Caveat: Verbcastles

Allegedly, the Korean language has no relative pronouns.  So how do they phrasally modify a noun?  They do this cool thing whereby they can nominalize a verb (and all its accompanying baggage, subject, object, etc.) and make it the object or subject of another verb.  And this can pile up:  a nominalized verb phrase functioning as the subject of another verb, which in turn is nominalized and made the subject of another, etc., ad infinitum.
I won’t even dare to try to show an example – I don’t want to embarrass myself by publishing mutilated Korean.  But it’s mind-boggling complex and yet syntactically elegant.  We can do it in English, within certain limits, but our natural Subject-Verb-Object word order makes it difficult to enchain indefinitely, while Korean’s Subject-Object-Verb order means the structures can nest comfortably.   Maybe I can try to conjure some reliable and concrete examples.

Meanwhile, I have been contemplating sandcastles, and found this old picture of a sandcastle Jeffrey (my stepson), Andrew (my brother) and I built on a Santa Monica beach in 1994.

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Think of them as complex syntactical objects made of sand.
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Caveat: 좋지도 않지만 나쁘지도 않아

… just doing OK.
In the last month, I’ve reestablished communication with two very long-lost friends who found me because of my facebook presence.   It’s pretty cool.  So I have been tweaking my facebook profile with the realization that apparently it’s a good place to be “visible” in the internet world.  Maybe I should make a myspace profile too?
I’ve also been working on trying to update my “website” – for the first time since last summer.   I’m trying to re-learn CSS so I can get beyond the default formatting that I inherited when I built the websites last year, using the pre-made example kits that come with the ASP.NET development platform.
I’m very happy to have bought a new MP3 player.  It’s nice to put it into “shuffle” mode and walk home at night through the humid streets, listening to Slick Idiot or Cat Stevens or U2 or Depeche Mode, completely random.
Here is a picture of me wielding an alligator and a stupid face for the benefit of my bemused students.
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