{"id":18159,"date":"2020-02-09T10:36:31","date_gmt":"2020-02-09T18:36:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/?p=18159"},"modified":"2020-02-09T10:36:31","modified_gmt":"2020-02-09T18:36:31","slug":"the-ambiguity-of-the-hounds","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/2020\/02\/09\/the-ambiguity-of-the-hounds\/","title":{"rendered":"The ambiguity of the hounds"},"content":{"rendered":"\r\n<p>I just encountered this phrase in a Le\u00a0Guin novel: \u201cRodenne fell to talking hounds.\u201d<\/p>\r\n<p>And it occurred to me that that phrase could mean very different things in different genres.<\/p>\r\n<p>The novel where I read it, <cite>Malafrena<\/cite>, is set more or less in the real world, in the 19th century. So the sentence means that Rodenne (a newly introduced character) began to talk about hounds.<\/p>\r\n<p>But in a fantasy novel set in a world of animals who can speak, the same sentence could mean that Rodenne died in battle, killed by hounds who speak.<\/p>\r\n<p>(Or, of course, <i>Rodenne<\/i> could be the name of a city, conquered by those hounds. But in other parts of the sentence in <cite>Malafrena<\/cite> (that I didn\u2019t quote here), Rodenne is clearly a person.)<\/p>\r\n<p>I think it\u2019s kinda neat that the different contexts can change the meaning of <i>fell<\/i>, <i>to<\/i>, and <i>talking<\/i>.<\/p>\r\n<p>(As a friend of mine used to say: \u201cContext disambiguates!\u201d)<\/p>\r\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-18159","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18159","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=18159"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18159\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18160,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18159\/revisions\/18160"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=18159"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=18159"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=18159"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}