From: oz@ursa.sis.yorku.ca (Ozan Yigit)
Subject: Re: a quote from "Alice"
Organization: York U. Student Information Systems Project
	<OZ.92Sep1122054@ursa.sis.yorku.ca>
	<1992Sep1.204532.2859@galois.mit.edu>
Date: Wed, 2 Sep 1992 01:38:24 GMT

Timothy Y. Chow writes [in response to my comment that in his
first analysis, he clearly misunderstood the structure of the
sentence]:

   Clear?  Really?  I don't think so.  The only difference between your
   analysis and mine is that you replaced "not otherwise than" with "as" and I
   simply dropped the phrase altogether.

I include your analysis [which I had been referring to] below.
I would be interested in the method through which you derived

   TC: Never imagine yourself to be what it might appear to
       others that X was Y would have appeared to them to be
       otherwise.

from this particular piece.

| 
| From: tycchow@riesz.mit.edu (Timothy Y. Chow)
| Subject: Re: a quote from "Alice"
| Message-ID: <1992Aug22.224447.9253@galois.mit.edu>
| References: <1992Aug17.002435.11890@galois.mit.edu> <1992Aug21.095445.9730@eskimo.celestial.com>
| Date: Sat, 22 Aug 92 22:44:47 GMT
| Lines: 47
| 
| In article <1992Aug21.095445.9730@eskimo.celestial.com> ericj@eskimo.celestial.com (Eric Jorgensen) writes:
| <tycchow@riesz.mit.edu (Timothy Y. Chow) writes:
| <> > TANAKA Tomoyuki <tanaka@copper.ucs.indiana.edu> writes:
| <> 
| <> >		`Never imagine yourself not to be otherwise than
| <> >		what it might appear to others that what you
| <> >		were or might have been was not otherwise than
| <> >		what you had been would have appeared to them to
| <> >		be otherwise.'"
| <
| <'Imagine yourself to be otherwise than it appears to others.'  All the rest
| <seems to contradict itself.
| 
| How do you get this?  It looks like you dropped the first "what."
| 
| I think I probably wasn't clear enough in my previous article.  The sentence
| makes sense if we delete everything after the "was."  To see the structure
| of the resulting sentence, observe that "what you were or might have been"
| is a noun phrase.  Replace it with "the queen of England."  Then we get:
| 
| 	`Never imagine yourself not to be otherwise than what it might
| 	appear to others that the queen of England was.'
| 
| Now note that "what it might appear to others that the queen of England was"
| is a noun phrase, and may be replaced by, say, "a great woman."  So we get:
| 
| 	`Never imagine yourself not to be otherwise than a great woman.'
| 
| We can drop the "not otherwise than" without much harm.
| 
| 	`Never imagine yourself to be a great woman.'
| 
| So, if we delete everything after the "was" the command is approximately,
| "Don't let others' opinions of your past influence your self-image."
| 
| We can actually retain the "not" after the "was" and apply a similar
| analysis.
| 
| The sentence relies on confusing the listener enough so that when the end of
| the sentence appears it is not recognized as such.  Locally, "was not" looks
| like the middle of a sentence so the speaker takes advantage of this to
| continue the sentence in a superficially plausible way.
| -- 
| Tim Chow     tycchow@math.mit.edu
| Where a calculator on the ENIAC is equipped with 18,000 vacuum tubes and weighs
| 30 tons, computers in the future may have only 1,000 vacuum tubes and weigh
| only 1 1/2 tons.                               ---Popular Mechanics, March 1949

oz
---
In seeking the unattainable, simplicity | internet: oz@nexus.yorku.ca
only gets in the way. -- Alan J. Perlis | phone: 416 736 2100 x 33976