Using Sentence Diagramming in Translations
- 2 minutes read - 265 words
The French Dispatch shows the recursive power of sentence diagramming. Perhaps I wasn’t the only person disappointed that it wasn’t a major plot point.
It was some time in about 2007, I’d guess when I was taking Latin under Jim Burleson at ACC in Austin.
We were picking apart some Latin sentence and finding the modifiers that bonded to the substantives and ensuring that their “(grammatical) gender, number, and person” were aligned. Somewhat offhandedly, Professor Burleson sketched out a horizontal line and started doing some sort of tree branching structure off of the line. Now, friends, I’ve never met a notation system that didn’t steal my eyeballs, so this was pretty amazing.
Now, one should never aspire to use these diagrams. That is, while they’re fine tools for holding something tricky under a microscope or when starting out, the goal is to get the deep structure of this tool encoded in your brain chemistry and neurons and to leave it behind, like Wittgenstein’s ladder. But for those learning a language, I think it’s as essential as the truth table is to logic, the variable state table is to programming, the sequence diagram is to process design.
And we don’t teach it. Burleson graciously gave our class a synopsis, but it really only scratched the surface. I subsequently acquired Reed & Kellogg’s book on the subject (via schoolgirl Maude Fenstermacher) and it filled in the rest. For anyone who’s going to be learning a language seriously, especially one that is either constructed or considerably mutated in its spoken form, learn sentence diagramming.