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April 10, 2006
"Who can impress the forest, bid the tree / Unfix his earth-bound root?"
I've always liked how the French use the word "si."
Suppose someone asks you the negative form of Peter Potamus' catch phrase. To wit: "Didn't you get that thing I sent you?"
Now, in English, you can respond "Yes" or "No." But when you say "Yes" you have to clarify you meant, in fact, "No"—"I did not not [these cancel each other out] get that thing you sent me." Contrariwise, when you say "No" you have to clarify that you meant "Yes"—"I did not get that thing you sent me."
The French are more elegant. They give "Yes" and "No" literal meanings, as if the question posed is a Boolean logic problem for which the answer is either true or false. Then, in order to avoid confusion, they have another word, "si," that positively answers negative questions. So a Frenchman, when asked "Didn't you get that thing I sent you?" ("N'avez-vous pas obtenu ce que je vous ai envoyé?") could respond "Si" and have it understood that he means "Yes, I got it." If he said "Oui," then that would most likely mean "Yes, I did not get that thing you sent me."
There are analogs of the French "si" in several tongues:
The following languages were reported (with confidence) to have an
equivalent to "Si" in French:
German "doch"
Dutch "jawel"
"Danish Norwegian" "jo'"
Swedish "jo"
Icelandic "ju'"
Finnish "Kyll�p�"
Hungarian "dehogynem"
Sorbian "ju"
Japanese "iie"
Occitan (related to catalan) "hoc"
Arabic "balaa" stress on first syllable
Eastern Armenian "inchu che" or "her che"
Other possibilities are Korean and perhaps Portuguese ("sim", at least in
some circumstances).
Interestingly, Quebecois French does NOT have "Si" and a forerunner to
Catalan DID ("hoc") but does not now.
The topic is also covered in the Jargon File (née the Hacker's Dictionary) entry on hacker speech:
This speech style is a variety of the precisionist English normally spoken by scientists, design engineers, and academics in technical fields. In contrast with the methods of jargon construction, it is fairly constant throughout hackerdom.
It has been observed that many hackers are confused by negative questions -- or, at least, that the people to whom they are talking are often confused by the sense of their answers. The problem is that they have done so much programming that distinguishes between if (going) ... and if (!going) ... that when they parse the question "Aren't you going?" it may seem to be asking the opposite question from "Are you going?", and so to merit an answer in the opposite sense. This confuses English-speaking non-hackers because they were taught to answer as though the negative part weren't there. In some other languages (including Russian, Chinese, and Japanese) the hackish interpretation is standard and the problem wouldn't arise. Hackers often find themselves wishing for a word like French `si', German `doch', or Dutch `jawel' - a word with which one could unambiguously answer `yes' to a negative question. (See also mu)
For similar reasons, English-speaking hackers almost never use double negatives, even if they live in a region where colloquial usage allows them. The thought of uttering something that logically ought to be an affirmative knowing it will be misparsed as a negative tends to disturb them.
In a related vein, hackers sometimes make a game of answering questions containing logical connectives with a strictly literal rather than colloquial interpretation. A non-hacker who is indelicate enough to ask a question like "So, are you working on finding that bug _now_ or leaving it until later?" is likely to get the perfectly correct answer "Yes!" (that is, "Yes, I'm doing it either now or later, and you didn't ask which!").
I've found taking questions literally to be an endless source of amusement. Once, a friend of mine dropped a lighter by my foot. When he asked me if I "could move my leg real fast" I physically demonstrated that I was indeed capable of doing so.
I have a feeling that it'd be easy to connect geeks' literal-mindedness with their love of the Lord of the Rings. In particular, I'm thinking about the way Tolkien took two of Shakespeare's cop-out metaphorical prophecies from Macbeth and used them literally.
The march of the Ents on Isengard and the slaying of the Witch-King of Angkor mirror, respectively, Burnam Wood coming to Dunsany, and the slaying of Macbeth by a man of no woman born. Ol' Billy Shakespeare resolved those with some guys in camo and a C-section. Tolkien had a baddie who could only be killed by a Hobbit/woman tag-team, and giant fucking trees walking around destroying castles and stuff.
Because of the evidence in his letters and biography, J.R.R. Tolkien is often thought of as being "unswervingly hostile" to William Shakespeare and his works (Shippey, Century 310) . As a schoolboy at King Edward's he had already formed his opinion of the playwright, and did not enjoy studying Shakespeare, whom he "disliked cordially" (Tolkien, Carpenter and Tolkien 213) . The Carpenter biography records that in a debating society speech at age sixteen Tolkien "poured a sudden flood of abuse on Shakespeare, upon his filthy birthplace, his squalid surroundings, and his sordid character" (Carpenter, Tolkien 40) . He blamed Shakespeare for playing an "unforgivable" part in the “debasement” of the English concept of the Elves (Tolkien, Carpenter and Tolkien 185) , and his plans for curriculum reform at the Oxford English School, based on the program he developed at Leeds University, reduced the emphasis on Shakespeare and Milton that he felt privileged modern literature studies at the expense of historical linguistics (Carpenter, Tolkien 137) . He thought that the Honour School of English Language and Literature course should have a rigorous language component “based on ancient and medieval texts and their language, with at most only a brief excursion into ‘modern’ literature – ‘modern’ being anything after Geoffrey Chaucer” (Carpenter, Inklings 24) .
He was not always consistent in his opinions, either, particularly when it came to his thoughts on reading Shakespeare versus seeing the plays in performance. In "On Fairy-stories" he states that he feels the witches in Macbeth are intolerable on stage but significant in reading, and in this case Shakespeare ought to have written a story instead of a play (Tolkien, "Fairy-Stories" 50) . Tolkien thought it was impossible to translate fantasy to the stage without violating the “Secondary Belief” of the audience.
As Tolkien said in a 1967 interview, he knew that at some point in The Lord of the Rings there would be "trouble with treelike creatures" (Norman 6) . A long letter to W.H. Auden in 1955 includes a footnote explaining the origin of the Ents:
Their part in the story is due, I think, to my bitter disappointment and disgust from schoolboy days with the shabby use made in Shakespeare of the coming of 'Great Birnam wood to high Dunsinane hill': I longed to devise a setting in which the trees might really march to war. (Tolkien, Carpenter and Tolkien 212) .
The other element taken most directly from Macbeth is the foretelling that "none of woman born/ Shall harm Macbeth" (Shakespeare IV:i) . In the original Holinshed Chronicles, the more specific prophecy was that Macbeth “should neuer be slaine with man born of anie woman” (emphasis added) (Boswell-Stone 36) . In Macbeth's case the fulfillment of this prophecy rests on a technicality - Macduff tells Macbeth he was "from his mother's womb/ Untimely ripp'd" (Shakespeare V:viii) ; or as he says in Holinshed, “was neuer borne of my mother, but ripped out of her wombe” (Boswell-Stone 43) . Although in Shakespeare’s time Caesarian sections were being performed on living patients with the expectation that at least some might survive, at the time of the historical Macbeth, a child was only cut out of the womb if the mother was dead so that the infant might be baptized. If the mother died, “the newborn was [considered] the child not of a living woman but of a corpse” (Blumenfeld-Kosinski 1) . The audience is cheated yet again - there is no way to tell by looking at Macduff that he was born by Caesarian section, or whether he is even telling the truth about his birth.
However, in The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien's completion of the prophecy plays fair with the reader.
Posted by Jon Rubin at April 10, 2006 09:17 PM
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