I’ve been on a Jacques Rivette kick recently — he’s one of those directors of whom I can say he’s a favorite only with the important proviso that when his movies are to my taste I like them a lot, but when they’re not (e.g., 1976’s Noroît) I have no desire to see them again. (Contrast with Godard, whose movies I’m eternally interested in experiencing even when I don’t like them very much.) So far my favorites are Paris nous appartient (1961, his first), L’Amour fou (1969), and Céline et Julie vont en bateau (1974); I’m likely to add Le Pont du Nord (1981) and La Belle Noiseuse (1991) to the list, but I’ve only seen them once each and can’t be sure. I’m currently watching La Bande des quatre (1989), and I think it too will wind up on the approved list, since it’s got the kind of lively acting and productive life/theater interaction that make his movies work. But I keep having to pause to investigate things vital to appreciating the movie, like Marivaux’s La double inconstance, the play the student actresses in the movie are studying/rehearsing, and just now I had to look up “La prière d’Esther” from Racine’s play Esther (used as an audition piece by a prospective student) and found myself at this page, which is very helpful in explicating the passage. But I ran into a stumbling block here (bold added):
L’alexandrin a des césures qu’il faut faire apparaître : la césure lyrique après « perfide », qui met en valeur l’argument adversatif (après tant de miracles) qui suit, l’arrêt après « anéantir » qui (outre sa rime avec le perfide du vers au-dessus) permet de bien faire apparaître l’importance du cod « la foi de tes oracles » ; et après « aux mortels » : même chose , mise en valeur du complément, la venue du Messie promise, le messie défini par les deux relatives : une promesse et une attente.
What was this “cod” that was so important? It doesn’t even look like a French word! But I let it go for the moment and continued reading, soon getting to this:
Les deux derniers vers sont très beaux avec l’antithèse vains ornements / cendre, le parallélisme « je préfère/ n’ai de goût » et le chiasme : « A ces vains ornements » en tête avant son verbe et « aux pleurs» après son verbe (mais les deux cod se retrouvent chacun à l’hémistiche et ne s’en opposent que mieux), avec la succession de monosyllabes du dernier vers : une pauvreté un dénuement, qui s’oppose aux « ornements » qui en fait sont la réelle pauvreté (« vains ») , les allitérations (G/K) et enfin ce « que tu me vois » : Esther prend Dieu à témoin de sa contrition.
There it was again, and this time the plural turned out to be cod! What was going on? Some googling took me here: “Qu’est-ce qu’un COD ? Complément d’objet direct : Un complément d’objet direct est un mot ou groupe de mots qui vient compléter l’action du sujet dans une phrase.” It would have been helpful if the author of the Esther’s-prayer page (which could use proofreading, e.g. “à al familiarité”) had used capital letters to make it clear it was an acronym, but at least I now knew it was a direct object, and now so do you. But my question for French speakers is this: would you know automatically what was meant by “l’importance du cod,” or would you have had to look it up? And (while I’m at it) do you pronounce it like code or say the letters separately?
Dunno about the acronym, but the term itself is ordinary enough for “direct object”:
https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compl%C3%A9ment_d%27objet
I suppose it’s like syntagme for “phrase”; both “phrase” and “objet” are unhelpfully ambiguous in French, making them less suitable for technical grammatical use as is. “Objet” by itself is used in that sense though. But in the middle of an actual written grammatical work it’s not likely to be ambiguous, of course. I suppose …
Might cod be school slang?
Yes, the term is familiar to me (having had, for my sins, a thorough immersion in traditional French language study, dictées and all), but we didn’t use such acronyms, and I wouldn’t have thought they were a thing in French.
I mean, of course I knew that acronyms were a thing in French — SNCF, FLN, and all that — but only for titles, not random collections of words.
Speaking of French, here’s an amusing quote from the Douchet book on the Nouvelle Vague I’m reading (he abbreviates it NV):
I confess I’m not sure exactly what is meant by the «à» ultra-circonflexé, but I like the expression. (Paname, of course, is slang for Paris.)
My dusty Nouvelle Bescherelle grammar spells COD in caps. As for the phrase in question, perhaps it parses as “the importance of (this particular) COD, « la foi de tes oracles »”.
Yes, once the acronym was explained to me, I understood what they were saying.
https://fr.wiktionary.org/wiki/COD says it’s pronounced as initials.
A few pages at odysseum.eduscol.education.fr seem to use cod but more use COD and elsewhere at eduscol.education.fr is mostly COD with some C.O.D. I surmise the site’s pages are class notes supplied by different teachers with no editorial implementation of a house style.
[ɑ]? [ɑˁːːː]?
It seemed unlikely to me that “cod” in context was French for “cod” as in the fish, but that made me realize that I had no idea what the fish is called in French, and the answer seems to be either “morue” or “cabillaud.” Both of these not only vary from the English (apparently of uncertain etymology) but also from the Iberian names (bacalao, bacalhau, bakailao, etc.). But “morue” looks suspiciously similar to the second half of Gadus morhua, the Linnean name for the Atlantic cod, and “cabillaud” looks suspiciously similar to the Dutch “kabeljauw.” What’s then weird is the relationship-if-any between e.g. kabeljauw and bakailao, where it kinda looks like one is a taboo deformation of the other but that doesn’t tell you which direction any such change operated in. German has Kabeljau oder Dorsch, the Scandinavian languages (plus Polish) have names that look akin to Dorsch, and the Baltic languages offer yet another unrelated-looking approach (Latvian “menca” or Lithuanian “menke”).
I guess from this we are supposed to conclude that cod were not found in whatever body of water was closest to the IE Urheimat, so everyone had to subsequently make up their own name when the results of migration meant they actually needed one?
Welsh, FWIW, has “penfras,” which as an adjective also means “thick-headed, stupid.”
Hat: I (Native French speaker who was mostly schooled in French) would have recognized it as such instantly, and I have never heard it pronounced as anything other than the names of the letters (i.e. /seode/).
Anyone who went through high school in French would recognize the term. You have to bear in mind that the distinction between direct and indirect objects (COI, AKA /seoi/: three separate syllables, nota bene!) is crucial in French spelling.
For example, the distinction between “On nous a vus”* (we were seen, where “vu” would be impossible) and “On nous a parlé” (we were spoken to, where “parlés” would be impossible) only makes sense if you remember that the “nous” of the first sentence is a COD, which triggers agreement of the past participle (there are a couple of other required conditions, which we may leave aside for now), whereas the “nous” in the second sentence is a COI and therefore never triggers agreement of the past participle.
This is VERY tricky for native speakers of French**, because it is only with third person pronouns that we have separate direct and indirect forms of the object pronouns: for all the others there is a single object form, used for direct and indirect objects alike. As a result it takes a careful, conscious effort to establish when the object pronoun triggers agreement of the past participle: Indirect objects never do, direct objects do (Again, if a couple of other conditions are also met).
Thus, COD and COI are terms that are much more widely known among francophones than similar such terms are among anglophones (Much to the despair of my colleagues who teach French to anglophones and who must come to grips with the reality that most anglophones, even those with top marks in English writing courses, are painfully ignorant of English grammatical terminology. This is unsurprising: unlike French spelling, English spelling does not require any understanding of grammatical relations within a sentence).
*Which could be “On nous a vues”, if the “we” consisted of female animate beings exclusively.
**So tricky that even L1 francophone PhD-holders whose schooling was wholly in French quite regularly make mistakes with this kind of agreement. This is especially common when the sentence is long and/or convoluted (As a result, the writer loses track of the nature of the object of a given verb).
Makes perfect sense. Thanks, Etienne!
On reflection, most of the French-language grammars I have read that routinely use just “objet” are of West African languages where verbs don’t agree with anything. (Also, they tend to have been actually written by Germans …)
most anglophones, even those with top marks in English writing courses, are painfully ignorant of English grammatical terminology.
This was the frequent complaint of my Latin master, back in the early 1970’s: he had to teach English grammar/terminology in order to (‘ut’ + infinitive) motivate the inflections.
And indeed despite my English Language ‘O’ Level grade C, I had only a vaguest of ideas what distinguished Direct from Indirect Objects.
I mean, of course I knew that acronyms were a thing in French — SNCF, FLN, and all that — but only for titles, not random collections of words.
In my experience, modern everyday French positively abounds in acronyms. More so than modern everyday English or German. The French seem to love acronyms, and by no means just for titles; they also frequently use them for technical or specialized terminology. But—and this is perhaps what really distinguishes French from English and German in this respect—the French then use those acronymized jargon terms as everyday words. For example, a commonly used word for homeless is SDF (sans domicile fixe), a QCM is a multi-choice quiz, CP (cours préparatoire) is first grade at school, subsidized/social housing is HLM, a mountain bike is a VTT… you get the picture.
Syntactic differences between direct and indirect objects in English are mostly either subtle or non-existent. Either sort of object can generally be made the subject of a passive-voice sentence, for example. One difference is that e.g. “A gave B the C” can be recast as “A gave the C to B” but there isn’t an obvious periphrastic recasting of B available.
But of course this kvetching by L2 teachers ignores the fact (well-established by Scientific Linguistics, to which all honor etc.) that generally no one actually needs to learn how to explicitly describe the grammar of their L1 – ordinary native speakers can speak perfectly grammatically with “only” a tacit knowledge of the rules they are following and be entirely unable to explain what it is they’re doing, or what jargon-labels to affix to various grammatical roles and phenomena occurring in the discourses they are uttering. If you go far enough back, a “grammar school” was generally one that taught Latin grammar to L1 Anglophones.
Hat: I (Native French speaker who was mostly schooled in French) would have recognized it as such instantly, and I have never heard it pronounced as anything other than the names of the letters (i.e. /seode/).
Thanks, that’s exactly what I wanted to know!
Either sort of object can generally be made the subject of a passive-voice sentence, for example.
This is actually a pretty unusual feature of English. Not that many languages can make an indirect object into a passive subject.
But I don’t think the difference between direct and indirect objects is particularly subtle in English, still less nonexistent; for example, if a verb has both a direct and indirect object, the indirect object must come first:
“I gave the man that book.”
“I gave that book the man.”
This is no more subtle than subjects preceding and objects following the verb.
Kusaal, like English, makes no distinction of form between direct and indirect objects, but it’s still straightforward enough to tell them apart (except in a few edge cases.) And, as in English, if a verb has both a direct and indirect object, the indirect has to come first.
Kusaal is more into indirect objects than English: almost any kind of verb can take one, including e.g. “exist.”
Would you like me to prefix “I gave that book the man” with an asterisk?
Who’s to say that book might not appreciate being given the man?
But in any event my broader point remains that native-speaker Anglophones can generally handle ditransitive verbs just fine without being able to explain what they’re doing or affix labels like indirect v. direct. If the way passives can work in English is unusual cross-linguistically, we don’t need to know that either, because what we do seems perfectly natural to us.
Yes, judging by what Etienne says above, the difference is that in French, the direct/indirect distinction is significantly less intuitive for L1 speakers, no doubt because the relevant agreement rules are pretty unintuitive in any case, and moreover often don’t actually affect the actual pronunciation, only the spelling. (It’s like Germans having to learn formal Grammar to know when to capitalise Nouns, only much worse.)
Would it be a fair guess that the spelling differences in French reflect long-ago pronunciation differences (from an era when the distinctions might have been more intuitive to Francophones) that were subsequently eroded away?
Atlantic cod is Atlantic. Baltic Sea and White Sea, but not Black, Caspian or Mediterranean.
Exactly. Also, everything Nat Shockley said about acronyms.
Silent plural -s does*, and so do the silent verb endings; but this particular one was introduced from Italian after the pronunciation difference had vanished (with a few exceptions like sg. fait = m. pl. faits but f. pl. faites).
* That’s another that routinely trips well-educated native speakers up. I’ve found tons of such mistakes in the blog of a comparative-historical linguist, and one in a book by a member of the académie Goncourt.
I probably should have phrased it as “the body of water closest to the IE Urheimat was not one in which cod were found.”
the reality that most anglophones, even those with top marks in English writing courses, are painfully ignorant of English grammatical terminology. This is unsurprising: unlike French spelling, English spelling does not require any understanding of grammatical relations within a sentence).
That may be true—I can’t think of an exception—but in many cases, standard word choice does depend on an understanding of grammatical relations. Thus it is or would be useful to say that in standard English “fewer” goes with count nouns and “less” goes with mass or non-count nouns, or that “lay” is transitive and “lie” is intransitive (or “lay” is causative and “lie” is inchoative, ha ha), or that “run” is present tense and past participle and “ran” is past tense, etc..
I get the impression that France, with a national school curriculum, has a standard grammatical terminology for French, and only linguists (if anyone) would use anything else. As I hinted above, I get the impression that this is not true in the U.S.
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By the way I’m pretty sure I was taught direct and indirect objects in my public elementary school. I can’t estimate how many of my classmates knew it a week later or when they graduated from high school.
Yes, judging by what Etienne says above, the difference is that in French, the direct/indirect distinction is significantly less intuitive for L1 speakers, no doubt because the relevant agreement rules are pretty unintuitive in any case, and moreover often don’t actually affect the actual pronunciation, only the spelling.
I’d think that L1 French speakers get lui/leur versus le(s) right 100% of the time. In that case the problem is that many don’t apply their intuition to number and gender agreement of past participles.
@Jerry F.: The fact that it is unnecessary to teach L1 Anglophone students the grammar of English certainly doesn’t mean that K-12 schools don’t purport to do so to varying extents. Although the fact that it is unnecessary may be a factor in why they often don’t do so particularly well, because there’s no particularly obvious variation in the output (i.e. fluency of the students) strongly correlated with variation in the input (thoroughness or competence of the instruction).
You can’t in standard English use “fewer” with mass nouns but “less” goes fine with both count nouns and mass nouns. Unless you have the misfortune to be in a school or other institution run by authoritarian crackpots who make false claims about English grammar and you find it politic to indulge their false claims.
This is of course an affirmatively negative feature of having explicit instruction in English grammar: students who actually pay attention are at serious risk of being taught false things and thus potentially coming out of their schooling less well-informed about their native language than would have been the case if the school had just taken a benign-neglect approach to the topic.
Atlantic cod are sometimes found in the Mediterranean, but not in the massive numbers of the North Atlantic.
I learned English grammatical terminology in 7th grade, but IIRC I had no real idea what it was for till I took Latin in 9th grade.
@J. W. B.: You’re right that people disagree on what English counts as standard. But if you don’t like my “less” and “fewer” example, what about the others? Is “He had to lay down” standard? “My dog got ran over”? Or “There’s so much things you can talk about” (from iWeb)? I’m saying native English say some things that are non-standard, and teaching them grammatical terminology might help them learn the standard forms.
Although the fact that it is unnecessary may be a factor in why they often don’t do so particularly well, because there’s no particularly obvious variation in the output (i.e. fluency of the students) strongly correlated with variation in the input (thoroughness or competence of the instruction).
Got a citation? And are you talking about fluency in their vernacular or in the standard dialect of their country?
@jf
All other versions* of this song I could find on Youtube have been corrected by grammar (should that be grandma?) Nazis:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=9eE2PbYroJI
* except the version for kiddies, which for some reason has only the music and no text.
In that case the problem is that many don’t apply their intuition to number and gender agreement of past participles.
Indeed. That is why I was talking about agreement. The rules for that (a) are not at all intuitive* and (b) more often than not, only actually affect the spelling. In the face of such obstacles, intuition is not so helpful, no matter how much you may possess.
* They are part of the French national project to make French (much) more complicated than Latin. This is most overt in French irregular verbs, but the real landmines are scattered throughout the syntax. French spelling is the easy bit.
@PP: I happen to know, by personal communication, that grandmas of even mildly repressive tendencies censor the entire song.
@DE: OK, sorry I misread what you wrote.
I suspect I never got to a lot of those landmines.
@Jerry F.: I do not believe the deprecated use of “lay” in “he had to lay down” is a result of confusion of tenses that couldthus be addressed by more explicit instruction about tenses and what to label them. Rather, that’s what you might call an implicitly reflexive or pseudo-middle-voice intransitive extension of the transitive verb “to lay.” To lie is to lay yourself down. Lay = cause to lie, and those who lie have generally caused themselves to do so, e.g. lain themselves down. The way you check this is by noting that “he had to set down” instead of “sit down” is the parallel deprecated/rustic usage, because you would not, in fact, expect a rustic speaker to say “he had to sat down.”
I don’t personally think at least in a U.S. context that schools (by which I mean, publicly-funded schools of the sort you get in trouble with the truancy authorities if you don’t attend) should as a general matter penalize native speakers of so-called non-standard varieties of English for speaking (or writing) their own native language variety. If they want to offer optional electives in how to code-switch into the so-called standard variety, that’s a different issue. But penalization of speakers of other varieties of English covers a wide range of topics, relatively few of which are grammatical. My eighth grade English teacher, for example, was obsessed with deprecating a handful of shibboleth-like variant pronunciations with undesirable geographical or social-class associations. I don’t know what benefit was achieved by her obsession. I assume she would have e.g. deprecated use of negative concord, but she didn’t go on and on and on about it.
Now, writing by contrast is not a natural/hard-wired human activity the way speaking is, and English orthography is in many respects not all that intuitive. So that’s something that needs to be somewhat self-consciously learned in order to be fluently deployed, and in-school instruction of children is one way (not the only way) to do that.
On “less/fewer”:
Kusaal quantifiers work exactly like English with respect to mass vs count, viz you can’t use a count quantifier with a mass noun, but you can use a mass quantifier with either a mass or a count noun.
Given that Kusaal and English are probably not all that close genetically (English not being Scandi-Congo), I wonder if some sort of universal is lurking in all this?
It might just be one of those Greenberg-type “marked tendency” universals. Kusaal actually does have some mass quantifiers that can’t be used with count nouns, but that seems to be a consequence of other selectional restrictions, as with e.g. fiin “a little (liquid.)”
@DE: I really don’t know that much about Welsh but one thing I (think I) do know is that quite a lot of botanical/zoological thingies referred to with count nouns in English are referred to with mass nouns in Welsh (with the possibility of picking out a single bit of the mass via a singulative construction). Does this marked-tendency pseudo-universal shared by English and Kusaal also manifest itself in Welsh?
Yes, Welsh too, I think (so far as a bit of vague introspection can tell.)
The thing about nouns like derwen “oak”, plural derw is very often misinterpreted. Derw is not a mass noun and derwen is just a singular, not a singulative. That may be the historical origin of such pairs (though I suspect it’s not so simple*), but that has no bearing on the synchronic position. Taking it that way is confusing form with function, like saying “sheep” in “many sheep” is a mass noun.
It’s not just plants and animals: there’s plentyn “child”, plant “children” … seren “star”, plural sêr …
* For example, a number of animal names have added a plural suffix derived from a Latin collective in -atus to the original stem and then resingularised it with -yn or -en, like pysgodyn “fish.” The old pysg turns up in set expressions and sometimes just as pl “fish” in older texts.
Ha, this reminds me of the time when capitalization of Nouns was abolished in Denmark. It was thought that it would improve grades by quite a lot (and so it did, reportedly). There are many corner cases, and some of those are arbitrarily decided. I spent the night reading an old talk on the subject (19th century stuff). Quite a lot of venom spewed back and forth, but it happened eventually. And it seems to me that maybe this is the sort of thing that the Académie Française should get rid of. It’ll be a long haul, but like the Nouns in Danish, it should be doable if the parties agree.
This Grandma business is absolutely hilarious, this page dedicated to the song freely mixes “ran” and “run” without even noticing the inconsistency.
@J. W. B.: I didn’t say that “lay” versus “lie” should be explained with tenses, though “lay” as the past tense of “lie” doesn’t make it any easier. I suggested one of the grammatical terms you used (“transitive”), and I have no problems with the others. But my point was that grammatical terms can be useful for people learning the standard usage. That applies whether they’re learning it by choice or they’re being taught it against their will in the belief that someday they’ll be glad they were. On that subject, all I’m going to say now is that I’m not in favor of telling native speakers that their and their families’ usages are ignorant, wrong, bordering on insane, etc.
Digressing to causative and inchoative verbs, I agree that “lay” for “lie” is like “set” for “sit” (and “fall a tree”), but “raise (up)” for “rise” is the opposite.
Let’s not forget the maybe still non-standard British “We were sat in the front row” (AmE not “set” but “seated”, of course—or does “We were sat” just mean “We were sitting”?)
“Does it lay flat when you lie it down, or does it wobble?” From here.
All other versions* of this song I could find on Youtube have been corrected by grammar (should that be grandma?) Nazis:
“She got ran over” doesn’t sound non-standard to me, just jarringly wrong. Is it regional? But more importantly, the “ æ” vowel doesn’t work in the chorus, it’s too long. The “ ʌ” vowel sounds much better there.
This was the frequent complaint of my Latin master, back in the early 1970’s: he had to teach English grammar/terminology in order to (‘ut’ + infinitive) motivate the inflections.
It’s a known problem in foreign-language pedagogy here in the U.S., and there are even some well-trod solutions. Back when I team-taught Russian language to American English speakers, one of our standard textbooks was the Edwina Cruse English Grammar for Students of Russian, which our students found pretty useful!
Incidentally, my own Rivette ranking would start with Céline et Julie, OUT 1 (the full, Noli me tangere version), and La Belle Noiseuse; when he’s good, he’s really damned good. Godard, though, I just can’t seem to get into.
@JWB, JF:
I do not believe the deprecated use of “lay” in “he had to lay down” is a result of confusion of tenses… an implicitly reflexive or pseudo-middle-voice intransitive extension of the transitive verb “to lay.”… Lay = cause to lie… “he had to set down” instead of “sit down” is the parallel deprecated/rustic usage…
hmm. i agree about it not being a confusion of tenses, or possible to “solve” through grammatical education – but i’d explain it rather differently. ever since being introduced to the yiddish verbs ליגן | lign [to lie] and לײגן | leygn [to lay]*, i’ve assumed that the english “lie”/”lay” situation was the result of an incompletely fused (presumably cognate) doublet. i’d certainly say that the deprecated-by-some interchangeability of “sit”/”set” is about some english lects having partially fused two verbs that are kept distinct in other lects (in particular, higher-prestige ones), and (in north america, at least) the lects most often associated with that fusion also having the “PIN/PEN” merger.
.
* as concisely translated/defined by refoyl finkel. neither, of course, to be confused with לײַגן | laygn [to tell a falsehood], much less לוגן | lugn** [to lurk].***
** /lign/ in more southerly lects, though still distinct in its participle, gelugt/geligt, where lign has gelegn/geleygn and leygn has geleygt/gelaygt. yiddish lects do love to make things sound like other things in other yiddish lects, but they do okay at keeping things distinct internally.
*** not to even mention hypothetical *lagn, *legn, *logn, *loygn.
unrelatedly, my immediate response to the question about “l’importance du cod” was to look across the room to a postcard on my wall, made by a fellow-new-englander friend, that says “cod be with you” (it was part of a series).
I used to have a t-shirt which said ‘cod move in mysterious ways’.
@PlasticPaddy: The first recorded version of the song had the prescriptively correct “run over,” so it’s no surprise that version of the lyrics predominates. I’m not sure why Alice in Chains decided to use “ran over” instead.
@Jerry Friedman: That British sense of sat (which I was largely unaware of at the time) was previously discussed here. It’s intermixed with a bunch of other interesting topics as well, such as a possible mention of a written tablet in Homer; and there is a link to an earlier discussion of the parallel formation with stood, featuring our late friend AJP Crown.
Ran/run:
The isles of Greece! the isles of Greece
Where burning Sappho loved and sung,
Where grew the arts of war and peace,
Where Delos rose, and Phoebus sprung!
I don’t know what the English language is coming to.
Grandma would certainly have disapproved of the author.
Re “got ran over,” wiktionary has, as its sense 3 of “ran”: “(nonstandard, colloquial) past participle of run,” with examples back to 1731,.
English strong verbs are often a mess because they started off with a bunch of different patterns (coherent if considered in isolation) and then many of them have partially shifted away from their earlier paradigms under the sway of various (false?) analogies and pressures to level, leading to even further unpredictability. I would be curious to see the results of fieldwork as to whether there are identifiable communities of native speakers who always use “ran” as the participle versus it being a quasi-nonce variant that no one uses completely consistently but that some folks stumble into with some predictable frequency, due to failure to have completely internalized a counterintuitive pattern and then getting variable results when they try to re-deduce the pattern on the fly.
The conjugation of “to run” is particularly historically messy because the starting point itself became unstable and shifted in a way that destroyed the transparency of the original pattern. Back in Anglo-Saxon days the infinitive was “rinnan,” with “(ge)runnen” as the past participle. Then in middle English the infinitive became “rennen,” perhaps due to interference from the ON cognate, and then things got even weirder as the centuries went on. In German you still have present “ich rinne” then preterit “ich rann” and then perfect “ich bin geronnen.” If only English had managed to maintain “rin/ran/run” as a perfect parallel to “ring/rang/rung” …
But to get back to the discussion w/ Jerry, which analysis is the more plausible one for why some speakers would say “got ran”?
A. These speakers do not understand that in the “get VERBed” passive construction you need to use the past participle rather than the simple past (and of course for all weak verbs plus some percentage of strong verbs it doesn’t seem to matter because the forms are identical).
B. These speakers tacitly understand (and follow) that syntactic rule perfectly well, but have a non-standard take on what the past participle of the particular VERB actually is.
I wrote: I agree that “lay” for “lie” is like “set” for “sit” (and “fall a tree”), but “raise (up)” for “rise” is the opposite.
What I said about “fall” and “raise” was backwards. “It raised up and hissed” is like “He had to lay down”, and “Be careful when you fall a tree” is the opposite.
have a non-standard take on what the past participle of the particular VERB actually is.
This seems more likely given the number of speakers who apparently say “I have ran a marathon”.
In Grandma’s case though euphony dictates the verb form in that song, much as, conversely, the grammatically correct “lie lady lie” doesn’t work at all.
I used to have a t-shirt which said ‘cod move in mysterious ways’.
Nice; I propose as an alternative “cod move in mysterious waves.”
To make perhaps unnecessarily explicit something that was implicit in an earlier statement and then implied again in my A v. B comment of 7:58 am, that native speakers typically (absent biological/neurological deficits etc.) acquire complete fluency in the *grammar* of their native language without any formal instruction does *not* mean they acquire complete or perfect mastery of that language’s *lexicon.* The lexicon is by contrast to the grammar somewhat open-ended and arbitrarily large and full of random word-specific contingencies regarding pronunciation, semantic scope, conjugation/declension of irregular verbs/nouns etc etc that don’t smoothly follow from a limited set of patterns that can be learned close to perfectly and mastered tacitly/intuitively w/o necessarily being able to explain them.
@Vanya: euphony aside I wonder if there’s a difference in semantic nuance between “lay” and “lie” other than formality/standardness of register. “Laying in bed” to my ear can more easily carry (although it need not – it depends on context) an implicature of sprawling invitingly across the bed and signalling a potential interest in sex, whereas “lying in bed” is more consistent with just feeling tired or sick. The first-person narrator in the Dylan song does not want the lady he’s addressing to go to sleep immediately!
@J. W. B re A and B.: I assume you’re talking about syntactic rules of the standard language.
Both sound plausible to me. As Vanya said, the question can be addressed empirically, and I’d add that I wouldn’t be surprised if the answer differed between individuals.
There’s at least one other possibility, with two subpossibilities (suppossibilities?):
C. The given speaker is not consistent.
C1. The speaker uses the available forms (which may include non-standard ones—I think “runned” is vanishingly rare, but there are such things as “tooken”) indiscriminately.
C2. The speaker uses one form or another depending on circumstances, such as their judgement of appropriate register. I’d guess this is the least common.
@Vanya: “She got ran over” doesn’t sound non-standard to me, just jarringly wrong. Is it regional?
Without actually trying to check, I’d guess that it can be heard in all parts of the U.S. and Canada from rural, suburban, and urban speakers. It’s probably more common in some places than others, though.
Incidentally, my own Rivette ranking would start with Céline et Julie, OUT 1 (the full, Noli me tangere version), and La Belle Noiseuse; when he’s good, he’s really damned good.
Yes indeed. I have every expectation of loving OUT 1, but I haven’t managed to see it yet.
Quite apart from lexicon, where variation among L1 speakers is obvious, perfectly normal L1 speakers also vary in their grasp of the less common byways of syntax (quite apart from any prescriptive shibboleths taught to you by misguided schoolteachers.)
I read a convincing paper on this topic (unfortunately can’t remember who by – Geoffrey Pullum?) The Chomskyan dogma that all normal speakers acquire all of the syntax of their L1 by N years of age is based on the restriction of “syntax” to the sort of thing that Chomskyans count as syntax, and ignoring all inconvenient counterexamples. In more plausible theories (like Construction Grammar), syntax is not some indivisible thing that you either have or lack: it’s something you pick up bit by bit, along with lexicon (not necessarily stopping at some arbitrary point in childhood.)
@Jerry F.: Is there a well-studied variety of English (w/o getting into English-adjacent pidgins or creoles) where there a passive construction with get+VERBFORM and the appropriate VERBFORM is *not* the past participle? Some “non-standard” varieties do have syntactic differences, e.g. negative concord or double modals, or copula deletion etc. But doing passives differently is not one I can recall encountering. I suppose in the most uptight register of standard English the “get VERBed” approach to passives may itself be deprecated as frightfully informal.
To David E.’s point, I suppose languages vary in how many “less common byways” their syntax has and how often in various discourse contexts one might want to either generate or understand an utterance using a syntactic construction sufficiently off-beat that many native speakers may not have quite mastered it. There are also cultural factors, e.g. I am told that in formal written French various syntactic constructions are used that are essentially never used in speech these days, even formal-register speech by the poshest speakers, but that’s less the case in English.
I have encountered people using every possible combination of ran and run as the past and past participle of the verb run. That means using principle parts:
A True Englishman knows that the verb is actually irn, anyway.
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/iernan#Old_English
Metathesis aside, the Standard English present “run” is a Ghastly Solecism, arising from confusing the present and past participle. Right-thinking prescriptivists say “rin.” (I see that JWB, whose credentials as arbiter elegantiae are surely beyond question, has anticipated me here. I rest my case.)
@J. W. B.: @Jerry F.: Is there a well-studied variety of English (w/o getting into English-adjacent pidgins or creoles) where there a passive construction with get+VERBFORM and the appropriate VERBFORM is *not* the past participle? Some “non-standard” varieties do have syntactic differences, e.g. negative concord or double modals, or copula deletion etc. But doing passives differently is not one I can recall encountering.
I see, I was thinking of individuals’s rules, and you were thinking of communities’ rules.
To amplify Brett’s comment, it’s typical of AAVE to use the same form for past tense and past participle. For some verbs, the form used is the standard past tense, for some it’s the standard past participle; for some, the choice depends on the individual.
https://cdt.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/Outline_of_AAVE_grammar___Jack_Sidnell_2002_1_Afr.pdf
In such a community, there’s no point in distinguishing past tense from past participle.
I don’t know whether there are communities or individuals who typically say “It was/got ran over” but “I’ve run farther than that,” or vice-versa. Heck, for all I know there could be people who say “I’ve ran marathons” but “I shouldn’t have run.”
I suppose in the most uptight register of standard English the “get VERBed” approach to passives may itself be deprecated as frightfully informal.
It wouldn’t have been allowed where I worked in the early ’90s.
In German you still have present “ich rinne”
Although you would have to be a water course or a liquid to say that.
It did occur to me in citing Kusaal fiin “a little (liquid}” as a mass quantifier that cannot be used with count nouns (above), that you probably could use it for persons who happened to be liquid.
That means “flow in small quantities”.
The “feet, do your stuff” verb you’re thinking of is rennen, rannte, gerannt – historically the causative of rinnen. Complete with Rückumlaut and /e/, as opposed to /ɛ/, in dialects like mine.
…though the standard avoids rennen as too emphatic and mostly goes for laufen (the cognate of leap, though it’s still a class VII strong verb like in Gothic: lief, gelaufen). Never mind that laufen means “walk” in the whole northern half, or more, of Germany.
…and the fun part is that prefixed forms of laufen can also be substituted for those of rinnen: ausrinnen = auslaufen “run out of a leaking container”.
Whoa. That looks like it’s from North Bavarian!
If one believes what one reads on the internet, modern German “rinnen” is cognate with Old English “rinnan” even if the semantic details have diverged, and it’s the cognate I’m interested in for illustration of the relevant ablaut pattern regardless of semantics. Although if it’s been displaced in (some varieties of?) Standard Modern German by the related (but weak in its conjugation) causative to mean the “feet, do your stuff” sense, that’s an interesting parallel to the lay-for-lie, set-for-sit substitution that is deprecated in Standard Modern English as a rustic/low-class error.
persons who happened to be liquid
*racks SFnal memory, comes up with nothing*
laufen (the cognate of leap)
And “lope”, a word that may still be used here in New Mexico for all I know.
…and the fun part is that prefixed forms of laufen can also be substituted for those of rinnen: ausrinnen = auslaufen “run out of a leaking container”.
Not in my variety of Standard German, where ausrinnen doesn’t exist. There’s the simplex rinnen (as you mentioned, meaning “flow” with an implication of small quantity, and also being a somewhat literary / poetic word), entrinnen “escape” (also literary / poetic, the normal word is entkommen), verrinnen “go by (of time)” and gerinnen “coagulate”. Of these, only entrinnen and verrinnen have a counterpart with laufen, and entlaufen “run away” is normally used for pets or captive wild animals, so can be substituted only in very limited cases, while verlaufen means “proceed”, with events as subject, and the reflexive from means “get lost”, so it has a different meaning from verrinnen.
Perhaps rinnen is more normal in compounds in the South?
Although if it’s been displaced in (some varieties of?) Standard Modern German by the related (but weak in its conjugation) causative to mean the “feet, do your stuff” sense
I’d say at least “most varieties”. I don’t know any where simple rinnen doesn’t mean “flow”; of the the prefixed forms, only the meaning of entrinnen cannot be derived from a meaning “flow”, but only from “run”.
I just remembered that there is also zerrinnen “melt away”, which IMD can only be used figuratively (for money, fame, etc.), while zerlaufen is used for concrete melting (e.g., when that happens with butter).
In summary, in my variety of Standard German rinnen is a literary / poetic word with only a limited number of prefixed forms, which mostly are literary/poetic as well, with the exception of gerinnen, which is the standard technical term for coagulate . As for laufen, it’s an everyday word meaning both “run” and “walk”, and I can’t think of any prefix that it can’t be combined with.
@hans
You can have Mitläufer but not *Gegenläufer (maybe the latter ran so fast they became Gegner).
That’s because there is no verb *gegenlaufen, and the reason for that is that gegen isn’t used as a verbal prefix; you have to use entgegen- or dagegen-. And both entgegenlaufen and dagegenlaufen exist.
@hans
Well gegnenrechnen, gegenbestätigen, but I suppose you would say these are backformed from prefixed nouns (or because rechnen and bestätigen are not verbs of motion/physical action?).
The first, but technically they are valid counterexamples; although that use of gegen as a verbal prefix is limited to a narrow technical sphere. Personally, I only use the nouns, but now that you reminded me, I remember seeing gegenrechnen in the wild.
I also thought a bit and came up with two more examples of verbal prefixes that aren’t used with laufen, the etymological doublets wider- “contra-, gain-” and wieder- “again, back”. Both are used with limited sets of verbs and one could argue that wider- isn’t productive anymore, but technically they are counter-examples. (It goes without saying that both aren’t combined with rinnen in my variety either.)
“flow in small quantities”
As with the English adjective “runny.”
A runny person would not be Jesse Owens, but a person who could take the Kusaal quantifier fiin.
*racks SFnal memory, comes up with nothing*
Same here, which is odd — you’d think the fertile imaginations of sf writers would have come up with such creatures. Some googling turned up Edmond Hamilton’s Outside the Universe, in which cubical spaceships within a comet are operated by liquid aliens.
…Or rather, so says Thomas Lombardo in Science Fiction: the Evolutionary Mythology of the Future, but when I checked the novel itself, I found he’d misremembered:
Ben Aaronovitch’s excellent Rivers of London series prominently features several river goddesses, who, while presenting as more or less human, are implied also to be the rivers in question. Rivers, are, of course, countable, but definitely have liquid properties. The hero’s beloved (Beverley Brook) causes flash-flooding in her catchment area when he upsets her. I have no doubt that she can also trickle if she wishes.
I like that series, too. Do you have any opinion on how correct the (Nigerian?) creole Peter’s mother speaks is? I know from back when I followed Aaronovich on Twitter that he takes pains to source his materials and asks his readers for information on local and linguistic details, but still…
Same as Etienne, I quickly recognized the cod in the title as COD. As a french person, the rule “au passé composé, quand le COD est placé avant le verbe, le participe passé s’accorde en genre et en nombre avec le COD” as been drilled in my head.
However, I disagree with the analysis of Racine’s verses as “vains ornements” and “pleurs” are COI, not COD! Or am I mistaken?
@Hat: Interesting. Having only a read a volume of Hamilton’s short stories, which weren’t bad (I remember liking one called “He That Hath Wings”), I see why people laughed at him.
@DE and Hans: Thanks, I may look for that series. Now I’m wondering whether Goldberry’s mother, the River-Woman, was capable of trickling.
Do you have any opinion on how correct the (Nigerian?) creole Peter’s mother speaks is?
I think it’s Krio, adapted a bit for comprehensibility. She evidently can speak English as well. IIRC, she’s supposed to be ethnically Fulɓe, from Sierra Leone. I’ve never really thought about how plausible her speech is, but it’s never brought me up short with an exasperated snort, which probably means something given that I’m generally very aware of such things.
Beverley’s mother, the (lower) Thames, is Nigerian, if I remember right. Or was … And quite right, too.
On Deep Space Nine, Odo and others of his race are liquid in their resting state.
Beverley’s mother, the (lower) Thames, is Nigerian, if I remember right.
Yes, that’s right, and I got her and Peter’s mother’s origin mixed up.
Zuwiderlaufen “run contrary to” exists, but it’s metaphorical only.
Yes; with and without prefixes it’s colloquial there, rather than literary/poetic. (I’m not sure I knew zerlaufen at all, though what it means is immediately obvious.)
Exactly.
Yes. And there are others… hang has lost its causative in English in the present tense and half-replaced it otherwise (hanged is a mixture); the German cognates got mixed up except arguably in the past tense… and my dialect has replaced “set” by “sit” completely.
Oh, and the cognate of write is reißen “rip, tear”, not its former causative ritzen “scratch lines”…
Germanic causatives are always weak. They also show umlaut where applicable and got their root-final consonants lengthened, but there’s little left of these in English and not a lot in Standard German.
Edmond Hamilton wrote a lot of stuff, much of which is not particularly special. I’ve read a number of his better recommended novels and short stories, and they were entertaining but largely forgettable. His wife was a better writer of science fiction, but produced quite a bit less. Part of the reason for that was that she mostly worked as a screenwriter after about 1960; ironically, the only science fiction film she worked on was her last, The Empire Strikes Back. (Supposedly, little to nothing of her script made it into the film, but she shared the screenwriting credit anyway, since she died working on the project. And that gives me a wonderful humorous trivia question to ask mathematicians and physicists: “Who wrote the first draft of the script for The Empire Strikes Back?”)
I maintain that Star Wars isn’t, and was never meant as, science fiction. It’s a fairytale.
We had sink on LLog recently. German preserves senken “lower” and versenken “sink (transitive)” as well as sinken “sink (intransitive)”.
@David Marjanović: That’s not an uncommon viewpoint, although I don’t personally agree with it. To me, I think it is primarily the trappings that make a work science fiction, and Star Wars certainly has the trappings of the space opera subgenre. Leigh Brackett’s own science fiction writing was more typically in the planetary romance subgenre, but a lot of it is also quite fairy tale like.
I agree with Brett: there are sf Westerns (cowboys replaced by spacemen), sf romances, sf fairy tales, etc. etc., and it doesn’t make sense to say they’re not sf just because they lean on or riff off of other genres.
I mean, there’s so little science in Star Wars. We get robots, target computers, rayguns, hyperspace, Luke’s prosthesis, and that’s it. We don’t even get treknobabble (except the midichlorians later). The science is just part of the background setting (i.e. in space).
I hate to break it to you, but there’s very little science in a lot of sf, from the very beginning. People offended by this have insisted on a distinction between “hard sf” (With Added Science!) and “soft sf” (mushy stuff with women and social ideas); I’m willing to work with that, but not with restricting sf solely to stories with physics and equations.
There is even science fiction which envisages a future in which capitalism is not the final achievement of human economic thought. (And not feudalism, either.) Talk about Speculative Fiction!
I think the thing about Star Wars is that, at least as science fiction, it’s just not very good science fiction. So one is tempted to assign it to a different genre altogether.
(My children, whose judgment is generally reliable, tell me that Andor is pretty good – and actually suitable for adults.)
I think the thing about Star Wars is that, at least as science fiction, it’s just not very good science fiction.
Exactly. I was bowled over (like everyone else) when it came out, but quickly came to resent it when it became apparent that from then on, that was what science fiction would mean.
Fair enough, I looked it up. Click on “The Scale”.
Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann transcends such petty classifications.
There’s no evidence that anyone in the Star Wars universe is literate, and there’s a classical literature, \eg
https://www.vice.com/en/article/womens-healthcare-star-wars/
about the lack of gynecological expertise there too.
As a kid I was impressed by James Blish’s Cities in Flight as a serious attempt to put at least interesting-sounding fake science into his stories.
I actually tend to dislike science fiction that spends too much time on made-up science. I don’t care for the technobabble in Star Trek or the works of van Vogt.
And people in Star Wars can definitely read, although it’s not clear in what alphabet.
Well, as scifi goes both star wars and van vogt are laughable, and the tractor beam reading reminds me of a bone inscribed with apparent runes, who knows what it says. I don’t mean to be contentious but there is a serious interest in science behind a lot of scifi. Phillip Jos\’e Farmer (\eg) on the other hand…
there is a serious interest in science behind a lot of scifi.
That’s what is called hard sf. You are welcome to prefer it.
Heinlein’s `Double Star’ and `Puppet Masters’ (for example) aren’t hard scifi but seem to me much interesting; to me they’re attempts at serious psychological accounts (of something or other…). Similarly for Bester’s `Demolished Man’…
Well, as scifi goes both star wars and van vogt are laughable
Van Vogt’s attempts at philosophy make his science look like Kim Stanley Robinson.
“Hard” science fiction is conventionally allowed a pretty free pass on things like FTL and consciousness uploading. I think it’s not so much the plausibility or otherwise of the “science” as how the pseudoscience links into the action. Or not.
Even the goddamn Force could have been treated in an interesting and consistent manner, perhaps by giving it some plausible-sounding plot-relevant serious weaknesses, if any of the writers had been allowed to write material suitable for grownups. Maybe some of the spin-off novels try. I shall never know.
Asimov’s positronic-brain robots are really basically magic, but the Three Laws are a great plot device.
Never say “never” again… my brother has read some and says there are animals that hunt by using the Force and others that defend themselves by creating bubbles that are devoid of the Force. Alas, no bionics follow. (Imagine switching the Force off and just blasting away with the good blaster by your side…)
Shamelessly stolen by Star Trek – for no particular reason; it is occasionally mentioned that Data has a “positronic matrix”, but it’s never a plot point. You’d think the sheer danger of the antimatter would come up, but no.
I read that as “postironic-brain robots”.
When the human race is beyond irony, the End will truly have come upon us. Perhaps “AI” will indeed then be all that remains …
To me, I think it is primarily the trappings that make a work science fiction,
To me too, including the word “trappings”.
“there is a serious interest in science behind a lot of scifi.”
That’s what is called hard sf.
This too. It’s what the Mohs Scale at TVTropes is missing. In the stories people usually call hard science, the science or technology is supposed to be interesting. Some stories such as “A Canticle For Liebowitz” violate no scientific principles at all but are never called hard SF.
[Still agreeing with Hat] I agree with Brett: there are sf Westerns (cowboys replaced by spacemen)…
In fact, Mom thought Star Wars (1977, called something else now) was an amusing parody of Westerns. (Dad fell asleep. I enjoyed the movie, but I was proud of him anyway.)
It’s what the Mohs Scale at TVTropes is missing TVTropes notes 6 and 7 wave at that
Ah, was I supposed to read the part that says “please read!”?
Thanks, especially Note 7. I’m talking more about the supposed interest of the science than the level of scientific explanation, but the two are related. Note 6 makes a point I completely agree with: that realistic natural science can go with unrealistic psychology etc.
was I supposed to read the part that says “please read!”?
If all else fails, read the manual.
Greg Egan’s Orthogonal series is a great example of (deliberately) impossible science carried through to impeccably logical conclusions, directly relevant to the plot.
He also gives a perfectly plausible picture of the psychology of aliens physiologically completely unlike us (women inevitably die in childbirth: “knowing your mother” is a standard trope in this universe for a logical impossibility.)
His aliens are perhaps a bit too like human beings for total logical consistency, but that is probably inevitable if you’re going to be able to identify with the characters at all, and care about what happens to them.
I started out rather predisposed against it (I like stories with people in them) but was won round. (The first episode involves the heroine’s beloved grandfather exploding, for reasons which are not only tragic but make perfect sense in-universe.)
just in case anyone here hasn’t seen it (seems unlikely), here is chip delany’s review of Star Wars. i was a very enthusiastic (and very young) fan of the original trilogy, but have barely watched anything since The Phantom Menace. i gave the first season of Andor a try and was stunned that the people who’s recommended it to me had been so enthusiastic. it struck me as “what if sam melville had lived to join bob avakian’s party – in space”* (tho i think that may undersell the ‘democratic centralism’** of the Resistance™ portrayed here). a well played agnes-gund-in-space character wasn’t enough to keep me coming back. i hope that later on, cassian has gotten to do like katniss, but i doubt it.
i don’t usually get very bothered by Wrong Hard Science** in sf, but i did have to put down The Ministry of the Future after kim stanley robinson had two characters have a conversation while swimming laps – of breaststroke, no less. i’m still dumbfounded as i type it. but maybe that just means i have a lower tolerance for Wrong Magic in fantasy (the book’s clearly an alternative history of the past as well as the future, given what KSR had to say about switzerland in the few pages i made it through before he went to the pool).
.
* which is about the least interesting thing he could’ve done if he’d lived, and one of the least probable ones, too.
** wrong linguistics is of course a different story.
hasn’t seen it (seems unlikely) …
Are null answers unrequired? No I hadn’t seen the review; but neither have I seen any of the Star Wars franchise. Skimming the review now, I’m feeling confirmed in my judgment.
When it comes to movie ‘special effects’ I think of a raised eyebrow from Anthony Hopkins, an agonised glance from Emma Hopkins. (I recently watched ‘The Remains of the Day’ in a retrospective series.) I think of the spectacular ensemble playing in ‘Last Orders’. I share in the cast being barely able to stay in character in Death of Stalin.
I have watched 2001, and Solaris; I did read some Asimov, have read Zamyatin’s We. But in general if a creative has something to say about the human condition, put it in a human setting. Atwood is beyond my patience.
I hate to break it to you, but there’s very little science in a lot of sf, …
I’d say there’s very little that’s credibly human either. As opposed to (say) Tristram Shandy or Ulysses (Joyce’s or Homer’s) which are over-brimming with entirely believable humans.
Do y’all consider Wells’s The Country of the Blind science fiction?
Ultimately it’s about the human consequences of a fictional disease. Is it that different from the story of a fictional outbreak of a real disease, viz. The Plague?
two characters have a conversation while swimming laps – of breaststroke, no less
How is that implausible? Does the story imply that they are swimming racing speed or just at a leisurely pace? I have had many conversations swimming breaststroke in the lake alongside my wife or friends.
@AntC
Now I am wondering what you read for pleasure as a boy/teenager. Was it nonfiction? Tolkien? Thrillers? Enid Blyton? Agatha Christie? Biggles? It is hard to imagine that you started with Ulysses.
@PP It is hard to imagine that you started with Ulysses.
The first Star Wars movie 1977, even the 2001 movie in 1968 (not that I saw it until ~1971) was long after I started my reading career. I do remember the scene from the Jason and the Argonauts movie 1963 with the fighting skeletons. (My grandfather took me/I was staying with them after returning from Scout Camp, so must have been about 1967. Presumably it was to be educational/cultural.)
I was reading Homer’s Ulysses also around 1971 (Greek Lit in translation ‘O’ Level). Gulliver’s Travels, Tristram Shandy, Lermontov, Zola would have been around then too; A Portrait of the Artist … and then Joyce’s Ulysses a little later.
By ~1967 I’d read (in not necessarily this order) Enid Blyton, Thomas the Tank Engine series, Lone Pine Club, Jennings and Derbyshire, Swallows and Amazons (because I’d taken up messing about in boats), Biggles anon. I was a voracious but uncritical reader. Nonfiction was a lot of Martin Gardner and some Young Engineer’s Weekly/Railway Modeller kinda stuff. Uncritical though I was, I only ever found Tolkien tedious (made several attempts).
Oh! the merits of a decent Public Library (and school library) service.
positronic-brain robots
Shamelessly stolen by Star Trek – for no particular reason; it is occasionally mentioned that Data has a “positronic matrix”, but it’s never a plot point. You’d think the sheer danger of the antimatter would come up, but no.
I guess it’s just an SF meme that was around at the time; the Arkonids (advanced but degenerate alien race that brings FTL spacefaring technology to Earth) in the German Perry Rhodan series (pulp series founded in 1961 and still published weekly today) also had positron-based computers.
Wiki advises me that “Financial disputes with the German publishers led to the cancellation of the American translation [of the Perry Rhodan series] in 1979.” I do have a vague recollection from probably around ’77 or ’78 of seeing those cheap paperback translations in the racks of stores where you could buy cheap/pulpy SF paperbacks. If I read any, they didn’t make much of a lasting impression, and I think subsequent cohorts of American adolescents were largely deprived of the opportunity. I think one of the stores I am vaguely remembering also had an inventory of cheap/pulpy mystery paperbacks where their foreign feature was translations of various of Simenon’s Inspector Maigret books, which may have aged better.
I’d say there’s very little that’s credibly human either.
Sorry, but since you don’t actually read sf, your opinion is worthless. “I did read some Asimov” — that’s like saying “I can analyze religious movies because I saw The Ten Commandments.” It’s amazing to me how eager people are to pontificate about stuff they know nothing about. But it does give me another chance to quote Robert Conquest’s immortal distych:
I looked up Sam Melville; improbably, I knew about Bob Avakian.
I didn’t know it existed.
(I did have enough of a classical education to have watched all three Star Wars trilogies, minus Episode III – but I did watch most of Backstroke of the West… – plus Rogue One.)
If I read any, they didn’t make much of a lasting impression, and I think subsequent cohorts of American adolescents were largely deprived of the opportunity.
In Germany it was quite big; I know that my dad and several other men of his generation were big fans, and my brother and I read the stories when they started publishing them in hardcover and my dad bought these books out of nostalgia. We were in our early-to-mid teens and quite into the series; I stopped reading it at some point in my mid-twenties. I have no idea whether today’s readers are mostly lifelong fans or whether they also have a readership among today’s young people.
Backstroke of the West
Much the best Star Wars movie. No idea why they dubbed it into into Lucasian for the cinema release. Very poor translation, too. Misses all the nuances of the original.
but since you don’t actually read sf, …
I didn’t list the sf I tried (or at least read the reviews) but gave up on. You can rapidly assess how much humanity there’s not going to be.
Those who’ve put their time into reading sf but not (say) Tristram Shandy or watching Merchant Ivory movies can’t claim to have any worthwhile opinion of how sf stacks up against other genres.
Anyhoo the world’s suffering from a much bigger gulf with those who never read anything.
Those who’ve put their time into reading sf but not (say) Tristram Shandy or watching Merchant Ivory movies can’t claim to have any worthwhile opinion of how sf stacks up against other genres.
What about those who’ve put their time into reading sf and (say) Tristram Shandy and watching Merchant Ivory movies? Can we claim to have any worthwhile opinion of how sf stacks up against other genres?
Look, if you’ve tried it and don’t like it, that’s fine. I feel the same way about fish. But I don’t go around dissing fish and saying anyone who likes salmon obviously doesn’t understand the virtues of a good steak.
sf is worse than salmon (and many other sorts of tasty fish) and Tristram Shandy, but no worse than Merchant Ivory movies. Now that I have spoken ex cathedra, you can all move on to your next dispute rather than belaboring this one further.
Merchant-Ivory movies are very pretty.
…and you know the saying that Star Wars should really have been called Stars War? In German it was: Krieg der Sterne – “war of the stars”. In modern times, however, the franchise is just called Star Wars because the target audience is reasonably assumed to know that much English.
sf is worse than salmon (and many other sorts of tasty fish) and Tristram Shandy, but no worse than Merchant Ivory movies.
Supposedly, during one of the demonstrations in San Francisco against the Gulf War in 1990–1991, one sign read, “War is worse than bad thrash-funk.”
@Y: that seems confusingly ambiguous. Certainly https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_(band) is a lot better than bad thrash-funk.
Fiction (all of it, I make no pettifogging fine distinctions) is better than cauliflower, but worse than profiteroles.
JWB: I mis-capitalized the quote. The original was no doubt all caps, which would have reduced that ambiguity.
@DM: The Country of the Blind is a lovely and melancholy short story. I hear that in a later version Wells tacked on a dramatic ending to it, but I haven’t read it. It probably spoiled it.
Aepyornis Island is another one of his teetering on SF in the same vein. I like his light touch with regard to unreality.
Not exactly “light touch”, but the great thing about “Mars versus the Home Counties” (published as War of the Worlds in the US, I believe) is just how grounded the action is in real places (and believable people.)
“Proper” novelists generally write bad science fiction, because they don’t really get the genre and greatly underestimate its particular challenges; their work then duly gets embarrassingly overpraised by literary critics who don’t get the genre either, and think it must be “good science fiction” because it resembles the sort of thing they do get.
Wells is an exception.
those who’ve put their time into reading sf and (say) Tristram Shandy and watching Merchant Ivory movies …
… I envy. You’ll note my reading habits got severely curtailed as soon as I started into a career — which wasn’t literature-adjacent. And then there’s all those countries to visit and mountains to walk up and bodies of water to sail across …
What I was responding to was rozele’s presumption that “anyone here” would have followed the whole Star Wars saga, and gone so far as to read lengthy reviews. From others’ comments, I’m fairly confident I used my time better.
saying anyone who likes … obviously doesn’t understand …
I don’t think, BTW, I said anything disparaging or otherwise about _readers_ of sf, or made claims about what they do or don’t understand; I commented only on my own reactions. OK I’ll cease belabouring.
I think rozele was deploying Hattic Irony.
It is bad form in the Hattery to imply that a fellow-Hatter might not (for example) be familiar with the religious aspects of the reign of Leo the Isaurian, or that they might not know the date of the Meiji Restoration, or some such similar piece of knowledge common to all educated persons. It would be like providing a translation of a familiar line from Horace – unforgivably patronising.
Exactly. (As every schoolboy knows.)
@Vanya: i’m impressed, never having seen it done or attempted! (though i don’t spend much time in the pool) it’s been five years, so i’m not entirely certain of the tenor of the conversation, but i do find speaking at a KSR-standard-wordiness level deeply implausible while swimming in any stroke where water comes in contact with the mouth (a very leisurely backstroke, maybe).
@DE: what you said! (about me, and about “proper” novelists, both)
@DM: i find sam melville fascinating – he’s very underestimated and misrepresented, to the extent he’s remembered at all.
FWIW, Danish has rinde/randt/rundet of small watercourses, descent (which is where the pptc. is often found: Han er rundet af en god familie, which I have to admit that I used to understand as a form of runde ~ ‘make round’), and time, all obsolescent.
“Feet, do your stuff” now uses the causative, like German: rende/rendte/rendt, bog standard weak verb. No causative shade remaining, so maybe it was an iterative; it retains a sense of ‘running busily’.
Whereas løbe/løb/løbet is more neutral, and has all the senses of rinde except for descent (which would now be han kommer fra en god familie). In adjectival use, the old strong pptc. is still somewhat alive: det forløbne år. But I have no doubt that as a matter of active production this will become det forløbede år in the lifetime of my offspring (unless it fossilizes completely, which is not unthinkable).
Normally, when people just swim, it’s breaststroke with the head kept out of the water the whole time. In the long run, that hurts, and it tends to mean the whole body is oblique enough to create more drag, so actual athletes stick their head into the water for every stroke or resort to crawling altogether; but that’s not the default meaning of “swimming” to me.
My feeling is that “The Country of the Blind” is counted as SF because it’s by Wells. If (say) Poe had written it, it would be filed under “Horror”.
Another story that I don’t see much of a reason for to be classified as “SF” than rather, say, as “weird tales”, is “Benjamin Button”, which I first encountered in a collection of “Cassical SF stories”.