Friday, March 2, 2012

Re-education campaign for the grammar police

I (Misha) can cheerfully admit that I'm a bit of a grammar and punctuation police.  I definitely mess things up sometimes, but I like to speak and write correctly when possible.  Things like spelling, commas, paragraph breaks, and proper use of quotation marks are very important to me.

As the adviser for three translation teams, I do a lot of editing.  One thing that I've had to learn is that the proper way to punctuate in these languages is sometimes different than how it ought to be done in English.  For example, the following is the English translation of a sentence from Ikoma Acts: "They begged me that, I should condemn him."  Ouch!  Yikes!  How do you feel about that comma?  It pains me, but that's how it is in Ikoma - there is a need to pause after the "that" and without a comma there, people reading aloud will stumble and have to start the sentence over again to say it correctly.

Another example comes from Zanaki Genesis: "Although Joseph knew his older brothers, but they didn't know him."  Aaaah!  Pain!  Agony!  There is no way that can sound like a proper sentence in Zanaki!  But oh yes, it most certainly is perfectly good Zanaki.  I wince at the idea of having "although" and "but" in the same sentence, but it is not a problem for Zanaki speakers, so I have had to learn to put my English terror aside and accept such sentences as grammatical.

What might be even more amazing than the fact I have adjusted (somewhat) to Ikoma and Zanaki grammar and punctuation is that I like the Tim McGraw song that has the verb "cain't" in it...

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