Rights organisations have long accused Pyongyang of shooting dead convicts in public
Err:
Rights organisations have long accused Pyongyang of shooting convicts dead in public
Conveys the meaning a litle better?
Rights organisations have long accused Pyongyang of shooting dead convicts in public
Err:
Rights organisations have long accused Pyongyang of shooting convicts dead in public
Conveys the meaning a litle better?
Defending their human rights records, then? They were dead anyway, so merely target practice?
Showing less cruelty per se than the man who actually killed the convict in the first place.
Curious language, English. ‘Shooting dead’ would generally be regarded as a verb, wouldn’t it? You wouldn’t confuse walking out angrily with walking out in the rain. First case ‘walking out’ is the verb whereas in the second the verb is ‘walking’. It depends on the context. Pretty well everyone will presume the second context for the dead convicts but not the first. First wouldn’t make sense. It’s something one has to explain to people learning English. We’re pretty flexible about what order we say words in & rely on context.
The cat sat on the mat. On the mat the cat sat. On the mat sat the cat. The cat on the mat sat. Sat the cat on the mat.
The classic phrase to give to computer natural language parsing software:
Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana.
@BiW:
Button flies like Levi 501s.
You wouldn’t confuse walking out angrily with walking out in the rain
I don’t know, because you’d primed me with walking_out angrily I naturally read that as walking_out in the rain. As in, ahh, look at that sweet couple, in the rain even.
Time flies.
I can’t, they move too fast.
Sat the cat on the mat
Implies that it is a question.
Such remnants of Germanic grammar persist in modern English.
It is a pity that we don’t have proper cases in English anymore, which would allow us to differentiate the subjects and objects more clearly.
@ Ottokring
They could all be interrogative, depending on the tone they were spoken with. Stressing the final word implies a question. Or not.
Like is a very difficult word to explain to foreigners because it’s used so much. Mostly so indefinitely & confusingly. It would have helped if we’d kept the a on the front as alike.
But. “What’s she like?” An elephant? Ten miles of bad road? The late queen? I’m pretty sure chocolates & new shoes.
Using anything other than “The cat sat on the mat” in normal conversation (as opposed to a literary or poetic trope) marks you out as a non-native speaker. We can readily understand “On the mat sat the cat”, but no native speaker would talk like this.
There’s a similar ‘trap’ for non-native speakers in adjectival order. No English speaker needs to be taught this, because they learn it at their mother’s knee, but there’s a strict order: opinion, size, age, shape, colour, origin, material, purpose. So you can have a beautiful little old rectangular yellow French wooden rocking chair, but if you change the word order it will sound odd. Most Indo-European languages have similar rules and a similar order, even though they may disagree about whether adjectives should precede or follow their noun :).
At a session in Geneva last week, which examines the record of member states every four to five years, Britain urged North Korea to “reform the judicial system to ensure respect for the right to a fair trial and end sentences that constitute cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment”.
Now do Peter Lynch.
@Chris Miller
He walked into the room & on the mat sat the cat, enjoying the warmth from the fire.
I’m not a native English speaker?
Despite his many attempts to discourage it, he walked into the room & on the mat the cat sat, giving him a defiant glare.
BiS
Ah yes, but there us a temporal element to consider
If you had said
I went into the room. The cat sat on the mat.
Or put in an “and” instead of the full stop .
Then that is an action succeeding your entering the room.
I went into the room and on the mat sat the cat.
Implies that the cat was already sitting there when you came in.
Fun innit ?
@Ott
Putting the verb last ties it in with the following verb. So giving the feeling that the cat is not just sitting passively but sitting defiantly & glaring. And it’s just done by moving a couple of words around.
I was driving home last night listening to one of my friends jabbering away in Spanish so fast it was difficult to separate the words. And I was thinking I could leisurely say exactly the same thing in English in about half the words.
Most Indo-European languages have similar rules and a similar order, even though they may disagree about whether adjectives should precede or follow their noun :).
“He recalled the scene of the battle, the snow white the trees black the blood red.”
BiS
you’re a poet but you don’t noet.
Is . . . is it wrong to do that? In public I mean? Should they do the executions of their political prisoners out of sight of the public?
An old, daft and still extant headline in The Daily Record: ‘Gunmen admit attempt to shoot dead brother of feared gangster Stewart ‘Specky’ Boyd’.
“Is . . . is it wrong to do that? In public I mean? Should they do the executions of their political prisoners out of sight of the public?”
Dunno… Crime in NORK is different from our backyard…
As featured in cloggie news: Taliban did a public execution, since… a while…
In this case a confessed murderer, with the Bereaved pulling the trigger.
Which I can.,…. understand…
Provided, of course, if in the turn of Years the executee is proved inocent , the executors face the same fate.
Makes people a *lot* less eager to push the Button, and sort-of ensures the complainants make *absolutely sure* they’re in the right.
Not that that will ever happen in Talibanistan, but … it’s worth thinking about.