Re: Language Change

Dan Sulani wrote:
>     Interesting. Would it then be accurate to say that
> in a given lang, the features which are important to
> poetry are those which are the hardest to manipulate
> in that lang? (sort of a "creative challenge theory" of poetry?)
That's probably partially true.  On the other hand, I understand that
German uses rhyme in poetry, despite having a lot of words ending in
/@n/ or /@/, due, presumably, to the areal influence of many of the
European languages' using rhyme in poetry.

>     That might explain one difficulty of trying to appreciate
> poetry in translation. What's important to the poet's lang,
> and thus to the poet, may not be the same in your lang, and
> thus it doesn't come through to you.  Hmmm.
Not necessarily - most of the difficulty comes from the different
structure of the languages, different semantic fields and the like.
Poetry is essentially a language game, so it requires a deep
understanding of the language.  Of course, some poetic forms translate
well, like the parallelism common in Hebrew poetry survives quite well
in English translations of the Bible.

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