[Lexicog] accusatory observation?

[Joseph Farquharson]

Hi Mike:

In Jamaican Creole, an English-based Creole in the Caribbean we would say.

Yu pen jrap    'Your pen dropped'

Mi pen laas    'My pen [is] lost.

Joseph

Mike_Cahill at sil.org wrote:
Hi all,
This is only marginally related to lexicography, but then we've had some
marginal discussions before...

Someone wrote to me:

   He (the teacher had one activity for us (the class) in which he dropped
   a pen, and then he
   asked us what we would say to him.  ("You dropped your pen")  Then he
   asked
   anyone who spoke another language how they would say it in another
   language,
   and what the direct translation was.  (Usually "the pen dropped").  He
   said
   that only in English and in German you would say "You dropped the pen",
   and
   that ALL OTHER LANGUAGES would say "the pen dropped".  He then went on
   to
   say that we can learn things about the culture from the way we say
   things,
   and had us come up with words to describe the two types of cultures
   represented by these two phrases.  The majority of responses had English

   speakers being accusatory, or some other unsavory adjective, and the
   other
   speakers being much more polite and sensitive.

Anytime someone claims a universal, my tendency is to say "Oh I bet I can
find a counterexample." So my question to those of you who are native
speakers of something other than English or German, what is the most
NATURAL way to make an observation of someone dropping something, to call
that person's attention to it? Not what is possible, but the most common
way of saying it. Facts first, then interpretation...

Mike Cahill


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Joseph T. Farquharson, BA Hon. (UWI), M.Phil. (Cantab.)
Graduate Student
Dept. of Language, Linguistics & Philosophy
University of the West Indies
Mona campus, Kingston 7
Jamaica, West Indies.
URL: http://www.geocities.com/jtfarquharson/index.html





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