Elizabeth Bear (1:01:28 PM): ...does anybody know how Russians punctuate dialogue?
Leah Bobet(1:04:39 PM): I do not, sorry.
Bear (1:05:28 PM): I have learned that Russian lacks a copular verb in the present tense, and so it may be indicated by a dash.
Bear (1:05:39 PM): IE, they have no equivalent of "to be."
Bear (1:06:17 PM): I am a jelly doughnut, then, in Russian becomes I -- jelly doughnut.
Bear (1:06:34 PM): Aha!
Bear (1:07:15 PM): They use a combination of the dashes and the guillemets
Bear (1:07:17 PM): win!
One wonders how one translates "To be or not to be" or "I think, therefor I am," into Russian.
...ooo, here's a webpage on domovoi....
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Interestingly, Klingon also lacks the verb "to be".
ReplyDeleteWhen I was in junior high we had a Create-A-Language project (which I think is awesome even today.) Every student had to create their own language, alphabet, etc. My language also lacked the verb "to be" (before I knew that either Klingon or Russian was the same), but possessed a verb for "to not be"; my explanation (I was in Grade 7 at the time) was that they considered "being" to be such a fundamental concept in existence that they only felt a need to comment on things "not being". If they had to express something as "being" they did so by saying "not not being."
See? That's clever.
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