I will tell you no
| 1. | Ven Porque Te Necesito |
| 2. | Tu Ultima Cancion |
| 3. | Mi vida eres tú |
michealt
金, 14/12/2018 - 16:58
Good translation, Rosa. One mis-spelling and one error of grammar.
Stanza 1 line 2: "sole" [suela or lenguado] should be "soul" [alma]. These words with the same sound but different spellings and meanings are a pain.
Stanza 2 line 1: "not" should be "no" (or "not any"). Mostly "not" on its own can't come between "there is" and the complement of "is", because after there is" takes a quantifier (multiple word quantifiers like "not the least bit of" or "not any" work if you want some extra sylables, but a simple "no" is better if the extra length isn't needed. (stanza 4 line 1).
I see you fixed "soul" while I was typing this comment.
sandring
金, 14/12/2018 - 17:54
Tom, a typo is just a typo. Rosa and I are teachers. After correcting a hundred of our students' works I can hardly remember what proper English words must look like. :-o And being teachers Rosa and I can tell you that "There is not rancor" is perfectly correct. Where are you always picking up such strange ideas about English grammar? Share the link :)
roster 31
金, 14/12/2018 - 22:54
Tom, a typo is just a typo. Rosa and I are teachers. After correcting a hundred of our students' works I can hardly remember what proper English words must look like. :-o And being teachers Rosa and I can tell you that "There is not rancor" is perfectly correct. Where are you always picking up such strange ideas about English grammar? Share the link :)
Thank you, Nadia, for your defense. but I understand what Tom says.
I suppose I was concentrating on the verbal form but, if I look at the substantive, it would be "no rancor", sure.
I imagine that to express the idea putting emphasis in the verb, I could have said "there won't be any rancor", right?
Thanks to you, both.
michealt
金, 14/12/2018 - 20:25
Nadia,
Rosa and I are good friends who are used to correcting each other's work. She has corrected more of mine than I have of hers, and told me I ought to comment on her translations more often than I have done - and because I've been concentrating on Gaelic and on English to French translation for a whiile now I've fallen even further behind on looking at her translations, so I'd be surpised if she objected to me commenting now.
And I'm afraid you are wrong. "There is not rancor" is perfectly incorrect.
A google search for "There is not rancor" finds 5 pages on the web. A google search for "There is no rancor" finds 14,300 pages on the web. That on its own should make it clear that "There is not rancor" is abnormal usage. A quick check using the older (but still valid) spelling "rancour" to see if it confirms the figures obtained for "rancor" delivers 10,500 to 5, so the total score is 24,800 for "There is no rancor/rancour" and 10 for "there is not rancor/rancour". Then 3 of the "not rancor" pages turn out to contain copies of the same paper, so there are only 3 distinct uses, not 5; and one of the "not rancour" pages is a blog quoting the previous days blog which contained "not rancour", so there are 4 independent examples there, not 5. So only 7 people have written "there is not rancor" or "there is not rancour" on the whole of the currently searchable web, as opposed to many thousands which have "no" instead of "not".
It's generally not a good idea to write things that will make people react with "hey, that's strange, I've never seen that before" or "what on earth does that mean - whatever it means, that's not how we say it". And "there is not rancor" is such a thing, as the results of google search clearly indicate.
If you want to find out what the grammar of English actually looks like (which is nothing much like what is taught in British schools and even less like what is taught in American schools) you need to consult a serious text-book. The one I would recommend is The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language by Rodney Huddlestone and Geoffrey Pullum - I'm hoping to acquire a copy for myself some time next year, but may not. Most books on English grammar are pure nonsense, sadly, so one has to try to get books by authors who know what they are doing and the problem then is knowing who is actually competent to wrtie such a book. Pullum is fine (it's worth looking for him on the web and reading some of his posts), and Huddlestone has a good reputation, so that book should be reliable - but that has ensured that its price is too high for most people; but there's no guarantee that it covers eveything, so it may not cover the isue of negative existence statements with non-count nouns (which is what's behind that "not rancor" vs "no rancor" issue).
sandring
土, 15/12/2018 - 03:00
Tom, dear, I don't mind your corrections. I fully agree with you that "There's no rancour" is the best way to say it. I mind your definition that it's a grammar mistake because it is not. I'm not advocating for Rosa because she doesn't need it. I'm advocating for students of English who may take it seriously and start looking for answers. Foreign students are extremely grammar conscious. Any affirmative can be made into negative with either the particle not or negative pronouns like no, no one etc. You've been talking not about a grammar rule but frequency of occurance or a more natural way of saying that. No bones broken, I hope. As for grammar books - I write them myself. :)
michealt
日, 16/12/2018 - 17:19
The grammatical rule involved says roughly that when "There is not" is used to indicate nonexistence of something, it can't take a noun unless qualified by an indefinite article or by "one" (as adjective, not as noun or pronoun) or by "any". And as only one of the thirtytwo citations of rancor/rancour in the OED 3rd edition covering its various meanings/uses over the last 638 years cites the plural it's clear that it's mostly used as a singular noun so I would suggest that when rancor is the noun involved "not one" and "not a" should be avoided and either "no" or "not any" used rather than "not one" or "not a" (and neither "there is not a rancor" nor "there is not one rancor" appears on the web as far as I can see).
I'll add some more counts: "There is not" is used more than twice as often as "there is no", between the two of them they show on more than 4 billion web pages, and it's only when the word "rancor" or "rancour" is added that "there is no" suddenly occurs more than 3500 times as often as "there is not" instead of less than half as often. The obvious thing to deduce from that is that 7 people made a grammatical error while the other 25000 didn't.
Incidentally, at least 4% of the occurrences of "rancor" on the web are misusing the word to mean some sort of fictitions beast invented for the StarWars films/books/games/spinoffs.
Brat
日, 16/12/2018 - 19:13
If I may, I guess there's at least an error of style in saying "there's not rancour"... Well, if you want to say that you have some feeling but it is not rancour and just some other one (like in the song above), you should start the phrase with "it's not rancour... (that lives in me, etc.)". And if you say "there's no rancour", you may mean there's no any special feeling at all (at least a strong one worth to be mentioned). I mean, the first case implies an alternative and the second one may omit it. That's how I understand this damn'd grammar. ;)
Surely, in Russian we don't have even a shade of this problem: we can say either "во мне нет злобы, есть лишь горечь" or "во мне не злоба - только горечь" omitting just one letter in the negational word. But still there are some subtleties, for instance, the first example uses verbs both for negation and affirmation, and the second doesn't (it uses just one negational particle), and, yes, declensions differ a bit. Well, it looks like it's much more complicated in Russian than in Spanish or English, after dissection. :)
Thank you, Rosa.
Pls, correct the typo "soul"
Best. :)