Language Log

From RfP:

I’m one of those writers who will do just about anything to avoid using the same word—or, worse yet, the same phrase—within a short run of text. So imagine my horror this morning when, after hastily responding to a comment on your post about “Parse depth in essays vs. novels”, I noticed the following:

Although he is indeed making a case for the combination of text and images in “static print,” as becomes clear in the rest of the paragraph from which I have drawn this excerpt, I feel one can also infer that this quote provides yet one more reason for authors to make their case with, shall we say, salients rather than by means of a lengthy siege.

In spite of my haste in composing this comment, I still took care to ensure that I had spelled everything correctly, and that my syntax was appropriate for the formal register that I was using for my comment.

And I did happen to notice that I had used “one” twice within the same clause, but since that word was used in two different senses and I was in a hurry, I decided to let it stand.

After noticing—and agonizing over—my error with the phrase, I wondered about why this attitude is so deeply ingrained. So I decided to ask you about it, in hopes that there’s an underlying linguistic issue behind it.

The spread of Greek language and culture across Asia has often been a topic of discussion in our posts, for which see "Selected readings" below.  Now we have a long, richly illustrated article that summarizes much of what has come to be known on this subject, a large part of it aptly from the pages of Sino-Platonic Papers.

"The Ancient Greek Kingdoms of China"
By Arunansh B. Goswami, Greek Reporter (December 1, 2022)

Note that the author is an Indian.  South Asia was an important conduit for the transmission of Sino-Hellenic cultural elements across Eurasia during antiquity.  This is not a conclusive, academic paper, but a convenient, comprehensive survey that usefully introduces many themes for the further study of Greek influence in Eurasia during the last two millennia and more.

The Daoist / Taoist classic, Daode jing / Tao-te ching (The Classic of the Way and Integrity / Power / Virtue), a brief text consisting of approximately 5,000 characters in 81 brief chapters, is one of the most frequently translated books in the world.  Even people who don't know Classical Chinese, such as the first translator quoted below, somehow feel that they are qualified to try their hand at it, and are sometimes paid enormous sums to do so by distinguished publishing houses. 

In this post, I will focus only on a single chapter, number 13.  Out of the hundreds of versions I could cite, I will give here only half a dozen by way of example of what can be done with the same text.

Stephen Mitchell's version of chapter #13 is so different from Derek Liu's that it's mind-boggling.

Success is as dangerous as failure.

Hope is as hollow as fear.

What does it mean that success is as dangerous as failure?

Whether you go up the ladder or down it,

your position is shaky.

When you stand with your two feet on the ground,

you will always keep your balance.

What does it mean that hope is as hollow as fear?

Hope and fear are both phantoms

that arise from thinking of the self.

When we don’t see the self as self,

what do we have to fear?

See the world as your self.

Have faith in the way things are.

Love the world as your self;

then you can care for all things.

(translation by Stephen Mitchell, 1988)

In "Trends" (3/27/2022) and "Embedding Depth" (11/28/2022), I noted that Earnest Hemingway's reputation for "little short sentences" is generally false to fact. I made the point by comparing the distribution of sentence lengths and embedding depths in his memoir A Moveable Feast to Usula K. Le Guin's essay collection The Wave in the Mind.

In a comment on "Embedding Depth", Bloix complained that A Moveable Feast is probably not "a reliable example of the style that made [Hemingway] famous in the 1920s and 30s." In today's post, I'll explain again why I chose that work, amplify the point by comparing Hemingway's 1926 novel The Sun Also Rises to Le Guin's 1974 novel The Dispossessed, and wave my hand at broader generalizations about dialogue vs. exposition and fiction vs. essays.