(no subject)
May. 9th, 2004 09:48 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
which_chickダーズりー氏は、穴あけドリルを製造しているゲラニンゲズ社の社長だ。
Mr. Dursley was a manager for Grunnings, a company that made drills. I'm not entirely sure that I have grounds for setting 穴あけドリルを製造している as a modifier to Grunnings, rather than for Dursley, except that Dursley is a MANAGER and managers don't actually make drills. They manage. I don't know. It just seemed more appropriate to set this to modify Grunnings instead of Dursley.
I've been thinking about the utility of transforming Japanese grammar (which runs very S-O-V) into something that will fit into English (SVO) sentence diagrams that were based on Latin grammar rules (which English doesn't really fit all that well). Then I started looking at some of the transformations that English is twisted into so that it makes sense in the diagrams. (In particular, I'm thinking of the inversion of questions and the padding of "understood" parts of a sentence.) I figure if that's kosher for playing with English grammar, I'm probably allowed to do whatever I like with Japanese grammar. Note to self: Is "grammar" the way that people take and organize words to get meaning? Is grammar what accounts for the fact that we can read "The man killed the bear" and know that the bear is dead, but then we can read "The bear killed the man" and know that there's a dead guy and a live bear at the end of the sentence. I don't know what else it would be, except a grammar thing, to account for the difference in meanings there.
I was enlightened at the opera, but (as with most enlightenment) I could have done without, if only someone (anyone) had bothered to inform me in advance that the music from Carmen would be most familiar to me as the theme music from The Bad News Bears. Nobody needs to discover that in the opening bars of the overture, damn it. Not at eighty dollars a ticket.
Mr. Dursley was a manager for Grunnings, a company that made drills. I'm not entirely sure that I have grounds for setting 穴あけドリルを製造している as a modifier to Grunnings, rather than for Dursley, except that Dursley is a MANAGER and managers don't actually make drills. They manage. I don't know. It just seemed more appropriate to set this to modify Grunnings instead of Dursley.
I've been thinking about the utility of transforming Japanese grammar (which runs very S-O-V) into something that will fit into English (SVO) sentence diagrams that were based on Latin grammar rules (which English doesn't really fit all that well). Then I started looking at some of the transformations that English is twisted into so that it makes sense in the diagrams. (In particular, I'm thinking of the inversion of questions and the padding of "understood" parts of a sentence.) I figure if that's kosher for playing with English grammar, I'm probably allowed to do whatever I like with Japanese grammar. Note to self: Is "grammar" the way that people take and organize words to get meaning? Is grammar what accounts for the fact that we can read "The man killed the bear" and know that the bear is dead, but then we can read "The bear killed the man" and know that there's a dead guy and a live bear at the end of the sentence. I don't know what else it would be, except a grammar thing, to account for the difference in meanings there.
I was enlightened at the opera, but (as with most enlightenment) I could have done without, if only someone (anyone) had bothered to inform me in advance that the music from Carmen would be most familiar to me as the theme music from The Bad News Bears. Nobody needs to discover that in the opening bars of the overture, damn it. Not at eighty dollars a ticket.
