My first blog entry on English Club, so I had better introduce myself.
I am Australian born, so my native language is English - if you can call what they speak down here "English". However, my mother was English (as in "from England"), and my father's parents were British (Scottish and Welsh).
I joined the English Club because I have a huge interest in languages in general, and English particularly - because of its extremely diverse origins. I speak "school-boy" German, understand quite a lot of spoken German but can read most German newspaper articles without having to go to Google Translate. I have recently had to pick up my French a bit, as I sometime visit New Caledonia. I also understand and speak tiny amounts of Japanese, Italian, Spanish and Portuguese.
One of the real eye-openers to me with my English was being able to spend several days with a translator in Brazil. His English was better than any other person I had ever met, and English was only one of the languages that he had learned subsequent to his native Portuguese. That was in 2005, and I have frequently thought about the quality of my own speech since then.
Last night, while walking my mother's dog, I encountered an English subtlety that I thought just had to be shared.
When I returned home with my mother's dog, it started sniffing intently under the back of my caravan. A few days earlier, I had allowed my dog to sniff around, and it too had sniffed intently at the same location.
That prompted me to comment, "Yes, my boy found something interesting there too."
I then realised that the statement was ambiguous, and that the strongest meaning was not what I meant. I restated it.
"Yes, my boy found something there interesting too."
I immediately thought about how difficult it would be for me to state the implied difference in German, and for a non-native English speaker to understand that there was a difference.
Comments
Thanks for sharing!
English is just such a tricky language. It's hard for English learners to understand the subtleties. In some cases, only the native English speakers can tell the subtle differences. Maybe it's true for other languages, too.
Hi Ohnie, I think that your example has a lot of similarity - the words "sugar" and "free" together are forming a single idea - "there is no sugar in this".
With my story, the phrase "something interesting" usually is talking about something that is implied or previously stated, or perhaps soon-to-be stated.
Some example sentences.
"Charlie has to apologise to Julie. That will be something interesting to see."
"Today I found out something interesting - Pauline did go out with Jack."
A way I could rephrase the sentence to highlight the second meaning - the one I intended - is like the following.
"Yes, my boy found something that he thought was interesting there too."
This sentence has exactly the same meaning as the following possible transposition.
"Yes, my boy found something there that he thought was interesting too."
In many ways, this last sentence has the best "feel" for me - the grouping of "something" with "there" makes the intention more solid. I think that "...interesting there too" may be a split infinitive.
A man went to the grocery store to buy sugar. He passed the candy aisle and noticed some candies labeled "sugar free". He picked up a pack of candy and went to the cashier to pay. After paying he asked the cashier, "What about my free sugar?" while pointing out to the words "sugar free" on the candy.
So we know that sugar free does not mean you actually get free sugar but that the candy contains no sugar. Also, I thought of another example which is a very popular eagle in the Philippines called "monkey-eating eagle". It seems kinda tricky - who eats who? We know that the eagle eats the monkey but if you are not familiar with the term, one could easily think that it's the monkey who eats the eagle.
Hi Ohnie, the subtlety arises because in English the two words "something" and "interesting" placed next to each other (as "something interesting") becomes a single term, effectively meaning "an interesting something" - i.e. an unspecified object that is interesting. However, it wasn't meaning "unspecified"; I was meaning "unknown".
By having the "something" separated from the "interesting", it is subtly changed from "an unspecified object" to "an unknown object".
In spoken English, the same structure as the first sentence could be used for both meanings, but to convey the second meaning (an unknown object), there would need to be strong emphasis on the "something". I would probably write this as, "My boy found something interesting there too".
Very subtle, indeed, for I couldn't really get the difference between the two statements besides the transposition. I think I would have said it the same way you have...I mean the "Yes, my boy found something interesting there too." Or perhaps, "Yes, my boy also found something interesting there." Of course, I'm not a native English speaker, so I'm not sure if that would be ambiguous like your original statement.
Thank you for the nice blog.