TAUTOLOGIES? You might be wondering about the possible tautologies inherent in 'perfect transposition and perfect rendition into perfect English' (to say nothing of the various senses of 'perfect', and we haven't begun to talk about procedurally and substantively perfect English). Here's my thinking about the phrase — let's assume you've decided upon it — 'I love you' as originally uttered in Spanish, English, Cantonese or 15th-century Buntu:-
perfectly transposed into perfect English: 'I love you'
imperfectly transposed into perfect English: 'I hate you'
perfectly transposed into imperfect English: "Wotcha, you'll do n'all innit"
imperfectly transposed into imperfect English: 'The reigns in Spane stays mainly, on hippopotamus let' (I observe procedural and substantive imperfections there. How many have you counted?)
A DISTINCTIVE DISTINCTION: Let's touch on the distinction between Richard's guaranteed procedurally and substantively perfect English:-
procedurally perfect (how to say it): I assist you to perfectly transpose into perfect English text of your own decided origination
substantively perfect (what to say): I assist you to perfectly render into perfect English substance that you may not already have thought of. Whatever the need, I can help you formulate something suitable. I'm very good at putting the right technical things into the right technical words. This service amounts or is close to counselling and or advice. Enjoy!
AND A DIFFERENCE: What's the different in meaning and sense between "I look forward to it' and 'I am looking forward to it'; why, where, when and how does it matter, and who really cares? (note the judicious use of the semi-colon)
MORE ABOUT ONE DISTINCTIVE DISTINGUISHING DISTINCTION: I wish to discuss here two linguistic phenomena and one literary phenomenon. The first two:-
how does a reader discern, with certainty satisfactory to himself, the meaning of a writer who is silent on his meaning except by context and implication, especially if original, innovative, eccentric, subtle, perverse, contrary, ironic, unconventional and unprecedented, and with whom the reader has never discussed the point?
how does it come about that the interpretations of all readers of a particular text coincide identically (or at least sufficiently functionally similarly)? Coincidence? Telepathy? It is uncanny, is it not, that all readers everywhere, of a certain sensitivity, in all situations, share the substantially identical perception of the particular sense in which the writer uses a particular word in a particular context. They apprehend the same identical sense — it might be a very subtle one and inherently ethereal, especially without a well established context — without it being explicitly or implicitly prescribed. An entirely silent solitary mass identical intuition subliminally coalescing to become a uniform universal concurrence in relation to a particular sense, without the slightest prescription or organisation, emerging and persisting sufficiently clearly and widely to be capable of identification, definition and dispositive inclusion in an authoritative dictionary — the writer's expectation and aspiration — is one of the great and unexplained linguistic (and literary) phenomena of the English language.
These are the two primary processes in written English. The writer must find a way to convey his meaning — a word, a phrase, a paragraph, etc. — without prescribing or even stating it, and the reader must have the facility of correctly sensing that sense without the slightest outside assistance, tending to recourse (at least on that point) to a dictionary principally for enlightenment, not for direction. (We are dealing with the sense of a particular word — the sense in which the writer employs a particular word and means it to be read, considered, understood and absorbed — perceived intuitively, instinctively, by the individual reader acting alone, reading and processing silently, deriving his own personal understanding of the word solely from his knowledge of its basic meaning and his own intellectual awareness and appreciation of the context in which the writer uses it. To this extent, a dictionary will not help the reader.)
(In an earlier version of this section, I drew a wholly irrational distinction between a prescriptive dictionary definition and a perceptual one. This of course is nonsense: a prescriptive definition can have been arrived at perceptually, and a perceptual definition can be prescriptive. The distinction I meant to make is between a dictionary definition that legislates and one that suggests.)
So now we can proceed. Let us look at it first from the writer's perspective. In relation to his every word, every writer relies on the first two phenomena. He chooses his words carefully to convey as vividly as possible his wishes: forbearing to expressly legislate or even expressly elucidate that sense, he must somehow make himself understood in the intended sense and only in that sense. A good writer will summon up spirits, mood, atmosphere that he hopes will be universally commonly understood, and that his readers will enter unanimously into the correct mental communion with the communicant. In this subtle partnership, the writer assumes that the reader is an intelligent fellow — his intellectual equal — who will intuitively discern the writer's meaning, whatever it be, however recondite or abstruse. The writer further assumes that all his readers will silently concur in intuitively discerning correctly the same meaning. The reader's job is to correctly comprehend and seize that sense and only that sense. I have no idea any of us does it, nor how we — readers past, present and future — all do it concurrently identically. He does whatever he feels like in the privacy of his own head. His reading will be more or less informed by receptivity, sensitivity, erudition, experience and some seventh sense. Some senses will be perceived only by a reader of a certain intellectual ability and type. Some phenomena are inexplicable.
I thought that there was a third phenomenon but I think I'm mistaken. The dictionary editor is a mere reader. He is no better placed in relation to a dead writer, or one or more other readers, than any other mere reader. He will never talk to the writer nor hold a plebiscite among readers. By the first phenomenon, he arrives at his own understanding. The answer will be revealed to him by intuition etc. He will have in mind, further, the second phenomenon — an extant, intangible common identical understanding — and his privilege of writing it down, legislatively or suggestively (a dictionary never, I think, declares which), for common consumption. His formulations reflect his erudition and might on close study reveal an intellectual magnificence, but fundamentally he will have arrived at them through mental processes as human and fallible as our own. He is one of us, to which extent how he discerns, detects, divines, delineates, describes and drafts for the common reader's consumption his own legislative or suggestive special pleading is nothing special.
But in Murray's case it is very interesting.
Of course one is not talking here about primary meanings of a technical word, such as, for example, 'train'. The primary meaning is of the raw word before creative maceration. 'Train' has several raw meanings. The dictionary editor is entitled and required to legislate those meanings. That is the first of his primary functions.
His next primary function is to articulate his appreciation of a creativised word. Thus every one of hundreds of thousands of secondary meanings listed in the New English Dictionary merely suggests itself to the reader-editor's linguistic and literary receptors, and he in turn, admittedly a superior sort of paradigm reader, will take the liberty of conveying that apprehension, not prescriptively, to his readers, more or less tendentiously, without imposing them, in sympathy with each reader's own intellect. ((This might come as a surprise to the foreigner indoctrinated to linguistic and literary authoritarianism.) He might be right or wrong on what the writer had in mind; the writer himself might not even know. For all the dictionary's formality, the reader is entitled to view these secondary entries as mere interpretation to the point of hypothesis, and the dictionary editor will probably agree.
I have looked in vain for Murray's disquisition on these points (cf. Dr Johnson quoted in NED, vol.1, pp.xi-xii). He acknowledges (eg NED, vol. 1, p.xi) the assistance of other dictionary editors, but I want to know some of his own intellectual processes, because his are probably on the lines of mine. What we are after from Murray is a full, intellectually intimate pellucidation of the rational, not metaphysical, process — hopefully a fixed, uniform scientific or similar method, however proprietary or derivative — by which he has grasped, with whatever certainty or confidence, the expounded sense of a word and how he comes to have expounded it so apparently dispositively. Surely he must have one?
What we get is an exasperating paragraph of six lines at the end of a section otherwise dealing with technical — principally chronological — aspects of what he unhelpfully terms the 'signification' of a word: NED, vol, 1, General Explanations, pp.xxi. Per ibid., 'To a great extent the explanations of the meanings have been framed anew upon a study of all the quotations for each word collected for this work, of which those printed form only a small part.' This only begs the question. Nor is any assistance afforded in his subsequent, similarly exasperating discussion of quotations: 'The Quotations illustrate the … uses of the word' (op. cit., p.xxii), which also begs the same question. How does he know he is correct in deducing and describing those uses? 'It is hoped that reasonable accuracy has been attained in dates and references…' (op. cit., p.xxiii; more to be expected of an archivist or librarian), but what about in the exposition? The absence of an explanation appears to indicate, if not confirm, that the original process is intuitive, or else he would out of a sense of moral obligation and intellectual candor have elucidated it. Hence, apparently, an English dictionary cannot, in relation to certain definitions, meanings and senses, properly aspire to prescriptiveness.
And see of course Murray's relevant definitions of 'sense':-
item 15 (NED, vol. 8.2, pp.457-460, at p.458), 'sense' subjectively understood: 'Mental apprehension, appreciation, or realization of (some truth, fact, state of things). Also, comprehension, perception of the meaning of' (italics added)
item 19b (op. cit., p.459): 'a meaning recorded in a dictionary' (on what rational basis?)
item 20 (ibid.): 'the meaning of a passage or context. Also, one of two or more meanings which the words naturally bear or are held to bear'. Now we're getting closer, but it's all rather subjective. And see definitions 21, 22, 23, and to decreasing extents 24 and 25. The bottom line: there appears to be no English scientific method for determining the conventional, existing, unconventional, unprecedented sense in which an English word is to be understood.
Of course I haven't (yet) read the entirety of Murray and Al's New English Dictionary (available here for free; an acquaintance if not a familiarity with this monument is desirable in anyone aspiring to fluency in English), but I strongly suspect that almost all senses of every word posited in it have been perceived by the learned editor, certainly not (unless a technical term) prescribed to him, even in relation to foreign words. (Nor, in turn, does he seek to prescribe his intepretation or exposition to his own readers. To that extent his dictionary is a work of intimate irrefutable subjective opinionated autobiography. More on this below. His own NED definition of 'dictionary' — vol. 3, p.331 — is regrettably circumlocutionary. Is he more forthcoming in the preliminary pages in vol. 1?)
Take for example the NED's mercifully short definition of the word 'thinker' (vol.9.2, p.313). None of the senses recited (presumably by Murray himself) is prescribed by anyone, including by any cited or other writer, or any academic, academician, thereotician, pedagogue, legislator, hysterical ideologist, officious bureaucrat, fascist nutjob or pontificating busybody. The editor, pretending to learning rather than perception or invention, simply notes his own personal understanding. He has no need of ascertaining and delineating any common or universal — and substantially occult, because silent — understanding, an impossible task which he would attempt only if clairvoyant. For reasons of practicality, he is not interested in the popular understanding of a particular word. He needs no survey, poll, referendum, plebiscite or consensus as to any sense, even supposing a poll could be feasibly worded in relation to even one sense of one meaning of one word. He will brook no committee, correction or contradiction. But we are dealing with a dictionary of English that, however not prescriptive other than of low-level meanings, must be pre-prescriptively indicative to some extent or is otherwise pointless. How did Murray catch Carlyle's special meaning? Pure intuition? Interpolation and supraimposition of context, other languages, contemporaneous literature and culture, 'feel', 'mood', 'sense'? How did Murray know that he had caught it correctly and exhaustively? How then did Murray know that the peculiar product of his peculiar erudition — his articulating his perception of that meaning — was 'spot on'? Here we stray necessarily into subliminal metaphysics and to what point? If Murray could divine Carlyle's meaning — and Murray was an average intellect — then so can everyone else, so who needs a dictionary? If the rest of us are jackasses, Murray's indications cannot help us, for we will never 'feel' the word as intended by the writer. The intelligent reader recourses to Murray for confirmation; the idiotic, shallow reader for direction and all the direction in the world will not assist the idiot to 'feel' the word. He will only pretend to.
The publisher trusts and pays the dictionary editor to enlighteningly articulate for his readers his own personal reading, with particulars (etymology, citations, etc.); the English dictionary can and does go no further (entirely different, I suspect, from authoritarian dictionaries in authoritarian languages). For that reason he must be a dominating, perhaps a somewhat dogmatic, intellect, of cursory interest in his own right, and of unquestionable credibility in some sense, to his readers. Since he is only proposing and not imposing, only his intellect is in issue, not his credibility. Since his propositions are personal, the question of authority is irrelevant. It is for his own personal extraordinary comprehensive grasp (a function of his erudition), his discerning discernment, his eminent presumption, the breadth, depth and subtlety of his percipience, his powers of detection, deduction, induction, discrimination, delineation, description and depiction and (if it be the case) his intuition, flexibility and uncanny accuracy (functions of his basic and advanced intelligence), that the editor — so misdescribed (there's no more apposite English adjective; note the annoying ambiguity in the "there's no more…" construction) — of a dictionary is hired, paid, published, celebrated and the recipient of well-disposed fulsome assistance from others similarly placed (as was Murray).
It would be singular were this singular collection of skills and abilities to repose uniquely in the native English speaker. How many Englishmen do you know who can and do string together an erudite sentence, oral or written, in English? I've read beautifully finessed English of multilingual continental writers of sensitivity and intelligence far in advance of what one can expect from the average English person. (Murray is said to have been acquainted with more than twenty-five languages, which is not irrelevant. He expressly and implictly acknowledges numerous foreign correspondents. It would be most interesting to read an English dictionary compiled by a foreigner.)
I trust that everything is now clear. (If you want to read devastatingly effective English, try a Queen's Bench Division pleading, by someone at the top of his game, of, say, 1982.)
AJAMI STYLE: English appears — I wouldn't know — to be a challenging language even for some native English speakers, some of whose dared essays into the depths of expressive spoken and written English are piteously shallow (which may explain the Englishman of few words, as bad teeth explain the closed-mouth smirk in some English portraiture and the tendency of upper-class English to smile with downturned lips). Hence my offer of perfect English to native English speakers, on the lines of the Ajami scribe. The service comes close to advice where the customer needs something highly technical — I do that — and doesn't know how to frame it
THE BEST POSSIBLE TRANSLATOR: It is questionable business to hire a foreigner for a professional translation into English. I don't believe I've ever heard or read perfect English from a professional foreign translator. Usually the translation, delivered theatrically and with due self-importance, is frankly erroneous, materially misleading, culturally insensate, robotic, grandiose, pompous, pretentious, oppressively officious, ungainly, obtuse, superficial, illiterate, unlettered, flat, entirely lacking in intelligence, insight and finesse and otherwise incompetent. Sometimes it is outright nonsense. (For a few pennies less or more, you could have had multiply perfect English from the right sort of native English speaker)
Woe betide the (tense, nervous, pompous, officious, flustered, hyper-sensitive, manic) charlatan translator into English. Unmasked, you'll be forever translating washing machine instructions, cereal packets and travel brochures (where your English merely vexes and elicits ridicule)
EVEN ENGLISH TRANSLATORS: Even if the situation, occasion, context, circumstances and need are all absolutely clear, there is often no one way — and sometimes there may be no way — to perfectly translate into perfect English (perfect English does not necessarily connote a perfect translation). Difficult enough for a native Englishman to express himself in his mother tongue, it is all the more intricate to effectually, efficaciously transpose into English an idea that starts by being singly or multiply foreign. For the huge scope for variations in tone, colour, sense, purpose, purport and meaning in translations into English by those who are native English speakers, compare David Barrett (ancient Greek) and J.M. Cohen (French and Spanish) with their respective competitors
VARIOUS FAILURES ON MY MIND: Failure to correctly pronounce the letter 's' — a common defect of European obstinacy (barring some physical impediment)
Failure to correctly pronounce either iteration — as in 'The thing' — of 'th'. The French say 'z' and 's' respectively ('ze sing'). It won't do
Mis-using 'that' for 'which'
Mis-using 'will' for 'shall'
Mis-using 'should'
The thoughtless placement of 'not'. ('Try not to do that' vs 'Try to not do that': there's a material difference, if you're attuned to it)
Talking 'with' someone. A common mistake. In English, one never talks 'with' anyone. (One does 'have a talk with' someone, and one even 'has a talk to' someone, but — as well as being utterly different from each other — they are entirely different from merely talking to someone)
Using the past past ('I went…', I ate…', 'I visited…', 'were') erroneously for the present past (respectively, 'I have been…' (oddly enough, not 'I have gone…'), 'I have eaten…', I have visited…', 'have been'): a common journalistic error, especially by sub-editors, who in America habitually put the predicate at the end of a phrase, deliberately or idiotically rendering the phrase ambiguous
Using the present past erroneously for the present (the nonsensical 'Encyclopedia Britannica have sued OpenAI…'. The correct English is of course 'EB is suing…').
Using the imperfect erroneously for the present past: 'was' and 'were' instead of 'has been' and 'have been' (a very annoying, very common error in online-speak)
Failing otherwise to correctly use the imperfect (and the much-neglected 'used to…')
Failing to correctly use the pluperfect
Imperfectly using the subjunctive: poorly understood, even less well employed. (Here's a double for you. What's the difference between 'on his return' and 'when he returns'? And shouldn't it be 'when he return'?)
LINGUISTIC YANKING: Outrageous recent Americanisms, so distasteful I desist from giving examples. A bastardised version of English English, American English is rapidly deteriorating in legitimacy. American English — overwhelming in its pretentiousness, verbosity, pomposity ('transportation') and illiteracy ('like') — is always a poor substitute for English (note that some words of American English mean the opposite in English. 'Oversight' is one of them). You will never get any points worth having for ever using American English (nor would you ever want to if you can use the real thing).
PITFALLS OF ENGLISH: It's worth mentioning that for all its variety — x senses of a particular word, x connotations of each sense etc. — English in the wrong hands can be an exasperating, ponderous, bombastic, verbose, unwieldly language (prolixity is a different issue, emanating — exuberantly in the right hands, as in James Thurber's 'happened, transpired, took place and occurred' — not from a deficiency but from an abundance of apposite words used correctly but wilfully tautologously, and otherwise superfluously unless expertly for literary effect).
DEFICIENCIES: Curiously for such a multi-dimensionally rich language, and perhaps especially for a language particularly well stocked with monosyllables, English is deficient in single words — cf. phrases — to describe certain common facts, circumstances and situations, and requires the use of convoluted constructions. (One can readily sympathise with Balzac's yearning for the French mot juste.)
As much as I deplore the use in English of raw Latin, can you think of a situation in which 'in extenso' is preferable to 'extensively', and exactly why?
Can you think of an English linguistic or literary situation in which one English word would serve for a contorted phrase and where that word does not exist? Conversely, can you think of an or the English word that, though possibly or definitely correct, is not serviceable? (One of the worst is 'interlocutor'.) To get us started, I venture to suggest that (to take a handful from hundreds of instances) English lacks a word for:-
an honest man, and for a dishonest one. (So, apparently, in each case, do French, Spanish, Italian, Indian, Russian, Mandarin, Japanese, Swahili and — my favorite — 9th-century Mongolian.)
a person who is, and is not, a native English speaker (note the commas: they affect the sense)
an official to whom one sends a formal complaint
an official who receives, processes and adjudicates a formal complaint
a power-of-attorney attorney? ('Attorney'won't do. My own expedient is 'power-attorney' but I don't like it.)
And can you coin an appropriate word in each or any case? Unlike French in France, there's no cultural obstacle to the expedient literate devising, by a genuine literatus anywhere, preferably from Latin or Greek, of respectable English words (cf. the coinage of gutterances by illiterate Americans). You may have noticed a number on this website.
Incidentally, do you know the English word three of the seven letters of which are the letter 'u'? James Thurber again. He mentions that his maid replied that she couldn't think of any such word, and that it had to be unusual, to which he rejoined exasperatingly that it was and it wasn't. Well what is it?