From an online source -- further to Tapper´s pluralisation of my "elsewheres".
-- In model theoretical logic, if ´where´ is sub-indexed, how do we allow for JL´s different usages of "elsewhere" to be deictically uniformly allomorphic?
"elsewhat", "Once a respectable English word,
deriving from Old English, "aelleshwat". Unfortunately it died out."
"See also elsewhere, and compare elsewhen (1418), elsewho (1542), elsehow (modern)."
Examples:
"It takes time and effort which might usefully be spent doing elsewhat."
(The Face, Nick Logan)
"His mind was on elsewhat that hot summer evening after tea."
(Memories of the Gorbals)
"But his eyes were saying elsewhat."
(One shining summer, Quinn Wilder)
"elsewhere something else else other what something anything whatever"
by Thomas the Rhymer Dec 16, 2006
"I’ve been busy with elsewhat lately."
by Victor Van Styn Jul 26, 2005
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All of the proposed else-x words are unnecessary. The context usually indicates the nature of the thing being elsed. One might think of the list of "else-x" words as an inflected version of the periphrastic "some-x else." I would expect the same pragmatic considerations that lead to the choice between inflected and periphrastic expressions might apply.
ReplyDeleteYes. I think you are right. All of the proposed else-x words are unnecessary. My, having just _Seen_ "Nine" with Sophia Loren, I think most words _simpliciter_ are unnecessary. Moved me to get the DVD "Amarcord" and revise all my Fellini, which I always loved.
ReplyDeleteI think I can analyse the meaning of 'else', which IS a good word.
It's true that to have 'else-' as a formative or productive prefix sounds a bit of a stretch.
But I think there is less of a ontologisation (awful word, sorry) when we say,
"I was thinking elsewhat"
than
"I was thinking of someTHING else"
for what we _think_ is not usually a 'thing'. A thing is something you find in the _fridge_, or Mother Hubbard thought, on the cupboard, for her dog.
But we don't _think_ things.
Elsewho may work similarly in avoiding the rather rude, I've always felt, reference to 'body' in
I was thinking of somebody else.
i.e.
I was thinking elsewho.
--
By sticking to shorter Anglo-Saxonisms: elsewhen, elsehow, ... etc. the language becomes more fluent, and less Romantick. Which may be a good thing, if you are Nick Logan, that is.
I wish you'd give more thought to that metonymy thing. (See how "thing" can be used, er, beyond the fridge"?) The thing about "thing" is its generality. That, rather than the substantiality of pysisical "things," is the metonymous feature that makes the word so easily appropriated to other roles.
ReplyDeleteEfficiency seems to me to demand that language be minimally explicit: the more the context informs, the less the words need do so. Isn't that consistent with Grice's maxim on quantity? Wouldn't saying something more explicit than "something" otiose where context dictates what nature the "thing" should have?
Or something to that effect...
Yes, perhaps I should give some more thought to metonymy.
ReplyDeleteElsewhere (ok, a word sticks with me when I overuse it) -- FLN, in a commentary on R. Dirven -- I once expressed an intellectual orgasm I experienced when I found this blend
of
metonymy
and
metaphor
-- It was an awful word, but will see if I can retrieve it.
I'm not sure metonymy, to cut a long story short, is such a good word, after all.
Metaphor, yes.
(It's all Greek).
But metonymy. OK, Greek too -- but much too based on 'nym', i.e. name.
Apparently, the mechanisms of metaphor and metonymy are similar. So similar indeed that R. Dirven, who edits things on these things -- was commenting on this Belgium author, I think, who coined this blend.
I used to oppose
metonumia
to
sunekhdokhe
-- There is a lovely site, flores rhetoricae, or sylva rhetorica -- listing them all.
Sunekhdokhe seems to me to be of little (?) use. So why would 'metonymy'?
In a rather irritating turn of phrase, WoW:ii, Grice says that his 'implicature' is going to do duty for
'something in the nature of a figure of speech'.
I cannot see how serious he was, but I think he possibly was.
In Aspects of Reason he says that philosophers should revise their list of classical fallacies. And so I would not be surprised if Grice held that we should revise our lists of figures of rhetoric too.
(He does mention meiosis, litotes, etc. in WoW:ii, and indeed metaphora and eironeia -- but no metonymia or sunekhdoche).
But I'll give more thought to this and if I find that blend post on it. Etc.
Yes, 'thing' is possibly overused.
In the Romance languages -- and don't I understand you to the "K" for Kramer, when you say you go for the 'cognate' (embarazado, perro/hueso, etc.).
In the Romance, 'cosa' derives directly from Latin 'causa'. So, we, Romantic philosophers, NEVER take derivatives of 'causa' seriously.
"Res" is ANOTHER thing. Oddly, in Argentina, 'res' is metonymically used for 'a piece of meat'.
"Res" gives reality, etc. And THIS was a serious Roman word. Possibly otiose, in that the Greeks never felt the need for them.
My teachers would say, "The Greeks were unable to _think_ the epistemological problem. They were naive realists to their backbone". Not sure about it.
But 'thing' is overused, and 'real', and 'cause'.
Kramer is safe because he works ceteris paribus, etc. But I can't! I'm always over-interpreting people! And 'people'.
"In the Romance languages -- and don't I understand you to the "K" for Kramer, when you say you go for the 'cognate' (embarazado, perro/hueso, etc.)."
ReplyDeletePlease clarify this point. I do not understand it.
OK. You were saying that when you speak a Romance language (Italian, French, Provencal, Catalan, Spanish, Portuguese, Galician) you look for any Latin cognate with the English.
ReplyDeleteI, too!
There are words in Spanish which don't derive from Latin, and which I never use. They are _grotesque_, too vernacular, and generally ugly.
Of course, in South America it's even worse, in that there's loads from the "Indians", so mis-called. But even in Hispania, there are words which are _older_ than Latin: the Iberian roots, for example ('camino' to mean 'via', for example).
It would be like in Italian words of Etruscan origin.
Or in French, words of Gallic, i.e Celtic, origin.
We shouldn't use them.
I once had to pass a course on this, and the teacher was into statistics, so he had us looking for a passage in a Romance language and provide which percentage was Latin, and which not.
I provided the Lord's prayer in Spanish. Percentage of words of Latin origin: 100%. Indeed, my bedstand book on this, which I treasure at the Swimming-Pool Library, is Elcock, The Romance Languages.
--- So I was agreeing with you.
When I say, "to a K", I am punning, stupidly, on that expression,
"to a T", which I've heard as meaning _totally_.
But if I'm using other letters, as in "K" for Kramer, I feel I can modify the letter accordingly.
You do mention 'embarazado', which is a 'false' friend, so-called with English 'embarassed'.
Which in English means, well, we know what it means ('ashamed').
But in Spanish, in some dialects -- not mine, if I have one -- means, "pregnant".
Oddly, when I was researching with Horn on negation in Yale, I found that a 'pregnant sentence', in English, is like ...
I forget, but it's technical term for something like carrying a _suppositio_, etc.
--.
Etc.
You mentioned about the dog and the bone ("a otro perro con ese hueso" -- to another dog with that bone -- which is not an idiom I'm too familiar with, but can figure out the meaning, but you said you would explain on a longer day. So feel free.
My use of 'figure out' is a good one. Figure out, figure in.
I once coined 're-figuring' to apply to a certain 'figure' of rhetoric (recall that these could be 'of speech' or 'of thought') and that 'skhema' is the Gk. for 'figura'.
To refigure, I thought, was a special figure of rhetoric which works on a figure:
I kicked the bucket.
(oddly, not used in the first person).
If I provide a slightly minor variant on that, I hit the pale, for example, it could, I guess still be understood. There was something that had triggered my thought, and I'll see if I can retrieve it. It was a list of variants on cliches, and how the change of a lexeme kills the 'effect'. The effect hits the pale, as it were.
Etc. Clear now, I hope.
I used "embarazada" in an earlier post as an example of how using cognates can get one in trouble. (I thought the usage to mean "pregnant" was universal in Spanish.) Relying on cognates, using "embarazada" to mean "embarrassed" could be, well, embarrassing.
ReplyDeleteI used "embarazado" as if I meant "embarrassed," but assuming that it probably means something else, again to make the point about how cognates are not necessarily reliable.
"pail."
I learned "a otro perro con ese hueso" in high school. My teacher translated it as "tell it to the Marines," a now-obsolete American expression that means "I don't care about that problem."
Anyway, over the years during which I had no need for my Spanish - say, 1966-1995 - things got a bit jumbled in my mind, and I came to remember the expression as "a otro perro con ese queso." And I would sometimes tell people that Spanish was a very weird language, that they even had this saying "take that cheese to another dog." Then I found myself in Puerto Rico on business in 1995, and I had occasion to speak the language again. I actually heard a guy say "hablando del ruin de Roma...," the sort of Spanish idiom I was sure American high school teachers told us about but no one ever used. Anyway, somewhere in my travels in that period, I found out that the other dog was to be offered a bone and not a piece of cheese. How I had turned "hueso" to "queso" in my mind remains a mystery. But I'm guessing you're not interested in that problem...
I am. And they do sound similarly enough. Don't they?
ReplyDeleteSo it does not sound too mysterious that you mis-remembered.
A friend of mine, Joan Chiswell, who used to teach "English" to the natives at the Belgrano Day School in Argentina, got herself 'embarazada' on a couple of times.
She would use 'orina' insted of 'arina'. Flour mill, for example. -- She would say it's a 'molino de orina' -- a urination mill, etc.
--- Etc.
I did find the list of 'variants' on idioms, and thanks for the correction on 'pail'. See if you can provide the original, for I'll be damned if I _can_. I cannot even remember the one about "All work and no play makes John a dull boy". I cannot see how 'boy' gets translated as 'fellow' in the variant. They look pretty clumsy, and obvious flouts to one of the most charming of all of Grice's conversational maxims under -- Clarity, which reminds me of a post I should post soon, on Clarity is not enough. The maxim:
Avoid unnecessary prolixity, sic.