a sein of the times

[robinturner]

My eyeballs are aching and my brain is about to close down, but I have finished proof-reading the third chapter of the Heidegger translation. I still don't understand most of it, but I'm pretty sure it is now punctuated properly. I am now starting to get those odd thoughts that pop up in your mind like unwanted windows. "What would Heidegger make of Chinese, which has no equivalent of the verb 'to be'?"* "Is 'dasein' like 'da bomb'?"


* Yes, I know there's "shi", but that's not the same - it's just an equative verb, and nothing you can get Teutonically metaphysical about.

Comments

[evan.livejournal.com]

I think "shi" is a copula, like "desu/da" in Japanese. Japanese has arimasu/imasu/etc. but I haven't heard equivalents in Chinese.

Chinese structure is hella weird.

[solri.livejournal.com]

Yes - "equative verb" is just what the they called it in my Chinese class. It performs two of the functions of the English verb "be":

1. identity ("Russell is the man smoking a pipe in the corner");
2. membership of a set ("Russell is a philosopher").

The fun thing is that you can't use it for qualities. I remember my surprise when our teacher informed us that although we could in theory say "shu shi hong", it would mean something like "The book is the same thing as the colour red" (as opposed to "shu shi hong de", which is short for "shu shi hong de shu" - "The book is a red book").

[vret.livejournal.com]

That's interesting. So a Chinese translation of the Nicomachean Ethics wouldn't make much sense because you simply can't express some crucial logical errors that Aristotle made?

[hfx-ben.livejournal.com]

Gad ... I spent the evening reading Dzogchen, so hitting this was like whacking my head on a beam.

Gives a whole new twist to Berkeley's percipi!!

[solri.livejournal.com]

Which ones did you have in mind?

[vret.livejournal.com]

Ha! I knew you would ask something like that. It's over 20 years since I read it, and the more I think about it the less sure I am.

I remember thinking that a lot of the arguments revolved around the unique perfection of the perfectly white object, and these fall apart as soon as you ask what other attributes this object has. I think there were other arguments in there that confused maps and territories, but I can't remember well enough now.

[evan.livejournal.com]

I've seen it argued that Chinese adjectives are really verbs; is "shu hong" valid? When this idea was presented to me in this class, I instead thought it was just a copula-optional language (e.g. Arabic, Russian), but now that I write that I realize there is "shi" that's used.

[solri.livejournal.com]

I'm sure there are different views on this subject (since Chinese grammar doesn't fit English grammatical terminology very well), but the one we were given was that Chinese has no adjectives as such, just stative verbs. "Shu hong" is not only valid, it's the unmarked form, though "shu shi hong de" is also common - IIRC, it emphasises the "hong".