Tuesday, May 22, 2012

Question mark in translation


Hooray, another of the ultra nerdy Punctuation in Translation posts of mine have gone up over on KJInternational.com.
I really love that photo. I submitted it with the post for KJ, but somebody further up nixed it. Fools!

And, to quote myself,

I also really love the inverted question mark of Spanish. Isolating the interrogative clause enables the writer to use an interrogative clause as a subordinate, even without a subordinating word: No podemos dejar al perro en casa, ¿lo llevamos con nosotros? (“We can’t leave the dog at home, we’ll bring him with us?”, or “Since we can’t leave the dog at home, will we bring him with us?”) I think that this orthographical convention captures spoken language more accurately, as we so often leave out subordinating words in speech and instead rely on context for pragmatic connections.

No comments:

Post a Comment