flemmings | (no subject)

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Suckitude, suckitude, and all is suckitude, except for a lovely comment on this entry about differing social customs:

A bit like when I used to wander around looking for stuff and murmuring, "Wo? Wo? Wo ist der neugeborne König der Juden?"

Doesn't have the same ring in English, but made me laugh.

Also there's no way I'm doing

50books_poc this year. I am doing

1fic_poc with kareny's 千秋一梦, Dream of a Thousand Autumns, at the end of which I shall be, as ever, blind or semi-literate or both. Even after two paragraphs of half-understood impressionist prose I'm wondering how you do that in English. Don't say Moonwise. How do you do that briefly in English?

And after reading

feliciter's translation of the last third, I'm wondering how, or if, one does Fu Chai/ Gou Jian sex in English. Note that /, BTW; it's important.

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Oo-er. It's not actually the last third, it's chapter 3 of 6 (?): the fic ends where the series does, but with a different tone.

how, or if, one does Fu Chai/ Gou Jian sex in English

~~with tearing of hair + gnashing of teeth in the dark. oh wait, that's my futile attempts at writing.~~ We eagerly await your fic!

Ahhh, *now* I see. I thought y'll had split the entire fic up in three, and you'd done the last two chapters. Between the missing characters in my Word versions, the 'orrible encoding of the original website, and the simplified hanzi, I was utterly confused, because the beginning of 奈何劫 looked nothing like what was in your translation. 'God, Chinese is far more different from Japanese than I'd thought.'

Tearing of hair and gnashing of teeth indeed, but I begin to see, sort of, how one could do an internal story, a-realistic and devoid of the rational frames and anchoring external details of standard narration. Writing, I've almost always taken the pov of someone watching the series: emotions are conveyed or deduced by what one sees on the faces and hears in the voices. Go internal and, well, you're at least relieved of Fu Chai the Dork King, or any irony that suggests he may be dorky even if he doesn't know it. It can all be surrender!Fu Chai, as it should have been.

*sneaking in* - Hello and Happy CNY! Gong Xi a Cai! *sneaks off again* -

Take care and have a good year. Hugs

Thank you! Hope it was a good holiday for you too. *hugs back*

Interior dialogue is much more effectively and poetically done (without being maudlin) in 千秋一梦 than in most of the other Chinese fics. A v. fine line between full expression, and telling rather than showing, if a fic is done from varying POVs, not to mention confusing (at least for this reader-writer.)

Fascinating. I've never even realised it, but I really don't say please and thank you to my family, not in Mandarin anyway. (and like some commentators have pointed out, it may be a regional thing.)

It could be that I never use the textbook "please" (请) in requests; it's always 麻烦你[do this, give me that, etc.] i.e. could I trouble you to [do this, give me that, etc.]. Dunno if it's a regional thing or a personal quirk. Anyway just the idea of saying 麻烦你 to family GIVES ME THE HEEBIE-JEEBIES.

(Also SEA Chinese practically never use the polite "you" (您) that I've noticed, not outside of classrooms. Some Mainland Chinese I've met use it quite a lot. I come off as such a rude little shit in comparison.)

We (my family, that is) do mind out Ps and Qs in English though. Well, Qs anyway. Ps are still a bit weird, though at least requests are phrased as such and not as straight imperetives. Or since we never speak pure English or Mandarin anyway, a typical request actually sounds more like...

妈，可以 pass 我报纸吗？Thanks.
Mom, could you pass me the papers? Thanks.

(It looks so terrible when written out like that.)

Regional, class-- it's the same in English. I did say 'please' to my family, and certainly 'please can /may I have' to my parents, when I was a kid. Polite requests now to family are either, indeed 'can I have?' or maybe 'could I have?' But I am old and well-spoken and never watched American TV.

At work, I notice, in the infant section I and everyone says 'Can you pass me the blah-blah? Thanks.' The interrogative makes it polite enough. But in the toddlers, where the little pitchers are listening, it's always 'Can you pass me the blah-blah please? Thank you.'

妈，可以 pass 我报纸吗？Thanks.

Sounds like yer average immigrant family here, where English creeps in to everyone's Hungarian or Farsi or whatever. But it's rarely a common word like 'pass' IME.

Oh，we always say 麻烦您 as well. We use 麻烦了 instead of thank you, usually repeated effusively. But yes, it's not something you use with your family or they'll think you're being sarcastic. Instead we use the 把 construction, which drove my stepfather nuts when he was trying to learn it. So instead of saying 给我报纸, which sounds quite rude, we say 把报纸给我 with family. I can't think of a parallel construction in English to describe 把. Is it a transitive? Is it a participle? But that's what we use instead of the imperiative.

My grammar book has an entire chapter on 把! Explains it, not terrible clearly, as Subject NounPhrase1 takes (object, I assume) NP2 and does Verb with it.

Doesn't say a thing about the sense of 把 but it seems to me the examples sometimes look like Japanese Vb -te shimaimashita (did something and now it's done, with possible regrettable sense) and sometimes just like the particle を. Though *why* you must mark the object in this sense is what I'd like to know. That it can single-handedly turn a rude request into a polite one is interesting.

Props to your stepfather though. He's learning Chinese?

Yes, he's doing the opposite of what you're doing. He's trying to be able to converse. He's quite good at pinyin, but refuses to learn the characters, so I'm not quite sure how that's going to work out.

It is really hard to pin down the sense of 把. Let me think. In everyday life it is the construction you use when you ask people to do something, rather than subject-verb-noun. It's also used in when you want to stress that something is done though the agency of the subject. So to say the flower pot was blown over by the wind, one would say 风把花盆打翻了。 Hmm... I wonder if maybe this is the Chinese equivalent of the subject verb noun sentence. It's so common that maybe it was the standard construction, and only after the two attempts to realign Chinese grammar to Western scholarship that people started to get puzzled by it.

Do we mean different things by the subject verb noun sentence? VSN to me is the standard 'Dick sees the man.' Isn't taht standard Chinese word order as well?

'The wind blew the flower pot over' is standard active voice. By stress (using actual words, not the voice pitch that modern English tends to prefer) do you mean something like 'The wind it was that blew the flower pot over'?

Oh, you're right, that's it exactly. It's true that SVN is now generally the Chinese word order, but I was just wondering out aloud whether in the past the standard colloqial word order was S把NV instead, and SVN was only adopted after the standardization of modern Chinese mid last century. Because if I think about it there aren't many situations in everyday conversion where we use SVN. It's always S把NV. If my mom brought over the paper, I would say "我妈把报纸带来了". There's a 把 even though it's the past tense and there's no need to be polite.

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