I thought this was interesting enough to entirely crosspost. Alas that I speke no Frenshe. Article: 1194855 of rec.arts.sf.written From: dtate at ida.org (David Tate) Newsgroups: rec.arts.sf.written Subject: Re: SFnal Linguistic Tricks Date: 8 Nov 2004 06:10:06 -0800 Message-ID: <9d67e55e.0411080610.6d11c667 at posting.google.com> NNTP-Posting-Host: 129.246.254.14 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit NNTP-Posting-Date: Mon, 8 Nov 2004 14:10:06 +0000 (UTC) David Silberstein <davids_aat_kithrup.comma at foilspam.invalid> wrote in message news:<I6sIo9.A0H at kithrup.com>... > In article <cm331e$kpl$1 at lust.ihug.co.nz>, > Michael Caldwell <absurdum at es.co.nz> wrote: > >I've taken such a shine to them that I've started using them in > >real life to some extent, especially the phrase "I pretend" to > >mean all of the things such as "I think", "I suppose", "Possibly", > >"I am certain of" etc that it does in this usage. > > I nearly think that if you are using "pretend" to mean "certain", > then you are entirely misusing the essence of the word. To quote > two words by the noble C. Sophronia Cleebers: > > 3. It appears that Dragaeran, like some languages in our > own world, grammatically distinguishes statements of > observed fact from guesses, inferences, and unsupported > allegations. To illustrate this, compare English, which > allows the same verb to be used for all those senses -- > both /I see it is red/ and /I see it is new/ -- with the > Hopi language, which requires the speaker to distinguish > them: /I see it is red/, but /I infer that it is new/. > > In Brust's translation, this distinction is > conveyed by the verb "to pretend." It takes the place of > such words as feign, guess, allege, assert, imagine, > claim, believe, say (without further substantiation), > theorize, think, be under the impression that, represent > as being and pretend (in its usual sense), as well as > the interrogative, do (you) wish to make me believe; > that is, in statements unsupported by material > observation. That's nicely erudite, but way too complicated. What Brust is actually doing is using the verb "to pretend" as it was when first borrowed from the French, where "prétendre" still means "to claim or assert". The Stuart heirs were called Pretenders because they were asserting a claim, not because they were feigning or simulating anything: pretend c.1380, "to profess or claim," from O.Fr. pretendre "to lay claim," from L. prætendere "stretch in front, put forward, allege," from præ- "before" + tendere "to stretch," from PIE base *ten- "to stretch" (see tend). Main modern sense of "feign, put forward a false claim" is recorded from 1412; the older sense of simply "to claim" is behind the string of royal pretenders (1697) in Eng. history. Meaning "to play, make believe" is recorded from 1865. > >Also the over use of "Almost" ("Have you seen your father > >today?" "I almost pretend that I have.") 'Almost'? I nearly think the word of choice is 'nearly'. > To continue with two more words by Cleebers: > > It is clear, from Brust's translations of > Paarfi's pre-Interregnum works, that at that time the > Dragaeran language also distinguished states of > imperfect knowledge on the part of the speaker, a > distinction that Brust most commonly translates as "to > almost think." For whatever reason -- the linguistic > evolution of Dragaeran is beyond the scope of this essay > -- it appears that by the time of the events described > in the present volume, everyday speech had dispensed > with this distinction concerning one's own state of > knowledge. I would propose an alternative interpretation. Paarfi is describing an extremely mannered and cutthroat society, in which giving offense could easily be fatal. Such societies invariably develop speech mannerisms that allow vulnerable persons to state opinions or make suggestions without the full force that a simple statement or suggestion would normally have, in order to make it possible for the listener to demur or decline without either party being forced to take umbrage. I take Brust to be using constructions like "I nearly think" or "I almost feel" to capture whatever Dragaeran amelioratives existed in the speech of that time. It's not honesty about the state of one's knowledge; it's caution in the face of prickly codes of honor. David Tate