Thinking on Dangling Prepositions, Grammar, and Dead Languages

Tags

ancient greek, Grammar, latin

“Why can’t you end a sentence in a preposition?”

Marie’s question traveled across the room on the winged breath of Aether himself. There was chatter all around the room, thus I know the wind that gave movement to her words was not alone in its search for ears that would give room to the message it carried. Even then, it seemed the very emptiness of space made itself corporeal around the wind she had created and aided it to the ears of all, listening. The room fell silent, maybe not the gods but our perplexity gave power to what had been said. As soon as the high pitched sound in Marie’s voice marked the verbal question finished at the end of the sentence that was uttered we knew the queue for answers had been given. I don’t know about the others, but upon me the question had the effect of making me cease my translating. We all stared, in that study room, at the girl that had just realized she had asked a grammar question in a room filled to capacity with Latin and Ancient Greek Masters students. She shrugged, as if the silence had placed upon her small shoulders a weight too hard to bear and which needed to be cast off as if a mantle of despair.

“Just thinking out loud, guys.”

Too late. The query had been thrown to us, like stone to water, and ripples were to come back at the caster none the less. Later, I joked she should have known better; we laughed about it for a while. Now, John spoke first.

“It’s just an archaic rule for people who can’t let go of the past. In fact, I don’t think very many people really care for it these days.”

Some heads nod in approval, probably because John was the cranky activist amongst us and the one who thought he would learn Latin to help the masses understand the ancients better, not make things worse with old rules and old paradigms. I get a bit cold. John’s answer was the cookie-cutter version of a plausible explanation – maybe I will have to say something. But Alice chimed in next; I thought it funny she was so eager to answer the question she had sat up from her near-prone position between two chairs and turned herself towards Marie. She was serious, a bit too serious, fact which only added to the comedy of it all.

“There is a Latin sort of mold built into it. Those of us who still care for the ancient languages follow the example of Latin.”

She cast a glance over at John, who quickly gathered air – not a good sign, actually – and proceeded to formulate a response.

“Prescriptivism did indeed dictate that the Latin model should be followed. I agree that it is a Latin construction, but we do not speak Latin, we speak English, and as such the rule is an archaism that should be ignored (and most people do ignore it) by pretty much everyone around.”

Alice smiled, the left corner of her full lips slightly higher than the right. Her grey, hazel eyes reminded me of Athena. She would not, in character, leave this fight without getting in a good punch. She had a retort worth the enjoyment of the comeback, her lips revealed that much.

“Around what?”

John looked confused.

“Around what, what?”

“Everyone around what?”

John realized what he had fallen into, he attempted a recovery.

“Around everywhere. Everyone around everywhere, as in here everywhere.”

Alice’s smile grew wider; her teeth, gleaming in the evening sun that shone through the titanic glass windows at the university library hinted the pleasure she took in making John eat the words with which he had dared offend her beloved Latin.

“Perhaps if you hadn’t ended that phrase in a preposition, as Latin prescribed and, in turn, 18th century prescriptivism, your meaning would have been much clearer.”

Marie seemed sorry she had ‘thought out loud’ at all. I smiled. When one is an expert at dead languages these discussions are common place. She should really not worry about it at all. Yet, there was a hint of red on her cheeks, perhaps she was embarrassed at the fact she had not foreseen this ridiculous discussion. I only realized I had stopped following the conversation between John and Alice when he turned to me and summoned me back from thought by tapping on the table around which we were all gathered. I turned my head towards him.

“I said, ‘what do you think’?”

I looked at Marie again, she was begging for a resolution to the conflict, her eyes had changed into the half-closedness that people in pain get when they suffer in silence. I looked at Alice too, she knew I knew she was right. I then looked at Mark, who was sitting diagonally from me, only so I could answer the question without looking at John directly. Only then could I really avoid his spear-like eyes.

“Well, I think Alice is more correct here. Latin uses prepositions to indicate, well, positions. Where we are, how we get there, they are an essential part of what a preposition is. Also, it is not just Latin, but also Ancient Greek that does this. In order to say that Latin was a bad example for English you would have to recognize that Ancient Greek was a bad example as well.

My ears confirmed what I thought I saw from the corner of my eye. John moved in his chair. Ancient Greek is his specialty.

So you have to consider that, perhaps, it is simply more proper to avoid leaving dangling prepositions at the end of sentences. If you have a question such as ‘what did you step on’ or ‘who are you talking about?’ just move your preposition to the beginning of the sentence and decline accordingly.”

“Come on, who the crap declines anymore?”

John was now visibly upset.

“We do! Seriously, John!”

Alice was aghast. I laughed and continued.

“‘On what did you step’ and ‘About whom are you talking’ are phrases that require just a little practice. Both in Ancient Greek and Latin prepositions are always, without exception, followed by a case, if that rule wasn’t absolute, we would never know what was going on, let alone translate properly.”

John sighed. Alice smiled. Marie seemed relieved. Mark hadn’t moved at all, he was busy translating Cicero and the many, many prepositions followed by cases that had, for the last 3000 years, dictated that it was irrational to leave lonely prepositional words at the end of sentences. It was then that he looked up, as if Zeus thunderbolt had struck, and said:

“I’m hungry, guess where I think we should eat at?”

The prescriptivists influenced by Ancient Greek and Latin laughed; then, we went to dinner.

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Thinking of Caesar, Grammar, and How Conservatives Behave

Tags

conservatives, G. Julius Caesar, Grammar, latin, Life, philosophy

I have been thinking on a phrase that Caesar used in his De Bello Gallico for a while now. Perhaps I am just overthinking it (yes, it happens) but I really like how the sentence speaks to his battle tactics.

Caesari omnia uno tempore erant agenda.
To Caesar, all things had to be done at a single time.
Para César, todas las cosas debian de haber sido hechas en un sólo momento.

The composition of the sentence, which flows quite well in the Latin, needs all sorts of prepositions and complex participles to make it work in English and Spanish. I could render it in English somewhat all-encompassing-like (how’s that for an adverb) without losing a lot of the meaning but, surprisingly, the Spanish gave me a lot of trouble. The verb to be, usually smooth in the Spanish, was somewhat awkward here, perhaps due to the language’s aversion to participles. Who knows.

The cool thing about this bit of writing, is that Caesar is talking about himself in the third person. Caesari is Caesar himself, in the Dative. Not only is he third person, but he makes himself the Indirect Object of the sentence (and the verb). Humility? I doubt it. Rather, he was expressing his opinion about a fact that he had experienced, and that all should consider, especially since he knew first hand. Sometimes will will construct something like ‘to me, it seems the best…’ In that sense, we are placing ourselves as an indirect actor, allowing the real subject of the sentence to come through in hopes that we can carry a point. So, what is our subject, if not almighty Caesar? Everything.

No, literally, omnia is the subject of the sentence. This little word in the nominative case and neuter gendered (I am not a fan of the neuters because they like to make you think they are direct objects – accusatives – when they aren’t) literally means ‘all things.’ ‘Everything’ as the subject seems almost fallacious. After all, no one can like ‘every kind of food,’ or ‘every person,’ or even ‘every good thing;’ but the use of the expression brings Caesar’s mind to us in an interesting way. The guy loved his extremes. Believe or not, conservatives tend to be far more all encompassing in their statements than liberals or democrats (ya, I just went there), and therefore use more words like ‘every,’ ‘always,’ ‘never,’ or ‘none’ more often than the aforementioned people. Why? Conservatism is pretty close to an ‘all or nothing’ sort of philosophy. In other words, conservatives are like the Sith.

The bad guys are conservatives? Well, sure; but hey, you didn’t think the Jedi weren’t liberals, right? Freedom for all races, rights for all creatures, nature(force)-lovers…

It is no wander that Obi Wan Kenobi’s answer to Darth Vader in Episode III is “Only the Sith deal in absolutes.” After all, “you are either with me or against me” is quite a conservative statement to make. Things are black and white when extremes are applied – ask any conservative. Caesar is doing the same thing here by separating ‘all or nothing.’ By saying ‘all things’ Caesar forces the reader to take into account everything they think about when they ponder Roman issues, culture, and ideals. In writing this to the senate at Rome, which is what Caesar was doing, he was challenging their changing beliefs, because he had won in Germany and that gave him the right, therefore he was in the know of life, right? Well…

Uno tempore is an Ablative of Time in Which, ya, that exists. This ablative set the reader into a time, a single dot of time in which the action of the sentence happens. Why choose to write it here? Well, Caesar, like the Romans, was a Subject-Object-Verb kinda guy. We, English speakers, are a Verb-Subject-Object people. We say ‘The Dog Runs to me’ because that’s how we like our sentences, and we don’t really have a way to express the same idea in any other way. If I were to say ‘The Dog me runs’ people would wonder if you got run over by some Great Dane or something. Romans didn’t care as much for word order, because the ‘to’ in the sentence was embedded into their dative case. Equally, here, instead of using a preposition, such as ‘in,’ the position and spelling of Uno tempore tells us that ‘one time’ is the time in which the action happens. Fun!

But here’s the kicker: erant agenda is a construction made up of an imperfect verb and a participle. Verbs are awesome little things that tell you when things are happening, which tend to be useful – usually. In English, because we conjugate little, we need aiding verbs to tell us time. ‘I eat’ is a present, ‘I was eating’ is a past, ‘I will eat’ is a future. Caesar’s Latin modifies the verb proper to give us meaning. The verb mutates something like this:

I eat – eato
I will eat – eatebo
I was eating – eatebam

I have left the verb roots in English to give you an idea of what is added. You may say, ‘aha, there are too words there!’ And you would be right. Because prepositions can act as nouns, the verb is complimented by one. Erant literally means ‘they were being’ in the imperfect past. Here is Caesar being a Sith again. The imperfect past denotes an action that begun in the past and is still taking place. Thus, he is saying that since he begun to do things this way, he has always done things this way. ‘Things never change.’ Conservative much? Just in case you think I’m going crazy, take a look at agenda. Yes, we get our word agenda from this. The participle literally means ‘to be done’ or ‘about to be done.’ Future participles, such as this one, also carry a sense of duty (ought to be done) with them. The more accurate translation would be ‘ought to be done’ or ‘has to be done.’ Remember that famous phrase from Cato: “Carthago delenda est”? Same thing. Carthage ought to be destroyed, and Caesar’s being ‘ought to be done.’ Literally, the Roman Imperator (general, here, not Emperor) was saying that ‘to Caesar, all things ought to be done that were [being done] at a single moment.’

I just love that. To do things at that level of preparation, considering how massive Caesar’s army was, is impressive enough. To picture conservative Caesar writing to the senate of Rome telling them their indecision was shameful and that, in order to save the city, they too ought to do things within a single moment, is just impressive. But to understand that to Caesar life was but a moment in which all that could be done should be done in order to leave behind the greatest memory possible of oneself, giving meaning to the phrase alea iacta est, is just mind-blowing. Caesar stopped for no one (not just a phrase in Spaceballs, apparently), rather he understood the importance of carpe diem, and seized indeed. Maybe the Romans got tired of the guy because he didn’t give them a moment’s respite. Yet again, who does business on March 15th anyway?

Valete amicos!

Disclaimer: as much fun as it is to judge Caesar’s character on a single phrase, you probably shouldn’t compare him to a Sith Lord Conservative whilst amongst friends. Actually, don’t compare your conservative friends to the Sith either… come to think of it, don’t compare anyone to siths, they may think you are being mean.

Plutarch on Learning Latin

Tags

ancient greek, Grammar, latin, Plutarch

ὀψέ ποτε καὶ πόρρω τῆς ἡλικίας ἠρξάμεθα Ῥωμαϊκοῖς γράμμασιν ἐντυγχάνειν. καὶ πρᾶγμα θαυμαστὸν μέν, ἀλλ᾽ ἀληθὲς ἐπάσχομεν. οὐ γὰρ οὕτως ἐκ τῶν ὀνομάτων τὰ πράγματα συνιέναι καὶ γνωρίζειν συνέβαινεν ἡμῖν, ὡς ἐκ τῶν πραγμάτων ἁμῶς γέ πως εἴχομεν ἐμπειρίαν ἐπακολουθεῖν δι᾽ αὐτὰ1 καὶ τοῖς ὀνόμασι. κάλλους δὲ Ῥωμαϊκῆς ἀπαγγελίας καὶ τάχους αἰσθάνεσθαι καὶ μεταφορᾶς ὀνομάτων καὶ ἁρμονίας καὶ τῶν ἄλλων οἷς ὁ λόγος ἀγάλλεται, χαρίεν μέν ἡγούμεθα καὶ οὐκ ἀτερπές: ἡ δὲ πρὸς τοῦτο μελέτη καὶ ἄσκησις οὐκ εὐχερής, ἀλλ᾽ οἷστισι πλείων τε σχολὴ καὶ τὰ τῆς ὥρας ἔτι πρὸς τὰς τοιαύτας ἐπιχωρεῖ φιλοτιμίας.

It was therefore late and when I was well on in years that I began to study Roman literature. And here my experience was an astonishing thing, but true. For it was not so much that by means of words I came to a complete understanding of things, as that from things I somehow had an experience which enabled me to follow the meaning of words. But to appreciate the beauty and quickness of the Roman style, the figures of speech, the rhythm, and the other embellishments of the language, while I think it a graceful accomplishment and one not without its pleasures, still, the careful practice necessary for attaining this is not easy for one like me, but appropriate for those who have more leisure and whose remaining years still suffice for such pursuits.

(Dem. 2.2-3 – Translation by Bernadotte Perrin)

Thinking on the Randomness of Thinking

Tags

Grammar, meaning, sentences, Thinking

Life is full of problems.

I cannot express how much of an understatement that is. I cannot, also, even begin to delineate how accurate the five-word sentence is. I like word counting; it opens up information about a phrase that is otherwise unnoticeable; even hidden. I am not saying that briefness is perfection – if such a thing as perfection exists. I am saying that the beauty of a single sentence can drive a point much better than the complexity of many. Further, a really good statement may very well be composed of many, many such little phrases. Unfortunately, it is becoming harder and harder to express thought in the enclosed bubble of a sentence; it is even more vexing to try.

The reason is obvious. We do not appreciate the circular eternity of a well-composed statement anymore. We don’t appreciate such completion because it makes us face our own lack of completion. We have decided that, in order to be smart we must be open-ended, mysterious, and dangling; like a preposition at the end of a phrase. We have trained ourselves to identify a problem that does not exist. We ponder the meaning of things we never thought of. We worry about grammatical issues we never cared for. Dangling prepositions are beautiful, and many ideas we seek to convey are not only properly handled in such a way, but also better left if left dangling at the end of a sentence, wondering if they will fall victim to the edge that has become an ending to the writer’s train of thought.

In the beginning, when we wrote, we wrote for the sake of an idea. We wrote to express an emotion, a problem of life, our very trains of thoughts which, though not derailed, had gone hopelessly out of control and could not be stopped. Those thoughts, although metaphorical and subverted to the will of the communicator, were understood thanks to the willingness of the listener to dissect, analyze, and reconstruct meaning from the looseness of the individual mind and its musings; this willingness is no longer there. We have been, spoon-fed, indoctrinated with this idea that a good thought is universal and universally understood. We have been told there is a formula to writing which dictates what can and cannot be said in order for a sentence to make sense. In a way, that is true. I mean that unless there is structure there cannot be anything structured, cohesive, and therefore communicable. Although, we have arrived at a point in which something is constructed and, instead of trying to obtain its meaning, we correct the shape of a particular window rather than the beauty of the whole that is seen. We pile error upon error -not errors made but noticed- not to make the building more communicative, but for the very sake of correcting it, then complaining it does not convey anything new nor innovative. We have stripped meaning from every strand of thought given us and labeled it plain and uninteresting; condemned it to a lifetime lived in seclusion by the very rules we have concocted for ourselves so as to simplify our daily wanderings through language.

Simplicity. The idea once meant efficiency. Now it means having a very small measuring stick so that anything too big for our simplified minds can be labeled ‘useless.’ Uselessness that is too quickly associated with Stupidity. Stupidity too broad to understand the problem lies not in the how-to of communication but in labels. How have formulas become not the mark of genius but the excuse of simplicity! How far we have come in our enlightenment that complexity is the very mark of irregularity! How low we have stooped ourselves, reversing the very course of nature, to have offended evolution itself!

Life is full of problems.

Subject. Verb. Possessive Adjective with an Object Noun.

We strip bare the Object, trashing its noun, and we have the following:

Life is problems.

However, we know, life is other things. Life is joy, and sadness; freedom and slavery; pain and gain… hence life cannot be [only] problems. Life cannot be full of problems, for other things make it full; other things make it life.

Problems are part of life.

Hope is part of life as well, if given due place; it can become a small ray of sunshine in an otherwise dark and gloomy perspective. No life, no matter how complex or sad, is full of problems. Life is full, like sentences with grammar problems, of other things, in combination, not in isolation. Find out what those other things are. Enjoy them to the fullest. For even a life with 99.99% of problems has a 0.01% of something else.

I meant to write ‘I was rear-ended this Wednesday while stopped at a light. Life is full of problems.’ Then I realized the insignificance of my first statement. Cars get fixed, bodies get fixed. Our minds, however, if broken, are infinitely harder to recover.

Here’s to the randomness of thinking.