Re: Punctuation, journalism and reading glasses

On Thu, 20 Mar 2008 07:45:51 -0700 (PDT), "neil@xxxxxxxxxx"
<neilandemmabarker@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

On 20 Mar, 22:38, John O'Flaherty <quias...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Thu, 20 Mar 2008 07:08:18 -0700 (PDT), "MAOgil...@xxxxxxxxxxxx"





<malcolmogi...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On 20 Mar, 21:57, John O'Flaherty <quias...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Thu, 20 Mar 2008 02:21:55 -0700 (PDT), "MAOgil...@xxxxxxxxxxxx"

<malcolmogi...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
A British journalist named Christopher Booker, writing in the
Telegraph, has written a highly critical account of China's recent
behaviour. The account is based on his assertion that millions of
people are starving in Qinghai.

He read this on the internet:

"Severe snow disasters have left 1.65 million people snowblind and
frostbitten, 500,000 livestock and wildlife dead and 3.1 million
others on verge of starvation in Tibetan prefectures of northwestern
Qinghai Province."

I suspect he wasn't wearing his reading glasses when he based his
article on this news item.

What say you?

You haven't provided a link to the article. How do we know he based it
entirely on the excerpt that you give? At any rate, the sentence is
completely ambiguous about whether the 3.1 million starvers are
animal, human, some mixture of the two, or another class of things
entirely, rats, for example.
--
John- Hide quoted text -

- Show quoted text -

No, I haven't provided a link to the article, but my quotation is a
cut and paste from Mr Booker's item in the Telegraph and is word for
word what appeared in the Xinhua article. Read his article - I am no
longer able to!  Google is a western luxury at the moment :-)

Both can easily be found by those of you who are are not subject to
web censorship.

  My sympathies for your situation.

My question is whether the article is ambiguous - I don't see any
ambiguity whatever. To me, the figure of 3.1 million is an unambiguous
reference to wildlife and livestock. Am I punctuationally challenged?

  To me, it is completely ambiguous because the referent of "others"
is indeterminate. It's not just a matter of punctuation. To force the
association of "others" to livestock and wildlife would require
breaking up the series implied by the comma after "frostbitten",
replacing it with the word "and". It's also not normal to use the word
"others", which refers to individuals, in reference to livestock and
wildlife, at least when they are denoted by those mass nouns.
Do you read it as not saying that any people at all are starving? If
so, do you think that an accurate report of the situation?
It looks as if the writer of the article in Xinhua produced a smoothly
flowing sentence, but didn't convey the meaning very well.
--
John- Hide quoted text -

- Show quoted text -

How about these:
Five are dead and others are starving.

It makes no sense to refer to a small, precise number of people, and
go then to the vague "others". If a precise number is unavailable, use
"several others" or "some others", or "a few others" or "many others".

Five people were hurt, ten animals injured and others in a state of
shock.

This appears on the surface to be a series of three items, which
parallelism would require to be similar. Whether "others" is intended
to refer to "people" or "animals" or both, it semantically violates
the parallelism of the series. It's also not normal to refer to
animals in a state of shock, especially as a fact parallel with people
being hurt. It's a bad idea in this series to drop the "were" in the
second and third clauses.
If you absolutely must cram this illogical collection of information
into one sentence, and insist on mentioning that the animals are
shocked, you could say
"Five people were hurt, while ten animals were injured and some others
were left in a state of shock."
It still doesn't make sense to give such fine information about the
condition of the animals in the same sentence where people are
referred to as simply "hurt".

I think the punctuation is important, and the meaning of 'others' is
clear. But obviously others disagree, which is why I'm canvassing
opinion!

Nothing new in Xinhua conveying meaning badly - the English is never
up to scratch.

In response to another poster, Qinghai and T*b*t are separate
provinces, so the Chinese treatment isn't relevant to this point.

Are the asterisks a device to get the post through censors?
--
John
.

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