Re: Subjunctive?

[Robin Turner <robin@Bilkent.EDU.TR>]

la sidirait. cusku di'e

> So, how do you know that the information that I don't have a 
> million pounds is not important?  The original question was 
> how one should translate it, not whether, in your opinion, 
> it's important.

Obviously unless something is my own words, I don't know for certain what
is or is not important (especially here, where I have no context to go
on). The point I was trying to make is that we should
be wary of assuming that just because in language A it is
compulsory to mark feature X, we should mark it in language Y.
  
> I am a terse writer.  Unless I have evidence that it will be 
> necessary for a given audience to write the same thing in six 
> different ways, I generally rely on the precise expression of
> single ideas, and for a translator to decide that information
> is irrelevant is dangerous.

True, but it is also bad to assume that something is important just
because it's embedded in the grammar. For example, Turkish has a suffix to
indicate received information (sometimes called the "rumour tense" or the
"gossip tense") so if you're speaking Turkish, you have to make a
grammatical choice between

geldi
he/she/it came

and 

gelmis~
I hear that he/she/it came

However, you would not want to start every -mis~ sentence with  "I hear
that" or "Apparently".


> I agree entirely that translation is hard.  In fact, the more
> I have studied language I have come to the conclusion that it
> simply cannot work at all !!

Quine seemed to come to the same conclusion ;-)

>  language itself is a miracle,
> and translation a mysterious art. I accept that you know more
> about translation than I do or ever will,

That I seriously doubt!

> and it's now clear
> that if ever I expect some of my work to be important enough
> to translate, I had better not use language the way I usually
> do, since I can't expect a translator to express everything
> important *in_my_opinion* (as the author) in the original.

Well, that's one reason why we have Lojban - it's much easier to specify
what is and isn't important. Questions of fluency aside, it should be  
much easier to translate from Lojban into a natlang than vice versa.

> 
> > Similarly, with the million dollars example, I do not think
> > that it is normally necessary to inform the listener that
> > I do not, and probably will never, have a million dollars.
> 
> By if I express it with the subjunctive, then I *do* think
> it's important.

zo'o semantics of "if" again? 
If you think it's important' you use the subjunctive, but that doesn't
imply that if you use the subjunctive, you think it's important. English
also demands that I choose gender when using a personal pronoun, whether
or not the gender of the person referred to is important or even known.

> > > As for the semantics of IF, I do not see any major problems.
>   (snip)
> > Granted, it includes the possibility that I may be rich if
> > I do not possess a million dollars, but this is true in any
> > case, since I am also rich if I possess two million dollars,
> > 999,999 dollars, or no money at all but a large quantity of
> > gold.
> 
> I agree.  However, there are questions that remain, and I
> believe that most of this discussion arises because people
> have been giving examples and assumed that you would see
> the question they are ntending to ask.

My fault - I was answering a different question altogether (something I
keep telling my students not to do!).

> So, how would you translate the following:
> 
>   " If I were to have a million pounds
>       then I'd be rich. "
> 
> given that I, as the author, have used the subjunctive, an
> otherwise obsolete form, to carry the additional information
> that I believe the antecedent to be unlikely ever to be true.
> 
I think other people have answered this fairly completely. 
> 
> And how would you translate the following:
> 
>   " If I were to finish this project today
>       then I would use it tomorrow. "
> 
> given that I, as the author, want to include the implication
> that the dependent clause has no real meaning in the absence
> of the truth of the antecedent.  Not only is there a causal
> connection, but consideration of the second part is completely
> pointless without the first.
> 
Isn't this the same as the "I'd buy a yacht" examples discussed earlier?
>