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Re: Language Change

From:Nik Taylor <fortytwo@...>
Date:Wednesday, January 5, 2000, 14:49
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. -- "Old linguists never die - they just come to voiceless stops." - anonymous http://members.tripod.com/~Nik_Taylor/Conlang/W.html http://members.tripod.com/~Nik_Taylor/Books.html ICQ: 18656696 AIM Screen-Name: NikTailor