I’m suspicious of the idea that an author could mean one thing, and yet accidentally form a statement which has a different interpretation that is still true, like taking the syllables of a true sentence in Japanese, reciting them out loud, and finding that they form a true sentence in English. My childhood experience with Judaic “reinterpretation” of inconvenient Biblical passages may have something to do with this.
But as said, this is far more plausibly going to happen with poetic, evocative, indirect statements like those in the Twelve Virtues, than with sentences from a random OBLW post.
Didn’t Hofstadter do something like a “grammatically correct sentence in one language that is also phonetically correct in another language” in one of his books or articles? Not that it undermines your point, but I couldn’t find it and vaguely remember seeing it before.
That’s not really the point, though, is it. I mean, I can write “Tengo tu estudio” (I have your studio) which is phonetically the same as “Ten go to a studio”. However, the only meaning they share is due to one word having the same parent (something I wonder about the Korean Tang and the Japanese -tan? but probably not). In any case, cross-language phonetic coincidences are much less rare than an author unintentionally including dual meanings in his text on a level deeper than “That’s what she said”. Which is what bothers me about people who read too much into Ulysses.
I’m suspicious of the idea that an author could mean one thing, and yet accidentally form a statement which has a different interpretation that is still true, like taking the syllables of a true sentence in Japanese, reciting them out loud, and finding that they form a true sentence in English. My childhood experience with Judaic “reinterpretation” of inconvenient Biblical passages may have something to do with this.
But as said, this is far more plausibly going to happen with poetic, evocative, indirect statements like those in the Twelve Virtues, than with sentences from a random OBLW post.
Didn’t Hofstadter do something like a “grammatically correct sentence in one language that is also phonetically correct in another language” in one of his books or articles? Not that it undermines your point, but I couldn’t find it and vaguely remember seeing it before.
http://pugs.blogs.com/audrey/2009/04/post.html
That’s not really the point, though, is it. I mean, I can write “Tengo tu estudio” (I have your studio) which is phonetically the same as “Ten go to a studio”. However, the only meaning they share is due to one word having the same parent (something I wonder about the Korean Tang and the Japanese -tan? but probably not). In any case, cross-language phonetic coincidences are much less rare than an author unintentionally including dual meanings in his text on a level deeper than “That’s what she said”. Which is what bothers me about people who read too much into Ulysses.