/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.12283559]

>>12282243
>my points were that there are various features of the jargon that are the results of his crude dictionary-driven method that strain the credulity of a bilingual reader
And none of these points hold any ground as already shown. What you think are objective criticisms are no more than questioning of choice, about as sound as asking why the author decided to color the proverbial curtains blue instead of green.
>you need to demonstrate their plausibility in an analogous context and scale
>escalated by calling nadsat a "plausible jargon" and now you're retreating
This is just dishonesty and desperation par excellence. I said it is structurally plausible, i.e. it's technically entirely possible for such a jargon to exist and none of your subjective nitpicking points at any actual intrinsic logical fault. I don't need to "demonstrate at a scale" because we're talking about a fucking fictional universe and current situation in real-world has absolutely no bearing on it. Whatever sociocultural and historical preconditions are necessary for the formation of this particular jargon as it is, we're free to assume did exist in this universe, so you don't even have to suspend your disbelief with scifi-magic. This is the absolute fucking basic principle of reading fiction and it's ridiculous you're willing to be as dishonest as to try and weasel your way around this just to try and save face on an anonymous frog picture forum. Fucking apply yourself, brainlet.

[Anonymous No.12283829]

>>12283559
>Thread dies
>Still want to answer to it.
>Make a new thread.
Just let it go, mate.

[Anonymous No.12283912]

>>12283559
oh man, you resurrected a dead thread after six hours for this. okay.

the problem is that you're not talking to me. this is not a conversation. it's a kind of conversation substitute where each of your utterances exists to demonstrate your competence or knowledge of some fact - and, within the rules of this imaginary game, demonstrating your competence repeatedly should make you the winner. so then you make these posts where you feign exasperation at still not being the winner. the problem is, of course, that the things you're saying have no connection with the actual topic of the conversation.

the conversation was always, for that entire thread you're helpfully quoting, about writing. the question was always how the construction of the fictional jargon affects the text and the reader, how it's employed for characterization and so on. so, for example, your statement that in the wild, real loanwords often display ignorance of the source language actually does not in any meaningful way connect to my statement that A WRITER should not be ignorant of the source language when inventing fake loanwords because it severely limits his capacity to employ the language for artistic purposes. his lack of contact with the language beyond a dictionary is why his violent thugs are uncharacteristically prudish when it comes to their russian, always talking of "excrement" but never of "shit" and so on, why a nation's whole youth is obsessed with russian verbs but only with the infinitive form one would find in a dictionary etc etc. your insistence that all this is TECHNICALLY NOT IMPOSSIBLE in the real world is irrelevant to whether it's desirable in the novel since, as i've repeatedly stated, my concern isn't with "realism" at all but with artistic verisimilitude. it's not that i want him to know proper russian so that the characters can all speak perfectly proper russian, it's so that he can purposefully construct the brokenness of their russian. in fact i've said in that thread that a direction i would have liked to see the novel take is completely abandoning any notion of naturalism in favor of unlikely but meaningful bilingual puns - but the weakness of his russian prevents him from coming up with any except for the few good ones he lucks into like "horrorshow".

your posting is at this point a tacit admission that your whole "real world lexicology" tangent was in fact pointless because it has no relevance to the verisimilitude of the novel - but instead of talking about the novel you are now asserting that novels cannot be talked about, that the conversation really SHOULD have been about whatever "intrinsic linguistic soundness" is and not the choices a writer makes, because the choices a writer makes are not "objective" enough to be talked about. like, your last line of defense is the assertion that it's impossible to discuss literature - on a literature discussion board.

[Anonymous No.12283923]

Fuck off mate

[Anonymous No.12284327]

>>12283912
>his violent thugs are uncharacteristically prudish when it comes to their russian, always talking of "excrement" but never of "shit" and so on, why a nation's whole youth is obsessed with russian verbs but only with the infinitive form
Again you're simply restating your shitty misinformed ideas on how loanwords work. The choice of "excrement" over "shit" doesn't make them prudish in the slightest. Any connotation the word bears stems solely from cultural and linguistic framework it is used in. To an English speaker "kal", "govno" and "dermo" provide absolutely no immediate semantic information whatsoever, let alone any differences in emotional nuance. Indeed the precise meaning is derived from the local usage itself and not from fucking source language original. The infinitive comment is just plain unadulterated retardation. No loanwords ever are transferred complete with original inflections, you humongous retarded baboon. "Babushka" doesn't get 10 distinct declined forms in English, "ayтcopcинг" doesn't stay unchanged in every inflected form in Russian, "kaschieren" doesn't get French conjugation endings in German. It's absolutely idiotic to even suggest that.
>their russian
This is the crux of all your autistic sophistry. You don't understand the difference between bilingual characters code-switching or speaking Runglish and monolingual English speakers using a slang with lots of direct borrowings from Russian. Nadsat is no different from a bunch of non-English speaking managers or IT workers or just plain teenagers speaking in a jargon filled to the brim with English loanwords. Burgess may have achieved this result through naivety of his dictionary borrowing method instead of a conscious decision, but this is absolutely a correct result both technically and stylistically.
>you are now asserting that novels cannot be talked about, that the conversation really SHOULD have been about whatever "intrinsic linguistic soundness"
Another exercise in desperate strawmanning. I'm not asserting anything, I've replied to your direct demand to "demonstrate plausibility in context in scale" (something that very conveniently you deem absolutely irrelevant нyивaпщe мы ниaтoм aпять just one post later).
>as i've repeatedly stated, my concern isn't with "realism" at all but with artistic verisimilitude
Bravo, Nolan. "My concern is not with realism but how close to reality this seems to be". Very poignant and self-aware of you.

[Anonymous No.12284333]

[Anonymous No.12284349]

>>12284333
>intimidated by posts longer than 10 words
Yup, that's /lit/.

[Anonymous No.12284777]

>>12284327
well with that last line we're actually getting somewhere: you refuse to distinguish between "realism", as in "could this actually occur if the book was not a book but a parallel universe" and verisimilitude, which has to do with what the book means, as a book. a fairy tale has no realism but plenty of verisimilitude. a most realistic simulation has no verisimilitude because it expresses no dramatic, philosophical etc truth. this communication in a work of fiction proceeds by the use of devices and symbols that the literate reader then interprets.

you're telling me now that if this future england was a real place and alex was a real person then his selective use of hundreds of russian loanwords but not a single vulgar one would be simply a meaningless accident resulting from a plausible process that happened "off-screen". however, this is actually a fictional place and a fictional character, and a character is not a simulated person and to see him as such would be functional illiteracy. a character is not defined by a hidden virtual childhood but the characterization that occurs within the work itself, among others the language he uses. to have him swear with terms that a bilingual reader will recognize as inappropriately tame or formal is to create a symbolic association for that reader with the idea of avoidance of obscenity even if no "logical" connection exists the. if in a movie rain starts when somebody gets sad, then the lack of a logical connection between emotions and weather does not stop that choice from having significance in a work of fiction. it's the same for the association with bookish artificiality that's created accidentally through the consistent presence of the infinitive suffix in the verbs. (this a point which you consistently misrepresent as a demand for the characters to speak full russian when the actual issue is the stylistically striking UNIFORMITY of inflection across all those borrowed verbs). it's this general failure to utilize the bilingual nature of the dialect as a tool for characterization of both individuals and the society as a whole that i'm reacting to. that's why all those posts ago i rejected the notion that nadsat is "brilliantly constructed from a bilingual perspective".

which, by the way, is a notion you or anyone else is yet to actually defend. you're putting yourself in a losing position by completely refusing to engage with the novel as a novel and nadsat as an artistic device. even if you demonstrate - and you still haven't - that the impression of artificiality i'm getting from those uniformly infinitive-derived verbs is just the result of my lack of perspective, that all the features i find infuriating are actually typical and normal and unsurprising and meaningless, wouldn't that just be damning with faint praise? like, the most spirited defense of the bilingualism of nadsat in that whole thread is your insistence that this artistic endeavor is... technically inoffensive.

[Anonymous No.12284973]

>>12284777
Yes, I definitely refuse to accept this absolutely wrong and nonsensical on every account "interpretation" of what realism and verisimilitude are. Please, read a couple dictionary and encyclopedia entries on what these terms constitute. Your posts are moving from bad faith polemics to ad hoc redefinition of absolutely unambiguous words for the sake of saving face. It's beyond pathetic.
>swear with terms that a bilingual reader will recognize as inappropriately tame
>bookish artificiality that's created accidentally through the consistent presence of the infinitive suffix
>bilingual nature of the dialect
I have literally just addressed these fallacious claims in the very post you've replied. Neither the "tameness" nor the "bookish artificiality" do come up for a bilingual reader who understands he's witnessing an English teenager using jargon full of Russian calque and not a bilingual involuntarily code-switching, which is a very obvious thing to grasp from the get go. I understand you're running out of ways to move the goalposts again, but please, do refrain from just repeating the same thing over and over in a different coating of irrelevant fluff - it's very tiresome.
>the most spirited defense of the bilingualism of nadsat in that whole thread is your insistence that this artistic endeavor is... technically inoffensive.
Well, the most spirited attack against Nadsat has so far been a person wildly incompetent on the subject faultily criticizing technicalities of its intrinsic structure and endlessly moving goalposts and deviating into vaguely related sophistry the moment any concrete points of his are addressed. So in my eyes mere technical inoffensiveness is more than enough to counter and preserve the initial assertion of Nadsat being brilliant even if inadvertently so.

[Anonymous No.12285560]

>>12284973
you rejecting the wording "realism/verisimilitude" for this distinction does not make the distinction any less real. it's basic literacy. there is no clockwork orange universe populated by virtual clockwork orange people. a character is not a simulated person but the sum total of the devices used by the work to characterize him, so for example the protagonist of that movie "lost highway" is actually spread over two physical "persons" and so on. in clockwork orange it's the language that directly manifests something about the characters and society, which is why a literate person will pay attention to its features and tendencies. you have never succeeded in telling me why the features i mentioned don't actually "count": when you tell me that it's not notable for those guys to use a random term as if it was a swearword because they have no awareness of the original meaning it does not follow that it's equally not notable for their entire vocabulary to be constructed that way. that's a consistent pattern that actually must have involved awareness of the source language at some stage because somehow this very specific process of exclusion based on vulgarity took place. of course what literally happened is that the prudishness of the dictionary burgess used got accidentally projected onto the book but it is nevertheless an undeniable feature of the text and a characteristic of this society. an actual defense of this would involve telling me it this is actually cool and good because it generates ironic distance for their rape-murders but that would require basic literacy instead of your shtick where everything's a meaningless accident.

what you don't even seem to be aware of is that your position is at this point much more negative towards the book than mine. i think the use of nadsat as a device is clumsy, making the it art that's a bit crap - yours is that it's completely artless white nose that doesn't and can't mean anything. and then you declare it brilliant because apparently you think everything is brilliant by default, and nadsat, being meaningless, cannot possibly do anything to detract from its own well-undeserved brilliance. that's some wild shit.

[Anonymous No.12285816]

Why is the lowercase guy arguing with the guy who writes like Reddit

[Anonymous No.12285828]

>>12285560
>you rejecting the wording
Literal water with no actual point solely to say "no u". Look up the fucking definitions of the words you misuse to not fucking drown in your own sophistry.
>you have never succeeded in telling me why the features i mentioned don't actually "count"
This is just bad tragicomedy at this point. You've been told over and over.
>that's a consistent pattern
>very specific process of exclusion based on vulgarity
No, there is no "very specific process of exclusion", because there is no normative minimum level of vulgar loanwords that would have been violated and indicated the presence of such a process, you colossal moron. And if you take the actual IRL rate of incidence of loanwords in English that are vulgar in the source, which is infinitesimally small, as such a level, then the absence of vulgarities in 200 or so Russian loanwords of Nadsat not only doesn't constitute an unusual pattern, but is by all means the expected value. In other words, you're once again arguing from and "detecting patterns" not against actual linguistic facts and baselines, but against your irrational and naive misconceptions conjured on the spot without any regard for logical coherence solely to continue this fucking charade of an argument. And once again I'll advise you to educate yourself instead of trying to rationalize your pseudtastic bullshit born out of stubbornness and autism.
>what you don't even seem to be aware
You really don't need to dedicate every closing paragraph to some deliberately retarded misrepresentation of my position. I'm not particularly anxious to fight windmills you try to prop up for lack of any actual arguments.

[Anonymous No.12286530]

>>12285828
here's how a sane person "detects patterns" in the language of a novel: you're reading about a vulgar psycho doing a rape and he suddenly describes someone's privates with a word that, apparently unbeknownst to him, sounds like a goofy euphemism children would use. it's a notable and surprising feature of the scene, a breach of decorum and a source of irony (irony and decorum both in the classical sense) not diminished in any way by the reader knowing that it's a loanword used without knowledge of its original meaning. some pages later it happens again, and again. now it's a pattern, a "nondiegetic" feature of the language of the book that a bilingual reader has to acknowledge.

here's how you propose it should be done: consult linguistic baselines and analyze the text statistically in search of anomalous rates of incidence. beep boop. all values within expectations. no notable features detected. rating: "brilliant".

i know you're not actually insane and don't read things this way, but a desire to "win" an internet debate has caused you to lock yourself into this bizarrely microscopic perspective where context and meaning don't exist and novels are not novels but word bags because it's the only mode in which you can demonstrate your superiority while avoiding real conversation. that's why you only respond to increasingly tiny parts of my posts and why you are yet to write anything about this novel as a novel. there's a way out of this madness and it's to actually just write why nadsat is brilliant.

[Anonymous No.12286810]

>>12286530
Here's how a sane person addresses a counterargument: I have appealed to supposedly skewed quantitative characteristic of the object at hand and have been factually corrected on my methodology. I should try and find another argument to support my position.

Here's how you do it: but dood if it's not vulgar then it's babby euphemism lul, aren't my false dichotomies and sophistry absolutely exquisite? you're a robot btw bleep bloop haha! stop refuting my brazen statistical claims with statistical facts, that's like microscopic and missing le real conversation. haha. bloop.
.
>sounds like a goofy euphemism children would use
Something not being vulgar does not make it a juvenile euphemism, you pathetic fag. And no, referring to testicles as apples isn't any more childish or goofy than referring to them as eggs, which is the standard Russian usage. If anything yarbles sounds and feels particularly great and appropriate compared to some clunkier sibilant-filled slavisms.
>i know you're not actually insane
I told you, you don't need to bother with dedicated paragraphs for strawmen and declaring yourself to be the only "real conversationalist" around. Instead come up with some arguments which can actually hold some ground instead of pitiful hubris-fueled wiling away and piles of military grade bullshit.