Re: The difficulties of judging a language which you don't speak natively (was Re: The difficulties of being weirder than English)

>> "El hombre bajó de vuelta corriendo al interior del sótano"
>
>I'm not a hispanophone, but it seems to me that this foregrounds "the
>inside of the cellar" in a way that the use of "into" in the English
>does not.
I used "al interior de" merely to contradict his claim that you
cannot convey this information explicitly so as to avoid any other
conceivable interpretation. You can also use the prepositional
phrase "adentro de" (the closest explicit equivalent of the English
preposition "into" - without any foregrounded nominal part) or simply
leave this bit implicit. The preposition "a" (to) is enough in Spanish
to convey that information, because it implies that he did not
just stop at the door but entered the cellar, unless this fact is
explicitly cancelled; otherwise, you'd use the preposition "hacia",
(towards).

In English you use "into" (instead of merely "to") even if the fact
of entering is clear, merely because that's the conventional way
to say it in this language and so, if I'm not mistaken, saying
"The man ran back down to the cellar" would appear to imply that
he didn't enter.


>When I tested the English sentence on two native Spanish
>speakers, they both produced translations (identical modulo the word
>for "cellar") using the verb "volvio", leaving the "down" and "into"
>components implicit.
For the same reason why in English saying such a detailed command
as "Come right back down out from up in there!" wouldn't be the
first choice for most people.

For most people and in most instances, if you just say "El hombre
volvió corriendo al sótano", the audience will get your meaning
clearly without any need for further explicit elaboration, by
default taking for granted that the man didn't just stop at the
door without entering the cellar, and that he went down from some
floor above ground.


>When I talked about the kids and how they tell
>the story of the deer, the boy, and the frog, they both agreed that
>the way the 9-year-old Spanish-speaker talks is indeed characteristic:
>the static layout is described and backgrounded, and then path-motion
>verbs are used to provide the minimum necessary cues.
But that's not the issue here. Of course Spanish and English each have
their characteristic default choices to organize and fore/background
information. A 9-year-old speaker of an Eastern Asian language would
probably pay a seemingly disproportionate attention to the social-level
interrelations between deer, boy and frog, while not being explicit
about how many of them there are.

The issue I was talking about is that the guy claimed that in Spanish
we are supposedly _unable_ to say the equivalent of an explicit and
elaborate description of path like in English "went back down into
the cellar" or "come right back down from up in there".

Of course, you're hardly ever going to get a 100% exact translation
between two languages that offers an scrupulously exact equivalent
level of fore/backgrounding for each and every bit of information,
because that would mean that both languages share the exact same
semantico-grammatical structure.

Cheers,
Javier

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