|
本帖最后由 choi 于 9-24-2020 12:26 编辑
John Banville, Subject, Predicate, Mystery. Wall Street Journal, Sept 19, 2020 (in the Review section that appears every Saturday).
https://www.wsj.com/articles/sup ... -pieces-11600439558
(book review on Brian Dillion, Suppose a Sentence. NYRB, 2020)
Quote:
paragraph 1: "The sentence is humankind’s greatest invention. Our constitutions and our laws are graven in sentences, and in sentences our histories are written. We declare love, and war, by way of the sentence. There have been civilizations, those of the pre-Columbian southern Americas, for instance, that did not have the wheel, but they had to have had the sentence, otherwise they would not have been civilizations. It is the essential contrivance that sets us apart from—though not above—the other animals. What should we do without it? Grunt.
first clause of paragraph 3: "He [Dillion] takes his title from one of Gertrude Stein's smugly meaningless effusions
paragraph 5: "He [Dillon] begins, mischievously, with Hamlet's last words, though not his last words as we generally know them. 'There are three variant texts of Hamlet, and, in at least one the Dane [Hamlet the person] dies differently: "-- the rest is silence. O, o, o, o." ' [end of quote] Though it lacks subject. verb and predicate [All commentaries on English grammar say a predicate includes a verb], 'O, o, o, o' is a sentence. and though it is a short one, it is not the shortest among Mr Dillon's choices -- that honor goes to Charlotte Brontë's 'The drug wrought' -- but the commentary attached is the briefest in the book, and ends thrillingly. Hamlet's 'O, o, o, o' is, Mr Dillon writes, 'surely nothing more or less than the vocal expression, precisely, of silence. "O" is the tragic apotheosis of zero.' "
Note:
(a)
(i) WSJ places the review behind paywall. There is no need to read the rest.
(ii) John Banville
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Banville
(1945- ; an Irish novelist)
(ii) NYRB stands for New York Review Books
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_Review_Books
(1999- )
(b) "Our constitutions and our laws are graven in sentences"
(i) grave (vt; past tense: graved, past participle: graven or graved; the etymology of grave as a verb and a noun are identical): "to carve or cut (something, such as letters or figures) into a hard surface : ENGRAVE <graved the dates of his birth and death on the headstone>"
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/graven
(ii) In "engrave":
en- (prefix; from Latin in-)
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/en-
(c) "There have been civilizations, those of the pre-Columbian southern Americas, for instance, that did not have the wheel"
(i) wheel
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wheel
section 2 History: "Although large-scale use of wheels did not occur in the Americas prior to European contact, numerous small wheeled artifacts, identified as children's toys [photo], have been found in Mexican archeological sites, some dating to approximately 1500 BC. It is thought that the primary obstacle to large-scale development of the wheel in the Americas was the absence of domesticated large animals that could be used to pull wheeled carriages. The closest relative of cattle present in Americas in pre-Columbian times, the American Bison, is difficult to domesticate and was never domesticated by Native Americans; several horse species existed until about 12,000 years ago, but ultimately became extinct. The only large animal that was domesticated in the Western hemisphere, the llama, a pack animal, but not physically suited to use as a draft animal to pull wheeled vehicles, and use of the llama did not spread far beyond the Andes by the time of the arrival of Europeans." footnotes omitted).
(ii) my comment: That is no excuse. A wheelbarrow comes in handy.
(iii) There had been no cattle in American continent before Europeans arrived. See McTavish EJ et al, New World Cattle Show Ancestry from Multiple Independent Domestication Events. Proc Nat Acad Sci (2013) 110: E1398–1406.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3625352/
Significance: "Cattle were independently domesticated from the aurochs, a wild bovine species, in the vicinity of the current countries of Turkey and Pakistan [from here to China, among other places] ∼10,000 y ago.
text: "Domesticated cattle consist of two major lineages that are derived from independent domestications of the same progenitor species, the aurochs (Bos primigenius). The aurochs was a large wild bovine species found throughout Europe and Asia, as well as in North Africa; it has been extinct since 1627. These two primary groups of domesticated cattle are variously treated by different authors as subspecies (Bos taurus taurus and Bos taurus indicus) or as full species (Bos taurus and Bos indicus). For simplicity, we refer here to these two groups as taurine and indicine cattle, respectively. The most obvious phenotypic differences between these groups are the noticeable hump at the withers (ie, the shoulders of a four-legged mammal) and the floppy rather than upright ears of indicine cattle. The taurine lineage was probably first domesticated in the Middle East, with some later contributions from European aurochsen; the indicine lineage was domesticated on the Indian subcontinent * * * the taurine and indicine groups are thought to share a most-recent common ancestor ≥200,000 y[ears] ago. * * * The first cattle in the Americas were brought to the Caribbean island of Hispaniola, from the Canary Islands, by Christopher Columbus on his second voyage across the Atlantic in 1493
(A) The word indicine is not found in English dictionaries.
(B) zebu
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zebu
("Zebu are characterised by a fatty hump on their shoulders, a large dewlap, and sometimes drooping ears")
Its etymology is from Modern French zébu.
(C) Latin-English dictionary:
* indicus (adjective masculine; from Ancient Greek [adjective] indikós, from [proper name] Indía): "Indian"
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/indicus
|
发表于 9-24-2020 12:13:42
楼主