On 2010-04-11 11:48:09 -0400, CDB said:
> PaulJK wrote:
>> CDB wrote:
>>> Robert Bannister wrote:
>>>> Adam Funk wrote:
>>>>> On 2010-04-02, Al in St Lou wrote:
>>>>> "Otto Bahn" wrote:
>>>>>
>>>>>>> That makes no sense all. Why would the aliens let him learn
>>>>>>> the language?!
>>>>>> Perhaps the character did it surreptitiously.
>>>>>
>>>>> That's what Wikipedia says:
>>>>>
>>>>> A friend of the narrator, a UN translator named Gregori,
>>>>> steals one of the Kanamit books, and he and the narrator
>>>>> attempt to translate it, via a basic Kanamit-English
>>>>> dictionary provided by the aliens. After some weeks, they
>>>>> determine that the title is "To Serve Man." Two weeks later,
>>>>> the narrator returns from a trip to find Gregori distraught.
>>>>> Gregori says that he has translated the first chapter of the
>>>>> book:
>>>>>
>>>>> "It's a cookbook," he said.
>>>>>
>>>>> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/To_Serve_Man#Synopsis
>>>>
>>>> Which is, of course, funny except to linguists who realise that
>>>> the chances of this "serve" pun working in another language is
>>>> rather improbable.
>>>>
>>> But the pun, or mistranslation, *was* entirely in English. The
>>> title in the aliens' language had no need to mean anything but
>>> "put on a platter".
>>
>> Yes, I find it quite difficult to believe it could ever happen like
>> that. Having spent weeks to determine the title's translation to be
>> "To Serve Man", they couldn't possibly NOT know what kind
>> of "serving" was in fact meant. What the book was all about
>> couldn't then come as an unexpected surprise.
>>
> Giving the author the benefit of the doubt, I suppose we could take it
> that the aliens' bilingual dictionary was on the rudimentary side, and
> simply had an entry like "SCZNARFR -- to serve". The anglophone
> humans, first working on the title,
> SCZPG?WNNARFF(slurp)T, might painfully decipher the sequence "to serve
> man", and make the wrong choice among possible meanings.
>>
> Note that the utterance denoting what we like to think of as a "direct
> object", but for which the Kanamit use a term better translated
> (although still very approximately) as "between the mandibles", is
> appropriately placed in the phrase, or "pounce", as an infix. It is
> pronounced a little like "pigoon", but with more saliva.
More than that, there is no "pun" here; this is a case of semantic
ramifications. And, as C. S. Lewis noted in "Studies in Words",
semantic ramifications can run in parallel across multiple languages.
--
John W Kennedy
"The poor have sometimes objected to being governed badly; the rich
have always objected to being governed at all."
-- G. K. Chesterton. "The Man Who Was Thursday"
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