Are you misquoting the Bible, or just the Kennedys?

_{(Or were the Kennedys misquoting the Bible, and everyone else is just confused?)}

To business. I've seen three versions of the same quote today; I will reproduce them here:

"To those who have been given much, much will be expected."

"To those whom much is given, much is required."

"To whom much is given, much is expected."

There exists the same problem in all three sentences; do you see it? Rearrange the second one and it becomes clearer:

*Much is required to those whom much is given.

Still confused? Try replacing the noun phrase (which is incomplete, for the same reason the sentences are wrong, which I'll explain below) with a simple noun:

*Much is required to George.

Now you see it, don't you? You can't require something to someone. "Expect" and "require" don't take an indirect object like that. I can't expect you some money, or require my friend luck, or anything like that.

The problem here is that there are two different verbs which require two different prepositions. You give something to someone, but you expect (or require) something from them. In this case, "expect" has lost its own preposition ("from"), so it stole "given"'s preposition ("to"), leaving the noun phrase "those whom much is given" woefully incomplete.

A correct (if slightly wordier) paraphrase would be, "From those to whom much has been given, much is expected." Or, more straightforwardly (although less poetically), "Much is expected from those who have been given much."

Regarding the post title, I've seen this quote attributed to many people, most often various Kennedys, but it originally comes from the Bible, specifically, the second half of Luke 12:48. In the NIV, it's translated as, "From everyone who has been given much, much will be demanded; and from the one who has been entrusted with much, much more will be asked." The KJV says it thus: "For unto whomsoever much is given, of him shall be much required: and to whom men have committed much, of him they will ask the more."

It's a good sentiment; it deserves to be expressed properly.

adventures in Catalan

I want to save a webpage. My options under the "Fitxer" menu are the following:

Nova finestra
Nova pestanya
Obre una ubicació...
Obre un fitxer...
Tanca la finestra
Tanca la pestanya
Anomena i desa la pàgina...
Anomena i desa el marc...
Envia la pàgina
Configuració de la pàgina...
Exemple d'impressió
Imprimeix
Importa...
Treballa fora de línia
Surt

*whimper*

gendered nouns

I have never ever understood the existence of gendered nouns. Seriously. I'm thinking of Spanish here, but I'm pretty sure it happens in all the Romance languages, yes? I know Latin has 'em, so that would make sense. As for other languages, I have no idea. German doesn't have them, am I right? I took a German class in like, third grade, but all I remember from it is how to count to 29, and the word for spaceship (Raumschiff—I think that's how you spell it, anyway). But English is more or less based in German, and English doesn't have them, so it would make sense for German also not to have them, right? Whatever. I'm rambling.

At any rate, what gives? From what I can tell, it's a completely random distinction separating nouns into two separate and completely useless categories (three, if you have neuter nouns—damned Latin and its complicatedness) for no discernible reason whatsoever. Just so they can have more ways to say "the." And where did the "gender" terminology come from? Why can't they just be categories A and B (and C)? Why feminine and masculine (and neuter)? What, pray tell, makes the wall (la pared) more feminine than the floor (el suelo) or an ankle (un tobillo) more masculine than a wrist (una muñeca)?

The way we learned it in Latin class (assuming memory serves, which may be a steep assumption), there are declensions, and first declension nouns are feminine (e.g. silva—forest), second declension nouns are masculine (e.g. amicus—friend) and third declension nouns are neuter (e.g. caelum—sky). I think. But I don't remember if this is always the case, or if it's just generally like that and there are exceptions; I don't know if you can say "first declension" and that automatically means "feminine" and vice versa. I feel like that's not the case, because if it was, why would there be both terms? And now that I think about it, there are more than just three declensions, right? I mean, the "family" words have to go in there somewhere—mater, pater, soror, frater—and they don't go in those three. Yes, yes, I'm remembering now, there are at least five. Possibly more.*

Agh, my kingdom for a Latin book.

And whatever happened to the neuter nouns anyway? Latin's "caelum"—"sky"—is neuter, but it morphed into "el cielo" in Spanish, which is masculine. Why? And the other neuter nouns from Latin that carry over into Spanish, they're not all masculine, are they?** Assuming they're not, how was it decided which ones would be feminine and which ones would be masculine? And what of the nouns that were already masculine or feminine in Latin—did they all keep the same gender, or are there some trannie nouns running around in the modern Romance languages? Do any of the modern Romance languages still have neuter nouns?

And I suppose this depends on the answer to a previous question, but it's on my mind so I'll ask: are the genders consistent across the related modern languages? That is to say, if a noun in two different modern Romance languages has the same Latin root, do the two modern forms necessarily have the same gender? For example, I know the word for "window" in Spanish, "ventana," is feminine, and it is based on the Latin "fenestra," which is also feminine. And I know the word in French is based on the same root—is it "fenetre"? (Well, I know how to say it, even if I can't spell it. So sue me, I've never taken French.) So is that then also feminine? And if so, is that a rule, or only coincidence? And again, what of those poor neuter nouns? Are there nouns that used to be neuter in Latin, and now they're having an identity crisis because they're feminine in one language and masculine in another?

Anyway, I'm veering away from my original question, which remains, why the hell do these categories exist in the first place? Seriously. If anybody can answer me that, I'll bake them a pie. A lovely delicious pie, with a buttery, flaky homemade crust, and fruit filling of their choice (I have a completely unfounded but rather strong prejudice against cream pies).

Anybody?

<sub>*I took two years of Latin, and we used the same book both years, and still didn't manage to get through the whole thing. In fact, I'm fairly sure we skipped over the fourth declension entirely, now that I think about it. So besides all the things I've forgotten in the intervening six years, there were some basic things I never even learned. Not that I'm trying to make excuses; just explaining why I probably don't know what the hell I'm talking about with some most of this stuff.

**The only other one I can remember off the top of my head is "bellum," which means "war," but in Spanish, "war" is "guerra," which doesn't seem to be obviously related, so I don't know if that's a valid example.</sub>

ETA: THIS. I'm not alone!

prepositions

The following is a sample, and I'd call it a fairly representative one, of a single sentence from an article I have to read this week as homework for my film class.

"Endlessly interactive, his films can only be understood in terms of their adaptation of the generic conventions of the documentary to the tradition of black gay and lesbian self-representation of which they are a part."

Oh my god. It's like one of those Russian dolls, except with prepositions.

rhyming and cannibalism in protest songs

So, I know it's cheating to rhyme a word with itself. That doesn't work. But what about rhyming a word with another word that is a derivative of the original word? The example I'm thinking of is in Barry McGuire's (well, P.F. Sloan's) "Eve of Destruction," in which there are a couple of lines in the third verse that go thus: "and marches alone can't bring integration, / when human respect is disintegratin'." Now, this example isn't an exact rhyme to begin with, the first word having the noun ending -tion and the second having the gerund ending -ing. It's just the way he sings it (leaving off the final 'g', for one thing) that makes it sound like a rhyme. But assuming one were to use this pair of words in a different context with the same ending—could one rhyme "integration" with "disintegration"? I feel like the answer would be no, but I honestly don't know.

On a completely different note, that bit near the end where he says, "Hate your next door neighbor / but don't forget to say grace,"—when I was little, I always heard "eat" instead of "hate." I didn't actually know it was "hate" until I looked up the lyrics online. Yeah, I was a weird kid. But I like my version better.

pronunciation

How the hell do you say the word "oeuvre"? I've read it a hundred times, but I've never heard anyone actually say it. The audio help on dictionary.com doesn't really help much; I need to hear it in context.

learning to read, revisited

So, my roommate just posed a seemingly simple question: what sound does the 'a' in "brandy" make? And out of the five college students in the room, none of us could come up with a definitive answer. The closest thing we could come up with was the short 'a' sound, as in "cat," but that still doesn't really sound right to me. And this makes me really wish I'd actually bothered to learn the IPA when Mrs. B. made me write out my songs for voice lessons in it; I feel like that would be helpful in this situation. Perhaps that will be my next course of weekend Google study. And in the long term, perhaps someday I will have the good fortune to take a linguistics class; that would be lovely.