Re: TRANS: Happiness (& a question for Christophe)

On Monday, October 29, 2001, at 03:58 , Christophe Grandsire wrote:

> En réponse à Yoon Ha Lee <yl112@...>:
>
>> (Christophe, a question for you or other native French speakers is
>> buried
>> under "yna," below...)
>
> Nice to feel needed :)) .
>
Mais oui.  :-)

>> yna:
[snip]
>>    if you're giving generic directions, say in a cookbook or something,
>> it
>> might
>>    be translated as a 2nd person--I think of this as similar to the
>> French
>> use
>>    of the infinitive-as-imperative, if I remember
>> correctly--Christophe?)
>
> I think so. We also use it in warning panels ("ne pas fumer": no smoking*
> ).
> It's the normal way to mark written "advice" (written imperative forms
> look
> much too familiar).
>
<nod>  Okay, just wanted to check and see if I was remembering that
correctly.

I'm reminded of Magic: The Gathering cards I've seen printed in Korean,
and it's fairly hilarious because the Korean used is about as formal as
you can get, even though it's a game that I can almost guarantee no native
Korean over the age of 20 would be playing...^_^

> *Funny offtopic note: in French, "smoking" means: "tuxedo", so imagine the
> surprise of a French man knowing no English and seeing the panel "no
> smoking"
> on a wall :)) .
>
ROTFL!

> My Astou also has a strange system of personal pronouns. It doesn't make
> the
> difference between 1st, 2nd and 3rd person, but between "I", "non-I" and
> "non-
> person", at least in singular. "non-I" can be both 2nd or 3rd person, as
> well
> as "non-person". But the first one seems to refer to something/somebody
> relevant to the discussion, while "non-person" doesn't necessarily. Still,
>  I
> don't know much about the difference. Astou is a dead language (even in
> its
> history :)) ) like Latin and Sanskrit, and thus it's study depends on the
> written materials about it. And they are not very numerous unfortunately.
>
That's cool.  :-)  Now, would things like pets and deities be counted as
non-I or non-persons, or is the question not even relevant?  Does it have
plurals?  I suppose I ought to come up with an (optional) way to mark
number in Tasratal, I'm just exceedingly lackadaisical about required
number-marking in my conlangs.  Call it too much background in Korean.  =^
)

Yoon Ha Lee [requiescat@cityofveils.com]
http://pegasus.cityofveils.com

Southern DOS: Y'all reckon?  (Yep/Nope)

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