Si hoc legere scis...

[Zhen Lin]

Si hoc legere scis, nimium eruditionis habes.

Now, how best can this be translated into Japanese?

I suppose it could be written in modern Japanese:
これが読めれば、教育がありすぎる。

But that's Latin, so I suppose classical Japanese would be a better fit.

これ読まるれば、教育がありすぐ。

Or should I use 未然形? Or perhaps ゆ instead of る? Is ～すぎる a
modern idiom?

[jcrippen]

Use kanbun instead. That's sort of equivalent to Latin for English
speakers, isn't it?

[j...@csse.monash.edu.au]

Zhen Lin <lo...@hotmail.com> dixit:

>Si hoc legere scis, nimium eruditionis habes.

Well, obviously that doesn't apply to me.

>Now, how best can this be translated into Japanese?

I always turn to
http://drhnakai.hp.infoseek.co.jp/latin/sub-latin-list.html

Sadly, it doesn't have that one. Doesn't have "Sona si Latine loqueris"
either (Honk if you speak Latin.)

--
Jim Breen http://www.csse.monash.edu.au/~jwb/
Clayton School of Information Technology,
Monash University, VIC 3800, Australia
ジム・ブリーン@モナシュ大学

[Bart Mathias]

此(れ)を読みえば for the first part, maybe. Then it gets hard. ありす
ぐ sounds weird to me. 余る maybe, but that sounds a little underdone.
If 教育 instead of some nice Japanese word, maybe 漢語 for the end, too?

Bart

[Marc Adler]

Zhen Lin wrote:

> Si hoc legere scis, nimium eruditionis habes.
>
> Now, how best can this be translated into Japanese?
>
> I suppose it could be written in modern Japanese:
> これが読めれば、教育がありすぎる。

教育を受けすぎている？

教育がありすぎる sounds like social commentary, or a company
boss bitching about all the training courses his junior staff is being
dragged away from work to.

此
可
読
、
有
過
剰
知
識

Marc

[Zhen Lin]

Marc Adler wrote:
> 此
> 可
> 読
> 、
> 有
> 過
> 剰
> 知
> 識

Is it necessary to have both 過 and 剰?

Any 訓点 for us?

[Marc Adler]

Zhen Lin wrote:

> Is it necessary to have both 過 and 剰?

Excellent question. While I have indeed studied kanbun and can get
through some pretty elementary texts with the kaeriten and all that
fairly well, I can't write it, and 此可読有過剰知識 is more of
a joke than anything. To start with, there's no "if" anywhere in there.
若此可読?

Bart will be able to answer this one.

Marc

[Bart Mathias]

Maybe in his pre-dementia days. (And he used to *teach* kanbun.)

You don't need an "if," I'm pretty sure. Classical Chinese often got
along with "and" (ie., clause succession) for "if," like English. ("Do
that and you'll die!")

I wonder if a 者 wouldn't go nicely after the 読? (Which was
interpreted itself pretty close to "if" by the early Japanese, when they
assigned it the reading(s) は／ば.)

Bart

[Zhen Lin]

How about this:

漢文：
若読得此、教育有餘
　下　上　　　レ
（若此読得、教育餘有）(I hope)

訓読：
もし(?)　これを　よみ　えば　ケウイクが　あまりに　あり

Question:
Which mora have 甲類 vowels, which have 乙類 vowels? How would you write
this in 万葉仮名?

[Marc Adler]

Zhen Lin wrote:

No idea. But, couldn't you just find a Chinese translation of the
phrase? Wouldn't it be purdy darn similar?

Marc

[Zhen Lin]

It would have to be classical Chinese - I haven't studied that.

[Bart Mathias]

I don't know how a 万葉仮名 writer would of wrote it, but it could be
done thus:

毛之許礼余美衣者教育阿末利二安里

I dropped the が cause it ain't grammatical, and I left 教育 in Chinese
so as not to take a chance of being the first to write on'yomis in
man'yougana.

許 and 余 are 乙類; 美 is 甲類. 衣 is actually 乙類 too (we can tell
from morphology), but not officially recognized as such, because there
isn't a single contrasting 甲類 "e." (Non-contrasting syllables [I
don't know if they can be demonstrated to be moraic in OJ], seem to be
automatically, if meaninglessly at *best*, classed as 甲類!)

Bart

[Zhen Lin]

Bart Mathias wrote:
> I dropped the が cause it ain't grammatical, and I left 教育 in Chinese
> so as not to take a chance of being the first to write on'yomis in
> man'yougana.

Is that so? Has が gained more uses then? (Ignoring the loss of genitive
functionality.)

> 許 and 余 are 乙類; 美 is 甲類. 衣 is actually 乙類 too (we can tell
> from morphology), but not officially recognized as such, because there
> isn't a single contrasting 甲類 "e."

Hmm, how does this work? Is 未然形 /e/ 乙類 by analogy with 上二段
conjugation? Do they consistently spell 乙類 /e/, but mess up non-乙類
/e/? And what about the /e/ - /je/ contrast?

[Marc Adler]

Zhen Lin wrote:

> It would have to be classical Chinese - I haven't studied that.

I didn't know it was that different.

Marc

[Bart Mathias]

Zhen Lin wrote:
> Bart Mathias wrote:
>
>>I dropped the が cause it ain't grammatical, and I left 教育 in Chinese
>>so as not to take a chance of being the first to write on'yomis in
>>man'yougana.
>
> Is that so? Has が gained more uses then? (Ignoring the loss of genitive
> functionality.)

Its current use as a first-argument marker results from its use for
connecting nouns. The modern adnominal/sentence-ending verb forms (終止
連体形) are a result, in the latter capacity, of the loss of the
original 終止形 and its replacement by the classical 連体形, which was
essentially nominal. (I think the origin of ending sentences in 連体形
is analogous to the modern [increasing?] use of the "extended predicate"
の[だ]). It was natural to link noun subjects with nominal predicates
via a "genitive" particle. That use survived in form only.

The 終止形 wasn't nominal, so the use of a nominal connector was
decidedly unusual.

>>許 and 余 are 乙類; 美 is 甲類. 衣 is actually 乙類 too (we can tell
>>from morphology), but not officially recognized as such, because there
>>isn't a single contrasting 甲類 "e."
>
>
> Hmm, how does this work? Is 未然形 /e/ 乙類 by analogy with 上二段
> conjugation? Do they consistently spell 乙類 /e/, but mess up non-乙類
> /e/? And what about the /e/ - /je/ contrast?

Yes, to your analogy question, except the 上 part. All 下二段 verbs
with 甲乙 distinguishable "...e" syllables in their secondary root form
conjugate 乙類. So one assumes (at least I do) that the others would be
乙類 too if only they could. Then the secondary root of 得 is 乙類 "e."

There is no case of え that is morphologically identifiable as 甲類.
That is one reason I believe that it is only 乙類. I have supported the
notion since 1960 that 甲類 syllables (which most people believe
typically arose from an "i-a" contraction) are partly distinguished from
the 乙類 by a palatal on-glide, something like [...je]. (Alexander
Vovin assures me that this is incorrect; Marc Miyake's dissertation
proves otherwise. I haven't found time to look at the dissertation, but
I doubt it would make an old dog like me learn any new tricks.)
Therefore, vocalic-initial 甲類 "e" would be [je], or ヤ行の「え」 (万葉
がな 「江」 for one).

However, we know that the second syllable in 見え has to be 乙類,
morphologically. So it turns out that 甲乙 "e" get neutralized after
the laminal "y" just as they do after the laminal "s, z, t, d, n," and
"r." Incidentally, this has always been my major arugment for the yode
hypothesis of 江類 "e": [j] after a labial consonant is just too much
trouble, and it vanished there just as it has in most English dialects
where "dew" and "due" now sound the same as "do," and hardly anyone says
"tyoozday" anymore for the day after Monday. When I was young, I was
puzzled that "news" ("nooz") came out ニュウス in Japanese, so complete
was the loss of post-laminal [j] in my dialect. (I do say "in lyoo of,"
but that's the only exception I am aware of in my own speech; "erudite"
is "air-you-dight" with the [j] starting a new syllable.)

I have often seen OJ て、せ、 etc., classified as 甲類. I think this is
a misleading way to refer to neutralized syllables.

Bart

[Zhen Lin]

It's at least as different as classical and modern Japanese.

Classical Chinese is to East Asia as [Mediaeval] Latin is to Europe.