Re: [tied] English.

Lest anyone misunderstand me, yes I am speaking tongue-in-cheek. In
fact I find it just wonderful that Piotr is our resident scholar on
the history of English. I was commenting on the apparent and sometimes
very real tyranny one language can exercise over another, but from the
unusual viewpoint of English, and the tyranny other languages impose
on it: oh, the poor little English language, and how it is put upon by
the rest of the world.

While English is not being led by the nose by non-native-speakers, it
is nonetheless feeling the constraints imposed by such speakers. Very
often, your English is more bookishly polished that we could ever
manage and we are almost obligated to follow your lead in this regard.

More broadly, I was talking of the internal pressures imposed on
current Modern English by our literature. The literature from
Shakespeare on down keep the current language in literary lockstep
with that of the past: synchrony and diachrony being squeezed into
one.

--- In cybalist@..., "Piotr Gasiorowski" <gpiotr@...> wrote:
> I think Mark is "complaining" with tongue in cheek. If it's any
comfort, I've learn quite a lot about the history of Polish from
foreigners, including quite a few English-speakers. And "we,
Indo-Europeans" owe a lot of first-class IE scholarship to "non-IE"
linguists like Oswald Szemerényi or Raimo Anttila.

It takes a non-native-speaker to really see the forest for the trees
of any language. A comparativist by definition has be non-native in at
least one of the languages he compares. Piotr's observations of
English are done from a rich, valuable vantage point.

Veering a little off topic, I wonder how Piotr regards Joseph Conrad.
Does Piotr back-translate, and attempt to get into Conrad's head?
And how well does Conrad translate into Polish, in comparison to
other English authors?

For those who might not know, the novelist Joseph Conrad is an
acknowledged grand master of English style. His native langauge was
Polish, and he spoke no English until he was an adult (tho' he
appparently read English passably well from childhood on). His written
English is better than that of just about any native speaker's.
Nabokov is the other wonder of this species of author.