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<div class="moz-cite-prefix">On 6/2/2022 10:16 AM, Will Martin
wrote:<br>
</div>
<blockquote type="cite"
cite="mid:5DDB418F-B4B0-4D5F-A71A-25AA1940E84E@gmail.com">
<div class="">In elementary school, I was taught that “A sentence
is a group of words representing a complete thought.”</div>
<div class=""><br class="">
</div>
<div class="">Note: That was complete bullshit. The boundaries of
a sentence are arbitrary, and depending on the thought, an
entire multi-volume book might be required to represent it, or
one sentence might convey a bunch of complete thoughts. I mean,
what is a complete thought, anyway?</div>
</blockquote>
<p>Here we go again with the effing <i>arbitrary</i> thing again.
The boundaries of a sentence are not arbitrary; writers and
linguists have been perfecting the ideas and techniques of writing
for millennia. I mentioned your ideas about what the word <i>arbitrary</i>
means to a bunch of English lit types, and they thought you were
nuts.<br>
</p>
<p>"A sentence is a group of words representing a complete thought"
is not the full picture, but it isn't complete bullshit, either.
It is a good starting point for writing. A complex sentence may
represent a complex thought, full of subtlety and conditions, but
it's all still tied together as a unit. A "single thought" may
contain multiple distinct concepts.</p>
<p>You wanna see a complex sentence that is, in fact, a single
thought? Here's the first line to <i>The War of the Worlds:</i></p>
<blockquote>
<p>No one would have believed in the last years of the nineteenth
century that this world was being watched keenly and closely by
intelligences greater than man’s and yet as mortal as his own;
that as men busied themselves about their various concerns they
were scrutinised and studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a
man with a microscope might scrutinise the transient creatures
that swarm and multiply in a drop of water.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>What's the complete thought? It is it is unbelievable that our
world could be watched by an intelligence more advanced than ours.
It describes the detachment with which we were being watched, when
we were being watched, sets up mankind as someone who also watches
lesser beings. All of the details are in support of the thought.
That's why it's "complete."</p>
<p>Can writers do a poor job of this? Sure. What you learned in
school was not just linguistics; it was a simplified guide to
writing <i>good</i> English.</p>
<p>In Klingon, the situation is rather different. We can't pile on
so many clauses and still claim to be writing good Klingon. But if
we're translating <i>The War of the Worlds</i> or other texts
contemporary with it, when it was popular to build very long
sentences in English, we must not only translate ideas, but we
must also change the complete thoughts of the English into smaller
thoughts in Klingon. And if we wish to preserve the point of the
text, we must fine a way to tie those smaller Klingon thoughts
together in ways that go beyond simple translation. I've had a go
at translating this line into Klingon, and while I can translate
individual concepts into Klingon sentences, making sure they all
tie together to <i>mean</i> the same thing as the original is
quite a different undertaking.<br>
</p>
<p>Good Klingon is structured very differently than good English.
That doesn't make structure arbitrary; it makes it
language-specific.<br>
</p>
<pre class="moz-signature" cols="72">--
SuStel
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://trimboli.name">http://trimboli.name</a></pre>
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