Today, July 22, is World Brain Day
An interesting factoid I came across in a discussion of the translation of the Final Fantasy games on another forum. Since Japanese and English use different word orders (Subject/Object/Verb versus Subject/Verb/Object), when translating interrupted sentences in a game or story the translators often have to guess-from-context or outright make up some of the translation because the original text literally doesn’t exist.
The different sentence structure means that a sentence interrupted halfway through will be missing different parts in Japanese or English. And if nobody wrote down anywhere what the full sentence was originally conceived to be, translators are stuck with making up whatever seems right.
Of course. It is the same when translating German ↔ English or German ↔ Spanish. Not to forget the famous negation (nicht) at the end of the sentence, the one that changes the meaning into the opposite.
It is just unusual that the second half of the sentence does not appear sometime later. But if it happens translators will have to be creative, that is: make it up. What else?
If they do it right nobody will be able to prove that what they made up is not what was meant by the missing part. And it feeds the debate in another forum of nerds! Win - win.
I would hope that, if at all possible, translators would first ask the original writers about what the character was about to said.
Oh, it was obvious when it was pointed out; I’d just never thought of it. It’s a pretty niche situation, after all.
People from Aurora, Illinois apparently cause similar confusion.
The Sponge Bob character Squidward is actually. . . an octopus!
TIL about the Egyptian Tale of Wenamun from Josephine Quinn’s fascinating history of trade routes, How the World Made the West.
It’s one of the oldest known works of true fiction, and certainly comic fiction, as opposed to mythology or parables, in written form several hundred years before the Iliad.
The king of Upper Egypt sends an envoy to the Levant to purchase cedarwood to repair his royal barge. As soon as Wenamun gets to the port of Dor, however, everything begins to go wrong, much like the plot of a Donald Westlake comic caper. The poor guy is robbed, detained, steals to make a getaway, gets tracked down, flees, escapes to Cyprus, and then attacked.
We last see him seeking asylum from a local [Cypriot] queen called Hatbi: “She said to me, ‘Spend the night…’”
The fragmented papyrus ends there. Hot stuff.
Footnote. On Wikipedia it’s called Story of Wenamun where they give a slightly different and more prosaic ending, "And she said to me: “Be at rest,” which has totally different connotations. Quinn - who is the Chair of Ancient History at Cambridge and credentialed up the yin-yang - knows how to tell a story better.
I agree, of course I was heavily into it in the 70s. In fact, me and my partner won (one of the) city championships in 1974.
Scale, scale and scale are false cognates
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Scale, meaning ‘to climb’ is from Latin scala, a ladder.
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Scale, meaning ‘the measuring device’ is from Old Norse skal, the drinking cup, which was used as a measuring tool.
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Scale, meaning ‘dermal plating of reptiles, fish and pangolins’, comes from Old French escale; a shell/husk.
Similarly with the two separate meanings of seal - IIRC one comes from Germanic sources, one from Latinate.
164 years ago today: the first published weather forecast.
The Times weather forecast for 1 August 1861
The temperature in London was to be 62F (16.7C), clear with a south-westerly wind
The temperature in Liverpool was to be 61F, very cloudy with a light south-westerly wind
It was to be overcast in Nairn, Portsmouth and Dover with the latter predicted to hit a pleasant 70F, the same as Lisbon
The forecast also covered Copenhagen, Helder, Brest and Bayonne
The phrasing “was to be” seems very odd to me for a future tense. I’m not sure if this is due to being in Britain, or be in the 1800’s, or a personal usage.
Doesn’t seem all that odd to me as a UK english speaker?
Maybe it was understood to be a contraction of “was expected to be”?
It doesn’t seem odd to me, either (N. Am. speaker)
Of course, this was published in The Times, at the peak of the British Empire.
So if an authoritative source like that says something “is to be”, it bally well better be so!
Or there might be Questions In Parliament…
Is “was to be” the wording of a modern commentator describing the forecast, or were those exact words published?
It’s not totally clear. Skywatcher’s quote is from the article; it’s in a box titled “The Times weather forecast for 1 August 1861” as if it’s a quote of the forecast, but the final line “The forecast also covered Copenhagen, Helder, Brest and Bayonne” suggests that it’s a modern paraphrase of the forecast.
Yes, I’m assuming that it’s a direct quote. If it’s a paraphrase, then never mind.
Must be a modern commentator. The report was on p. 9 of the August 1, 1861 Times, and it was just a table of numbers.
Technically, the numbers weren’t a forecast, but readings taken by various weather stations on the morning of July 31. However, three lines at the bottom did give a forecast of sorts.
General weather probably in the next two days in the–
North – Moderate westerly wind; fine.
West – Moderate southwesterly; fine.
South – Fresh westerly; fine.
Map expert Mark Monmonier has an excellent book covering both the history of weather forecasting and weather mapping, and the distribution of maps called Air Apparent: How Meteorologists Learned to Map, Predict, and Dramatize that goes into detail on early attempts to get them in newspapers.
And for my two cents, “was to be” is perfectly fine English and I agree with @xtenkfarpl that it’s just a shortening of “it was expected to be.” The problem with the wording is that these are past numbers and not future predictions.