Delling's Thread

[Rosella]

Then someone explain prokaryote?

[Delling]

In this context, "pro-" means before. Since the "karyote" can be taken to mean "having a nucleus", the relationship implies the assumption of evolutionary biologists that "prokaryotes" as a form of cellular life predate "eukaryotes" (there's also the tacit implication that this was an evolutionary dead end since more complicated organisms are exclusively composed of eukaryotes).

[snabbott]

In this context, "pro-" means before. Since the "karyote" can be taken to mean "having a nucleus", the relationship implies the assumption of evolutionary biologists that "prokaryotes" as a form of cellular life predate "eukaryotes" (there's also the tacit implication that this was an evolutionary dead end since more complicated organisms are exclusively composed of eukaryotes).

I don't know if I would say that - prokaryotes do pretty well for themselves as single-celled organisms. Fun fact from Microbiology: there are more bacteria in your body than there are human cells.

And then there are the Archaea...

[Delling]

Oh, it's not something I necessarily agree with. It's just a common oversimplification, the sort of statement made flippantly in a high school bio classroom.

[darthkiwi]

This is in response to the KQ3 redux thread.

Ah, so is "saw" > "would" a valid construction? I would have assumed it were only valid if it were written "the truth you would have seen", but that's just going from my own instincts as an English speaker rather than my grammatical knowledge (which is sadly closer to nil than I'd like).

Also, a caesura is not technically a foot containing only one stressed syllable. I think the effect you're describing is:

And so we stopped. "Man the boats!" he cried.

There's an elided syllable between "stopped" and "Man". This does lead to a caesura, but this is not in itself a caesura, because caesurae can occur in other places. For example:

And so we crept away; but as we crept

Here there's a caesura between "away" and "but", caused by the semicolon. The versification is still perfectly intact - it's a pretty much perfect line of iambic pentameter with all its feet present and correct - but there's still a noticeable gap in the middle.

A better example (and one which I haven't made up) comes from Marlowe's Dr. Faustus:

See, see where Christ's blood streams in the firmament!

This is a really striking line because the caesura comes so early: after only one syllable. I went to a poetry discussion group a few years ago where the poet in residence pointed out that this image of blood dramatically streaming out of the sky was one Marlowe brought up a number of times in his career as a playwright, and that each time there was a caesura in the line, as though one was needed to give it the right dramatic force. And as he played with this line and this image, the caesura moved further and further away from the centre of the line, until here it's right on the edge, as though the first "See" is a declaratory cry (perhaps to the audience but perhaps just in panic), and the rest of the line just sort of streams away in terror, mimicking the streaming blood.

[Delling]

This is in response to the KQ3 redux thread.

Ah, so is "saw" > "would" a valid construction? I would have assumed it were only valid if it were written "the truth you would have seen", but that's just going from my own instincts as an English speaker rather than my grammatical knowledge (which is sadly closer to nil than I'd like).

Consider this example lifted from a grammar site: "If I went to a friend's house for dinner, I would take a bottle of wine or some flowers." We might add: "Back in those days..." because modern listeners/readers are more comfortable with these constructions when describing something which has changed in the present, but the point remains the same--it is possible to construct (thanks to the analytic/periphrastic nature of the English future tense) a form that conflates past and future, giving us a sort of "past-future" which stands between "back then" and "right now". It is in fact this conflation of the past and future which is responsible for the glossing of the construction as "conditional".

We wouldn't complain if the original read: "If you saw me, you would see the truth". Well, "If you saw me, the truth you would see" is grammatically equivalent to that and therefore logically equivalent (because semantics aren't separable from grammar). Now, should we exchange "when" for "if", what changes? We CAN still read "When you saw me,..." as a condition. The difference between when/if conditionals is that "if" has open modality, the condition is true subject only to its own internal modalities (the factuality of having seen or not having seen) whereas "when" has an additional modality applied, that of time.

If we say...

When you saw me, you saw the truth: the two events are contemporaneous (and unequivocally in the past).
When you see me, you see the truth: seeing the first person is EQUIVALENT to seeing the truth; again the events are contemporaneous.
When you see me, you will see the truth: the second person will see the truth (or come to understand the truth) some time after seeing the first; it is implied that seeing the first person is perhaps a necessary precursor to seeing the truth.

It is this sentence which has been cast into the past, so the sense is that upon seeing her, Graham has discovered something that precedes his seeing the truth.

We've done all of this without appealing to the progressive and perfect aspects. The perfect aspect just adds another level of recursion (our first level of recursion is the point of reference in the past tense... if we introduce perfects, then we're applying actions to points after the present and/or the past depending on where we stick our forms of to have ).

Also, a caesura is not technically a foot containing only one stressed syllable. I think the effect you're describing is:

Hrmm... yes, caesura is the pause within a line or the flow of speech... not sure where I first heard it classified as a single stressed syllable standing as a foot (though probably in high school as that was the last time I saw or did much thinking on prosody). It was probably a confusion with strong caesura which seems to be tied to the pause happening with the stressed syllable. In any case, my recommendation still remains to switch to a meter composed of only stressed syllables (spondee, molossus, dispondee... ask me again in a week... I'll have forgotten them ) to engage a sense of urgency or immediacy.

[darthkiwi]

Hmm, it's becoming clearer but I'm still confused.

I think you correctly point out that "When you see me, you will see the truth" is the present form of the phrase in question: "When you saw me, you would see the truth".

My problem is that no matter how many times I run it through my head, it just doesn't work - at least, not in the context of KQ2. The example you give of would in a similar context is "If I went to a friend's house for dinner, I would take a bottle of wine". This can also be changed into "When I went to a friend's house, I would take a bottle of wine"; the speaker could be reminiscing about the many times they went to have dinner with friends, but not refer to any particular event.

I think my problem with "saw me > would see" might actually be a conceptual one rather than a grammatical one. In the bottle of wine example, I know that the sentence is abstract and hypothetical: he could be talking about any number of visits and so it forms a general principle of wine-taking rather than one single instance. But with KQ2, I know that it refers to one event - the moment when Graham sees Valanice for the first time. There's just something about the way that's phrased which only makes it grammatically palateable to me if it's talking in the abstract: if the sentence were, "Over the course of the many years we spent married, you saw me hundreds of different times, and when you saw me, you would see the truth", I'd be perfectly capable of parsing it. But because (I assume) the song refers to that single event, my brain just can't handle that.

I think the main problem I have is that the present form - "When you see me, you will see the truth" - sounds like something that a deity might say, so I picture a single moment of epiphanic glory which can be described as "truth". But with the lyrics as they stand, I can only make them function if they don't refer to a single event, but to an abstraction of many events. There's a gap between what the sentence implies from its content (a single epiphany) and what it, to me, demands of its grammar (an abstraction).

Which is not to say that the problem lies in your grammar; on the contrary, I think it's my brain that's at fault.

[Delling]

My problem is that no matter how many times I run it through my head, it just doesn't work - at least, not in the context of KQ2. The example you give of would in a similar context is "If I went to a friend's house for dinner, I would take a bottle of wine". This can also be changed into "When I went to a friend's house, I would take a bottle of wine"; the speaker could be reminiscing about the many times they went to have dinner with friends, but not refer to any particular event.

That is the general sense of it.

I think the main problem I have is that the present form - "When you see me, you will see the truth" - sounds like something that a deity might say, so I picture a single moment of epiphanic glory which can be described as "truth". But with the lyrics as they stand, I can only make them function if they don't refer to a single event, but to an abstraction of many events. There's a gap between what the sentence implies from its content (a single epiphany) and what it, to me, demands of its grammar (an abstraction).

Which is not to say that the problem lies in your grammar; on the contrary, I think it's my brain that's at fault.

Well, that is the problem: the construction doesn't match the context. I haven't listened to the song so I haven't been willing to comment fully on the context. I don't think it's your brain: I think it's the mismatch of grammar and context.

The interpretation that it is describing a single event which comes after a single other past event is the most literal, grammatical reading, but it isn't really supported by the content. This isn't such a dry exposition of "just the facts".

EDIT: Oh, also... a deity would say: "when you see me, you see the truth" (well, actually, this is a personal divinity, a less personal but perhaps more holistic divinity would say: "when you see the truth, you see me")

[Deloria]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UH9c_eBXnQs

[Delling]

... but...

"Our fate's unknown/so rarely shown/Together we'll see it ever sewn." ...what does that even mean?

Also... oh... that's not the whole sentence:

"When you saw me, the truth you would see/that your heart could feel its emptiness heal."

...which also explains why there's inversion. Even today, inversion happens more frequently when you have a clause running around in the predicate.

The noun clause "that your heart could feel its emptiness heal" stands in apposition to "the truth". This makes it clear that it really is a simple sequence of two events occurring the past.

[darthkiwi]

I'm really not clear, now you've quoted the whole line, how that actually works. It looks like "see" is being used by the phrases on either side of it: "When you saw me, the truth you would see" and "you would see that your heart..."

Anyway, they're really, really bad lyrics, which rhyme without meaning anything.

[Delling]

I'm really not clear, now you've quoted the whole line, how that actually works. It looks like "see" is being used by the phrases on either side of it: "When you saw me, the truth you would see" and "you would see that your heart..."

It is. So, the sentence without inversion would be "you would see the truth that your heart could feel its emptiness heal."

The noun clause "that your heart could feel its emptiness heal" is an appositive to "the truth", so they do have to be interchangeable within the sentence.

As an aside, another way to effect the inversion is through a cleft construction: "the truth which you would see would be that your heart could feel its emptiness heal." In which case we demote the main predicate, moving it into a dependent clause; promote the direct object, making it the subject; and replace the main verb with a less vivid stand in (would be).

Now, if we don't want to change the level of grammatical emphasis of the main clause, we just don't subordinate the main verb and the construction we get is the one that we have. Alternatively, we could put the appositive noun clause immediately after the direct object, but this becomes rather cumbersome:

...the truth that your heart could feel its emptiness heal you would see.

We've shunted the main subject and verb so far away from the direct object that the whole meaning of the sentence becomes unclear (we could actually do this in Latin: veritatem ut cordis tua possit sentire vanitatem eius sanare videas... but then in Latin, they have declension and a propensity for such periodic sentences).

[darthkiwi]

Oh I seeee! That makes sense now, thank you!

I still thinks it's a slightly silly way to go about writing song-lyrics though.

[Delling]

It is a slightly silly way to go about it, yes, but at least in the end, it does demonstrate some command of the language they are using.

[DawsonJ]

Delling, I've got a question that you'll no doubt be able to answer.  Why do Facere, Fare, Faire, and Fazer translate to Hacer in Spanish? I know there's quite a bit of Arabic influence in Spanish, but I've also seen a number of  books discussing Arabic's influence on the French language.  So why would one be Hacer while the other is Faire?

Thank you.

[Deloria]

Simple trick: When trying to figure out why morphology happens the way it does, repeat the words over and over in varying speeds and see what happens. Also, keep in mind that "F" is a sibilant sound and sibilant sounds are more likely to be replaced by other sibilant sounds or disappear altogether and be replaced by an aspirating sound.

[DawsonJ]

Simple trick: When trying to figure out why morphology happens the way it does, repeat the words over and over in varying speeds and see what happens. Also, keep in mind that "F" is a sibilant sound and sibilant sounds are more likely to be replaced by other sibilant sounds or disappear altogether and be replaced by an aspirating sound.

Good point.  The interesting part about spoken Spanish is that it's spoken differently than written, but rarely does the written form change.  In Mexico, they tend to add an "-s" to the 2nd person pretérito, as in Fuiste spoken as Fuistes.  And while I hear Nojotroj, the written form remains Nosotros.  Therefore, the word Hacer matches their manner of speech, but just looks odd in writing.  That being said, it does match their usage of Hoja for leaf, instead of a comparably written translation of Foglia (which wouldn't sound good in Spanish, considering a similar form is already considered offensive).

Morphology is an interesting subject, verily! In the cases of Haber (Spanish) and Haver (Portuguese), the silent "H" is an unnecessary addition to Avere and Avoir.  However, Haber, Haver, Avere, and Avoir also have multiple uses in each language, so they're not exact translations. Just saying.

[Deloria]

That has nothing to do with morphology. Words evolve and their usages evolve too. Keep in mind that when the stem originally started to exist, many of the usages and verb constructions we have today did not. Most Romance languages now have several constructed tenses, with the pluperfect and the perfect and the future perfect all containing forms of that verb, whereas classical language tenses tend to consist solely of one verb (with the exception of Greek being weird occasionally).

[Delling]

Deloria is of course correct. (I've been too busy with travel and everything else to answer unfortunately).

Essentially, some but not all initial f's in Latin became initial h's: e.g., facere->hacer but fui->fui.

As for your notes on varying pronunciations and differences between phonology and orthography, these things happen. No, seriously, you don't understand: this isn't just hand-waving--it's how languages work!

[Deloria]

Orthography reforms happen every so often and then it seems like it's caught up, but really, all spoken languages are really just dialects of written languages and most languages do not have orthography and phonology that match up.