Elmo Lum | Particles

Particles

November 10, 2012

Woke up thinking about particles the other day. Not the kind like dust — the kind I was thinking about was the kind of particles that are used in language. Which I don’t have a lot of occasion to think about, seeing as my only real language is English and, as far as I know, its only particles are yes, no, and not.

In other words, the kind of linguistic particles that aren’t quite real words, that don’t have their own meaning, but whose only purpose is to modify the sense of the language that surrounds them. Yes, no, and not by themselves don’t have meaning, but only serve to affirm or negate the context of their surrounding words.

All languages have the particle not (yes and no are not actually essential). And some languages have others — for example, all the various dialects of Chinese use particles to designate questions (as a tonal language, it isn’t easy to express questions by varying one’s tone).

Twelve months of winter /
The rest summer!

Russian employs a handful particles, among them же, to designate emphasis, as well as ты, to mean (a generally positive kind of) astonishment. But neither translates that well into English. For example, что же — что meaning what — is typically translated as “what in the world,” a reasonable approximation, but one that isn’t always so easily applied to other particles. Consider this little poem about Kolyma:

Колыма ты, Колыма
Чудная планета
Двенадцать месяцев зима
А остальное лето!

In English this is typically rendered something like this:

Kolyma, Kolyma
Beautiful planet
Twelve months of winter
The rest summer!

In the opening line, the particle ты is simply left out. This particle simply doesn’t translate. At least not gracefully. In translation, some of the sense of the poem (the astonishment of ты) is simply abandoned.

This is hardly a new idea, that translations are a weaker golem of language. It’s long been noted, for example, that translations age more quickly than their originals. In ancient China, a famous translator once referred to reading a translation as being like eating food someone else has chewed and spit out.

But who in the world wakes up to think about particles?

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Is d’oh a particle? I’m not quite sure.

Also, strictly speaking, it seems particles can sometimes refer to whole classes of words, including conjunctions and interjections.

I’m just assuming this — I can’t imagine how a language could manage without it.

During the Soviet era, Kolyma was one of the most remote gulags; its inmates referred to it as the dark side of the moon. I learned about it and this poem while reading The Unquiet Ghost by Adam Hochschild, a fine book in which one chapter relates how he made the arrangements to visit the actual site, which arrangements ended up being tinged with sweetness and humor.

Actually, for quite some time I didn’t understand this sense of ты. But when watching the Russian vampire film Ночный Дозор (Night Watch, 2004), I came across the scene where one of the characters is watching a subtitled episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, where she meets a vampire but doesn’t know who he is, and when the vampire says he’s Dracula, a surprised Buffy smiles and tells him, Get out! For which the Russian subtitle read, Что ты! (Что meaning What.) After that, I knew what ты meant.

As it happens, ты is also a homonym for the familiar form of you, much like the French tu (or once upon a time, the English thou).

I heard of this while taking a university course in ancient Chinese literature, but I’ve forgotten the man’s name (I pretty much always forget Chinese names). So far I haven’t been able to track the name down.