someone about declensions and cases if they don't know what an object is! (I have. It's not fun.) Last edited by Latinandgreek; 04-30-2012 at 06:12 PM. |
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04-30-2012, 10:18 PM | #227 | |
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05-01-2012, 02:34 AM | #228 | |
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05-01-2012, 04:05 AM | #229 |
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It certainly makes you more "aware" of language use, I think. Eg, you perhaps stop and think about where and when it's appropriate to use the subjunctive, to name but one example.
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05-01-2012, 07:38 AM | #230 |
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Yes. The same way learning better breathing patterns and foot placement helps a runner. It is not something you think about much while you do the activity, but it becomes an integral part of the activity.
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05-01-2012, 07:46 AM | #231 |
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05-01-2012, 09:54 AM | #232 | ||
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Some rules certainly do start to sink in a mere few years of active writing, but I know that a great many are beyond me even now - and I don't think I'm alone. For example Harry's example of subjunctive was one that I had to look up for a refresher - I'd heard the term before but could not have given any examples of what it meant. I like to think that years of reading, and writing for non-pleasurable purposes, may have led me to use acceptable grammar, but whether I'm technically correct or not I'm never going to know, because I have trouble understanding the rules even after reading the explanation. |
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05-01-2012, 10:26 AM | #233 | |
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I am not actually sure that the stuff discussed is an issue of translation per se. Granted, if I pick up the Euthyphro casually, I may be somewhat misled by the normal contemporary English use of "pious" or "holy" (depending on what translation I will use). But if I immerse myself sufficiently in that text and in other texts from the same milieu, even if I do so entirely in translation, I will start to see what "pious" or "holy" means in that context (especially if all the translation stick to one English word). The issue isn't so much of translation as immersion. Even if I read the text in the original language, I may well be misled, because how the particular author uses the word may not quite match the ordinary usage at the author's time. In fact, there are times when we will get a better understanding in translation than we would have got had we been native speakers contemporary with the author, because the author may be trying to transform that culture, while we ourselves may be living in a culture that is a fruit of that transformation. Thus, arguably, in a number of (but not all) cases, the English word "virtue" gives a slightly better picture of what Socrates is talking about than the Greek word "arete" would have given to Socrates' contemporaries, because it was Socrates who transformed the word into the deeply moral sense that "virtue" connotes. Our culture is an inheritor to Socrates' transformation of the concept from a generic excellence to something deeply moral. (At the same time, we have somewhat lost the "excellence" part of the meaning.) Another thought worth bearing in mind is that in the case of most of us, we need to humbly admit that a good translator's knowledge of the language and culture of the text is likely to be better than our own understanding of it, and hence we may get a better understanding by reading the translation than by reading the original. If I were to come up with a different translation of a passage of Aristotle than, say, Irwin and Fine did, there is a pretty good chance that they are right and I am wrong, because they have given many more years of their lives to Greek and Aristotle scholarship than I did. Though we may well do even better by reading both the translation and the original. :-) |
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05-01-2012, 10:37 AM | #234 | ||
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1. Something is carried because someone is carrying it. (Passive participle because active participle.) 2. Likewise, something is loved because someone is loving it. 3. Therefore, if the holy is defined as what is being loved by the gods, then what is holy is holy because the gods are loving it. 4. But (as Euthyphro already admitted) the gods are loving what is holy because it is holy. 6. So, both: the gods are loving what is holy because it is holy and it is holy because the gods are loving it. And that's absurd (because of the implicit premise that you cannot have "A because B and B because A"), so Euthyphro's view is to be rejected, or so Socrates thinks. Quote:
Last edited by pruss; 05-02-2012 at 09:55 PM. |
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05-01-2012, 02:15 PM | #235 |
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All of which is making me want to reread Bertrand Russell's Logic and Mysticism in Patricia Clark's lovely edition. I like what Russell has to say about Euthyphro, the Dialogues and Socrates' methods generally. "Let us assume for the sake of argument that [insert what is soon to be treated as the first of a series of unassailable truths]."
I do think that tenses can be harder for people to grasp than, say, double entendres in another language. Better to begin with Latin than to try to learn it after a lifetime of unruly English (though we do have the example of Swift picking up Greek in his decrepitude). |
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