Weren’t we talking about ‘freedom’ and ‘democracy’ and people being ‘anti Confucian’? Mr Administrator (Lawson), I think the blog from ‘James’ or whoever he is suppose to be was rather insulting. Is this one-sided democracy or are you agreed that Lee Kuan Yu was correct all along?

Note from Admin: Ok, this whole thing is well beyond silly. Comment deleted for having nothing but insulting content. J Chan you have been warned about your more insulting comments before. If you want to post your comments here, try to maintain a respectful attitude and let us all work towards a productive exchange of information and thoughts.

“Had ‘that’ been an anaphora for ‘articles’ (plural) in the preceding sub-clause, the preceding demonstrative pronoun would not have been ‘this’ (singular) but ‘those’ or ‘these’ (plural). Here ‘that’ functioned as an adverb. Look at the punctuation, there is no comma after ‘this’ in Baumler’s original writing.”

Other than the last sentence, every single claim in this comment is shockingly wrong. My favorite is the following:

“Here ‘that’ functioned as an adverb.”

How do you do it?

J Chan, this has been fun. Thank you for testing the limits of my incredulity. One of my favorite English aphorisms is ‘reality is stranger than fiction’. Thank you again for showing me “the realities of life”.

With affection

DY
PRC Shenzhen

Nice try.

J Chan wrote (comment 17):

“The subject of ‘assume’ was ‘this’- a singular not a plural as stated by Du Yisa.”

No.

The subject of ‘assume’ is the demonstrative pronoun ‘that’, which is an anaphor. Its antecedent is the compound noun ‘articles like Kurlantzick’s, or like this’, which is “a plural as stated by Du Yisa.”

Please note that this was overtly clarified in both comments 13 & 15. The grammar of both Dr. Baumler’s original & my response is eminently conventional and pedestrian, although the commentary has been unexpectedly creative.

J Chan wrote (comment 14):

“‘Creative misinterpretation’- perhaps you like to interpret that for us.”

You have already done so brilliantly.

J Chan also wrote (also comment 14):

“So the lesson for you here, Du Yisa, is never change anything someone else wrote, without seeking their clarification, and investigate whether there are other ways of interpreting what was written down instead of relying on what you thought things meant and if that didn’t suit you, make a change or two without asking.”

Thanks for the lesson.

Now I must apologize, as I really must go.

Regards

DY
PRC Shenzhen

Very good. Now let us look back. There is something in QC we call traceability. Let us trace it back to what Baumler wrote shall we?

“I am always a bit amused at articles like Kurlantzick’s, or like this that assume that the Americans, their model, and their actions are what really matter here.”

The subject of ‘assume’ was ‘this’- a singular not a plural as stated by Du Yisa. The plural would have been ‘these’.

It surprises me that one who writes as well as you do would dive head-first into such an egregious bit of nitpicking.

In short: You are a real piece of work. I happen to know Du Yisa, and despite his residence in the PRC, I believe that, in a one-on-one grammar smackdown, you’d lose by a mile. (Feel free to take me to task for metting my mixaphore.)

Let me see if I, with a major in English, a Masters in Education, 25+ years of teaching experience, etc., etc., etc., can explain this in a way that even YOU can understand.

Let’s say you got a letter from your mother that said, “Arthur and his friends go to school Monday through Friday.” And let’s say, J. Chan, that for some unknown reason you wanted to write to your sister about Arthur, and actually QUOTE your mother. Following? Going too fast for you? I’ll type slower.

So you write to your sister, and you say something like: Mom says that Arthur “go[es] to school Monday through Friday.” Are you with me? (By the way, I have left your imaginary writing sample outside of quotation marks so that I don’t have to get into doubles and singles and all, which might just confuse you.)

Now, you weren’t CORRECTING your mother, nor implying that she had made a mistake. (Gods forbid; that would be so un-Confucian, J. Chan.) Rather, you were simply accounting for the fact that you had omitted Arthur’s friends outside of the quotation marks.

Get it? It’s so simple, really. My friend Du had omitted the articles BY OTHERS (“articles like Kurlantzick’s, or like this”), so he turned the verb into a singular one.

Now, even a man of my incredible erudition can be a bit slow at times. Can you explain again how in the name of all that is grammatical a sentence like “The Kurlantzick article assume that the Americans, their model, and their actions are what really matter” could ever be correct? You wrote, “[B]oth the verb conjugations in ‘this article assume’ and ‘this article assumes’ are correct. However they mean different things…” What exactly is the meaning of “this article assume”? I mean, I know it can be used in the subjunctive, if it had the proper context (“Did this article assume otherwise, I would agree with it” might pass; but most people born after the age of Pope and Swift would phrase it “Had this article assumed” or something like that.)

Recapping: Du was not impugning Mr. Baumler’s grammar; he was simply following the time-honored tradition of emending words that are placed into other contexts when inside quotation marks.

YOU, on the other hand, J Chan, are the one who found a mistake where there was none, and expended quite a bit of virtual type on “correcting” it (along with a rather gratuitous rant on “[t]ranslating a Sinitic language into an Indo-European language” which is not AT ALL what was happening here). Isn’t THAT ironic? Don’t you think?

There are two things that really stand out as wonderful in the above exchanges:

1. “In the case of the example here, a simple change in syntax (ie the addition/ deletion of an ’s’ in the English verb conjugation) changes the semantics completely.” Wow. Do you kill flies with a bazooka?

2. The most wonderful thing of all: Mr. Baumler’s “noble silence” regarding all this. I think I’ll join him.

Peace,
James

Please note: While I’ve done my best to write the above correctly, errors do creep in. Forgive me. Just be sure you don’t start finding errors where there are none; the real ones will suffice.