Timeline for On the syntax of 'Cogitate quantis laboribus fundatum imperium (...) una nox paene delerit' (Cic. Cat. 4, 19)
Current License: CC BY-SA 4.0
15 events
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| Oct 17, 2020 at 18:50 | vote | accept | Mitomino | ||
| Oct 12, 2020 at 3:29 | comment | added | Mitomino | The Italian translation in the Facebook link is not mine. As for your question “Do you think a literal translation would be possible in Italian?", no, I don’t think so (NB: I read & speak Italian but I’m not a native speaker of this language). | |
| Oct 12, 2020 at 3:27 | comment | added | Mitomino | ...& (2) to the extent that the juxtaposition/coordination is that of three subordinate clauses, una nox paene delerit is syntactically instantiated three times: i.e. to the extent that three landing sites for so-called "WH"-exclamative/interrogative elements (quantis/quanta + abl. NP) are needed in subordination clauses, these elements must move up to the initial position of the subordinate clause of delerit (here we can assume there can be only one WH-element per clause: cf. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wh-movement). | |
| Oct 12, 2020 at 3:24 | comment | added | Mitomino | When I said that "the real ellipses involved in the tricolon is a debatable issue", I mean that this issue is not always obvious. For example, it seems clear that the tricolon above does not involve three instantiations of the main verb cogitate but only one (after reading one of your last comments, I see we can agree on this point). This option discarded, two possibilities remain: (1) to the extent that the juxtaposition/coordination is that of three Nominal Phrases, una nox paene delerit is not elliptical (let’s call it the what-you-see-is-what-you-get proposal) & ... | |
| Oct 12, 2020 at 2:18 | comment | added | Cerberus♦ | Notice that your Italian translation on Facebook also flattens the syntax: could that be because Italian, too, has more limited morphology than does Latin? Do you think a literal translation would be possible in Italian? | |
| Oct 12, 2020 at 2:14 | comment | added | Cerberus♦ | @Mitomino About the underlying reason why Latin can do this but English cannot: a generic reason is that translating a construction from one language into another always 'favours' the original language: after all, the construction was naturally formed in this language. But I also think it may be because, to express syntax, English depends on word order very much, whereas Latin has more morphology which it uses for the same purpose, allowing for more flexibility in word order; this flexibility might make such nesting easier. | |
| Oct 12, 2020 at 2:12 | comment | added | Cerberus♦ | @Mitomino: Right, the ellipsis I supplied was just a possible example. In your version here, though, we still do not have three independent sentences; if we wanted to expand into independent sentences, those interrogatives would still need to depend on something (we'd need to supply three somethings). But I agree it is not really important to the central thought of your question. (I usually see filling in ellipsis as a mere illustration of structure, rather than as the discovery of "real", specific words that should somehow exist invisibly. | |
| Oct 12, 2020 at 1:23 | comment | added | Mitomino | When you say "I do not understand why the commentator read the sentence that way", please note that what (I understand) he was trying to do was just to clarify the content of the complex Latin sentence to a reader of English. What is said by him is not necessarily incompatible with what you call the lectio brevis. In any case, as emphasized in your interesting edit (+1!), the question above is not so about the real ellipses involved in the tricolon (a debatable issue, indeed) but rather about why the example in the title of the post (without a tricolon) is ok in Latin but not in English. | |
| Oct 12, 2020 at 0:16 | comment | added | Mitomino | Here periphrastic means 'wordy', 'roundabout', the result of a paraphrase (in Spanish we say "rodeo"). BTW, let me say that I fully agree with your conclusion: "there is nothing odd about Latin; it is just English which is incapable of rendering the same construction". Or, to put it in the neutral typological words of my post, Latin belongs to a type of languages that allow this type of constructions, whereas English belongs to a different type that doesn't allow it. As noted above, I wonder if this difference could (?) have to do with the so-called "(non)configurationality" of languages. | |
| Oct 11, 2020 at 23:53 | history | edited | Cerberus♦ | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
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| Oct 11, 2020 at 23:49 | comment | added | Cerberus♦ | @Mitomino: Okay, a "periphrastic combination": what does that really mean? And why would such a reading be needed or desirable over the lectio simplex? I couldn't easily find the quotation in the linked document. P.S. I've added an explanation of why English does not allow a literal translation. | |
| Oct 11, 2020 at 23:47 | history | edited | Cerberus♦ | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
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| Oct 11, 2020 at 23:46 | comment | added | Mitomino | Many thanks for your detailed answer! I'm afraid that you misinterpreted the commentator's point above ("A short form of expression combining two really distinct indirect questions"). What (I understand) is meant by this commentator is that the Latin example involves a periphrastic combination of the following triplet in (1) cogitate quantis laboribus imperium fundatum sit; cogitate quanta virtute libertas stabilita sit; cogitate quanta deorum benignitate fortunae auctae exaggerataeque sint and (2) cogitate ut una nox paene {imperium/libertatem/fortunas} delerit. | |
| Oct 11, 2020 at 23:22 | history | edited | Cerberus♦ | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
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| Oct 11, 2020 at 23:16 | history | answered | Cerberus♦ | CC BY-SA 4.0 |