The Linguist

@CIOL_Linguists WINTER 2023 The Linguist 31 OPINION & COMMENT linguist Lucien Tesnière investigated verbs as essential components of a sentence and researched how they interact with other subordinate elements. His famous book Éléments de syntaxe structural asserted that verbs structure sentences by connecting and binding elements, which has been compared with the way atoms react. 4 Verbs have been categorised using various classifications. Grouping them in this way, and describing their similarities and differences, is of great advantage, especially when learning a language. Looking at mood, for instance, we can distinguish between indicative ('I do my work now'), interrogative ('Did you see her yesterday?'), conditional ('If you want to speak to me, you can'), imperative ('Stay there!') and subjunctive ('If I had a good voice, I would be a singer'). When taking the voice into account, we can group verbs in transitive ('to offer', 'to love') and intransitive ('to smile', 'to rain'). Verbs set the tone of a communication, give it a certain meaning and play a fundamental role in the overall function of a text. Translating content with multiple verbs can be a challenging task. Aside from meaning, they present a complex set of grammatical nuances which the translator needs to consider. A transitive verb in one language may not be transitive in another. English and German have more transitive verbs than Polish, for example. Polish does not have any phasal verbs, which are quite frequent in English, but its verbs do modify depending on gender ('we went' translates as Poszłyśmy when talking about women and Poszliśmy for men). The passive voice presents the most issues in verb translation, 5 and there are also differences between the usage of subordinate supplements, which certain verbs require. Passive German or English verbs often appear as active verbs in the Polish translation, reflecting the grammar and style rules of the target language. This is one of many interesting puzzles for the translator. Notes 1 Hadley, PA, Rispoli, M and Hsua, N (2016) 'Toddlers' Verb Lexicon Diversity and Grammatical Outcomes'. In Language, Speech, and Hearing Services in Schools, 47, 44-58 2 Duden Verlag (28/2/23); cutt.ly/DudenVerb 3 Aristotele, ed. C Gallavotti (2018) Dell'arte poetica, Mondadori, Verona 4 Tesnière, L (1980) Grundzüge der strukturalen Syntax, trans. U Engel, Klett-Cotta, Stuttgart 5 Vinary, JP and Darbelnet, J (1995) Stylistique comparée du francais et de l'anglais: Méthode de traduction, Didier, Paris Linguist, tutor and researcher Dr Joanna Biernat-Sowka MCIL works for a multilingual technology company. TL Mistranslations 1 New citizens now pledge allegiance to the King, not the Queen. 2 It was accidentally put on sale early in Spain. 3 He seemed to say Russia and Turkey were at war. 4 White world. Picture clue 1 Welsh; the Brecon Beacons. By the book 1 Gabriel García Márquez. 2 Animal Farm. 3 King Charles III. 4 Edith Grossman. Schools out 1 German. 2 Northern Ireland. 3 Huge difficulties recruiting language teachers from within the UK. 4 Oak National Academy. A very British scandal 1 The British Museum. 2 Paramedics. 3 Send information to the parents in their language. 4 She didn't speak Welsh. Indigenous languages 1 Wales (Welsh). 2 The International Decade of Indigenous Languages (IDIL). 3 Chile and Argentina. 4 Six (60 years). League of the Lexicon 1 a) The Académie Française has 40 members who hold office for life, hence les immortels. 2 b) The first known grammar is the Ashtadhyayi, written by Panini about 2,500 years ago. 3 a) Lithuanian has conserved many features of the common ancestor language Proto-Indo-European. 4 c) Tum-ti-tum. Linguist Max Müller coined the other two theories. Questions adapted from the League of the Lexicon game; twobrothersgames.co.uk. What language…? 1 English. 2 Latin. 3 Bulgarian. 4 Doric, a dialect of Scots spoken in northeast Scotland. Emerging research 1 Apes, especially chimpanzees and bonobos. 2 False (it found the opposite). 3 The most multilingual regions are hugely understudied and the regions most commonly studied are not very multilingual. 4 End-of-life care. Tech developments 1 Real-time machine translation. 2 Meta. 3 It cloned the voices of its top podcasters. 4 BMW (which also translates as 宝⻢). The view in politics 1 Afghanistan (a war veteran). 2 Catalan, Basque and Galician. 3 By using online translation tools. 4 Brazil. Who's who? 1 Cate Blanchett learnt German for the film Tár and speaks the language in several scenes. 2 Susie Dent became a CIOL Vice President (but give yourself a point if you gave another valid reason). 3 Alfonso Cuarón was upset when Disney+ automatically dubbed his 2018 film Roma into English as he had made sure it wasn't officially dubbed. 4 Paul Mescal was interviewed in Irish on the red carpet at the Baftas, where his film Aftersun won an award. In numbers 1 b) 12. 2 c) 200. 3 c) 66%. 4 c) 50%. Pop culture 1 It was Netflix's first Welsh language TV show. 2 Everything Everywhere All at Once. 3 Cha Cha Cha by Käärijä. 4 ITVX. Questions on page 20. Quiz answers

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