Worth It
Whatever your grade-school English teachers may have said, parts of speech in English are as complicated as all hell. Forget about words that have multiple parts of speech (e.g. “run”); what about words like “would”? Did you ever have to classify that? (Linguists actually call “would” and friends “modals”, but the exact properties of modals in English are not quite well understood.)
I got to thinking about parts of speech in the phrase “it was worth it”. That sentence is actually linguistically interesting in another way: how English speakers are able to resolve the pronoun “it” so easily. That’s not what I got interested in, though. What part of speech is the word “worth” in that sentence? I think most people would be tempted to say “preposition”, failing to fit it into any other category, but to me, a preposition is something that expresses a relation between two nouns, and that word doesn’t.
I never quite figured that one out (I don’t think linguists have either), but it led me to something else. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that “it was worth it” is a very idiomatic phrase in English, and the words that comprise it are hard to classify into parts of speech. Then I started thinking about how other languages express it.
En français, on dirait « Ça valait la peine ». Literally translated, that phrase means “that had the value of the cost”. “Valait” is a conjugated form of the verb “valoir”, a word that is related to a slew of modern English words: “value”, “valor”, “valiant”, and even “available”. Properly translated, we’d have to say “valoir” means “to be worth”, but that kind of defeats what I’m trying to do here. The phrase, then, is basically saying that the value of the first “it” in “it was worth it” is at least enough to overcome the cost.
In Japanese, it’s also an idiomatic phrase: 割に合った. This is pronounced approximately “wari ni atta” (if you don’t know what Japanese sounds like, don’t even try). Literally, it means something like “it met with profit”. This actually makes a lot more sense to the English speaker than a lot of Japanese idioms. Something that was worth it is profitable; i.e. the benefit is greater than the cost. I’m starting to think the Japanese might even make more sense than the English.
I have a bunch more to say about “it was worth it”, parts of speech, and idiomatic phrases, but right now, my attention span has run out.
(It’s entirely possible that one day I will write about something other than linguistics or computers. However, today is not that day. In fact, neither is tomorrow; I’ve got a neat language-related post lined up for tomorrow.)
I got to thinking about parts of speech in the phrase “it was worth it”. That sentence is actually linguistically interesting in another way: how English speakers are able to resolve the pronoun “it” so easily. That’s not what I got interested in, though. What part of speech is the word “worth” in that sentence? I think most people would be tempted to say “preposition”, failing to fit it into any other category, but to me, a preposition is something that expresses a relation between two nouns, and that word doesn’t.
I never quite figured that one out (I don’t think linguists have either), but it led me to something else. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that “it was worth it” is a very idiomatic phrase in English, and the words that comprise it are hard to classify into parts of speech. Then I started thinking about how other languages express it.
En français, on dirait « Ça valait la peine ». Literally translated, that phrase means “that had the value of the cost”. “Valait” is a conjugated form of the verb “valoir”, a word that is related to a slew of modern English words: “value”, “valor”, “valiant”, and even “available”. Properly translated, we’d have to say “valoir” means “to be worth”, but that kind of defeats what I’m trying to do here. The phrase, then, is basically saying that the value of the first “it” in “it was worth it” is at least enough to overcome the cost.
In Japanese, it’s also an idiomatic phrase: 割に合った. This is pronounced approximately “wari ni atta” (if you don’t know what Japanese sounds like, don’t even try). Literally, it means something like “it met with profit”. This actually makes a lot more sense to the English speaker than a lot of Japanese idioms. Something that was worth it is profitable; i.e. the benefit is greater than the cost. I’m starting to think the Japanese might even make more sense than the English.
I have a bunch more to say about “it was worth it”, parts of speech, and idiomatic phrases, but right now, my attention span has run out.
(It’s entirely possible that one day I will write about something other than linguistics or computers. However, today is not that day. In fact, neither is tomorrow; I’ve got a neat language-related post lined up for tomorrow.)
Labels: linguistics
posted by Think Different @ 9:22 PM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home