As I am sure you've gathered by looking at my website, my native language is English. I do all my technical writing in English. I envy people who can write technical passages in more than one language, as that is a very valuable skill to multinational companies. But as you might imagine, learning another language is not always the easiest. For one thing, there are whole bunch of different words that may sound or spell differently. Sometimes there are cognates (words that sound similar) such as "edifice" (English) and "edificio" (Spanish). But that is just looking at the surface of a new language. Conjugation is arguably harder -- conjugating even a relatively simple verb, such as "to be" can become an exercise in frustration:
"To be" is a verb English-speaking people use so often in day-to-day conversation that it barely registers on native speakers' radars. But imagine a language where "to be" is almost never used unless it's to illustrate a point. This is what I discovered when I started learning Russian. Russian skips over the present tense form of "to be" almost entirely. In regular conversation, it is only used in the past tense or future tense. The present tense is just implied. So here are a few examples you might encounter if you ever speak Russian:
So what happens when we take "to be" out of several iconic documents? Weird stuff, that's for sure. A great example is the Declaration of Independence (abridged for expediency): We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. The text is of course, still intelligible. You can figure out what it's saying without too much trouble, even if it reads more like somebody in high-school wrote it, instead of the writings of an educated aristocrat. But now let's take the iconic monologue from Shakespeare's Hamlet, and rip it a new one: To be, or not to be, that is the question: Anybody familiar with Hamlet should know I'm cutting out the rest of this particular monologue because it contains surprisingly few uses of "to be." But I now know a fantastic title for a suspense novel: "The flesh heir: A consummation."
So! What's the point of all my jabbering? Just pointing out how even the simplest verb, describing a state of existence, can be a major sticking point in figuring out somebody's intention.
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AboutThe musings of a 30-something Jewish technical writer. Blog posts may vary in nature, ranging from ponderings about the English language, observations of cultural oddities, or the occasional quasi-political rant. ArchivesCategories |