Difference between revisions of "Latin and Mandarin Chinese/Lexical selection"
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Since "The ship was wrecked because of the weather" is a bit more understandable as to what is going on than "If the storm tomorrow is nice, I may go for a walk," we will have 天气 as the default translation. | Since "The ship was wrecked because of the weather" is a bit more understandable as to what is going on than "If the storm tomorrow is nice, I may go for a walk," we will have 天气 as the default translation. | ||
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+ | '''Example Sentences''' | ||
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+ | Tempestas pulchra est → 天气很好。 | ||
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+ | "The weather is beautiful." | ||
=== soror === | === soror === |
Revision as of 13:31, 7 April 2018
Contents
lat → zho
Our examples for one-to-many mappings from Latin to Chinese from last assignment were (1) the many different classifiers that can go with different nouns and (2) the sentence-ending particle 呢, often marking a rhetorical question (which, in Latin, would probably not be formally different from a genuine question). However, we later realized that these aren't exactly lexical selection problems. Instead, we decided to address the words tempestas and soror.
tempestas
The Latin word tempestas can mean "weather" or "storm". In contrast, Chinese has 天气 "weather" and 风暴 "storm". One way we can distinguish between these two senses is by looking at the adjectives that are associated with tempestas. For example, if the tempestas is pulchra "beautiful", it's probably talking about the "weather", not the "storm" (of course it's possible to speak of a "beautiful storm", but it's not the most likely case).
tempestas pulchra "beautiful weather" → 天气
tempestas calda "hot weather" → 天气
Since "The ship was wrecked because of the weather" is a bit more understandable as to what is going on than "If the storm tomorrow is nice, I may go for a walk," we will have 天气 as the default translation.
Example Sentences
Tempestas pulchra est → 天气很好。
"The weather is beautiful."
soror
Latin has just one word for "sister", soror. Chinese has 姐姐 "older sister" and 妹妹 "younger sister". This is pretty hard to select for in most cases, but at least we can tell if the Latin happens to pair soror with the adjective "big" or "small" (the Latin way of saying "older" and "younger") or some other clear indicator of age.
soror major "older sister" → 姐姐
soror minor "younger sister" → 妹妹
soror infants "infant sister" → 妹妹
zho → lat
Our examples for one-to-many mappings from Chinese to Latin were (1) the preposition 在, which can express many different locative relationships for which Latin has distinct prepositions and (2) the fact that Latin pronouns have many different forms depending on case etc., while Chinese only has one form for each pronoun. The former would be a good option if it were not for the fact that Latin often uses the locative case rather than prepositions anyway, and the latter is actually more of a grammatical issue than a lexical selection problem, so we decided to work on 开 and 头.
开
开 kai is a verb with a lot of meanings. It can mean, among other things, "to open", "to drive", "to bloom", "to hold/run/convene (e.g. a meeting)", and "to start/establish (e.g. an organization)" (see Wang 1995). Unsurprisingly, Latin has separate words for many of these concepts. For this assignment, we will focus on selecting between 开 in the sense of "to open" and 开 in the sense of "to hold/run", since 开 in the sense of "to drive" seems mostly to be used with motorized vehicles, which Latin oddly doesn't have a lot of words for. The Latin word for "to open" is aperiō (whence Apertium "open-source software for machine translation"). One Latin word for "to hold/run/convene" is convenio. We can select between these words by looking at the object of the verb:
开门 "to open a door" → aperiō
开盒子 "to open a box" → aperiō
开窗口 "to open a window" → aperiō
开抽屉 "to open a drawer" → aperiō
开会 "to hold a meeting" → convenio
开课 "to hold a class" → convenio
头
头 tou "head" can also refer to hair in some situations (see Lv 2014), which is not the case in Latin. In Latin, "head" is caput and "hair" is capillum. One way to select between these two senses is to look at the verbs and adjectives that go with tou. Some verbs and adjectives would probably only be seen with tou in the sense of "hair."
梳头 "to comb hair" → capillum
剃头 "to shave hair" → capillum
洗头 "to wash hair" → capillum
平头 → "flat hair/crewcut" → capillum
潮头 → "fashionable hair" → capillum
You might think "long hair," "curly hair," etc. might be good choices, but I think Chinese uses a different word for hair in these phrases. Since the primary meaning of 头 is "head," we will have caput as the default translation.