Regarding some points from this week's class, I have a few afterthoughts bugging me now.
Firstly, the Arabic writing and its balance.
I find it amusing as well as wonder if when it comes to writing, Arabic-speaking writers consciously put in the coordinators to balance out their sentences. Are they trained since they were young? Do they follow the flow of sentences and just do it? They must have a good sense of writing.
Then here is the essay by the Arabic-speaking student. I think the essay was originally written in English, not a translation from Arabic. In this case, I find it more amusing that the student was still able to keep his/her style of mother-tounge writing (I'm very sorry for the weird expression, I don't know the right term to use) even though he/she was writing in a foreign language.
As we have seen in our "Speech Acts" class, most of us responded to a similar situation differently when using English and Mandarin, and most probably other mother tounges.
However, this student seems to be able to use English to convey and express his/her Arabic ideas very well without being affected by the English norms of writing.
Yes, this includes having the Arabic balance in English sentences.
Is this a case of poor skills in interlanguage variation?
Secondly, I feel that comparing texts A and B is not fair to see how English and Chinese writings differ.
Text A is more like an intellectual, educational, scientific piece of writing similar to those found in journals and other reports.
Text B is more like a beautiful, artsy poem.
Two different pieces of writing with different purposes. I'm very sure they can't adopt the same style of writing.
http://www.library.utoronto.ca/canpoetry/litovitz/poem3.htm
http://www.library.utoronto.ca/canpoetry/litovitz/poem2.htm
I am no literature person. But those two poems were written in English by one poet.
Do their structures differ? Do they follow any particular genetic language types(e.g. circular Oriental or digressive Russian)?
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Hi Andy,
ReplyDeleteI share your sentiments too.
I find it amazing that Arabians consciously or unconsciously balance out their sentences. It is as if they were all taught from young to be poets.
Also about poems, I agree with you that there are many which don't follow the typical English structure, yet they are undoubtedly written by English speakers.
Perhaps Kaplan's doodles are best used to categorize prose rather than poems, or else, many poems will fall in none of his doodling categories.
Like the poems you posted in your entry, they don't seem to be following any structure. It is more like a combination of many different writing structures put together, and in the end, it is hard to categorize the writing into a single doodle category.
I know culture may be only one of the factors that influence one's writing styles. Competence in a foreign language can surely be another major factor (probably a more important one) affecting how one writes in that language.
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