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Record W4312438004 · doi:10.54395/jot-yt9kd

Translating ἐὰν μή ‘unless’ Conditionals

2022· article· en· W4312438004 on OpenAlex

Why this work is in the frame

A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.

affAt least one author lists a Canadian institution in the pinned OpenAlex snapshot.

Bibliographic record

VenueJournal of Translation · 2022
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldArts and Humanities
TopicSyntax, Semantics, Linguistic Variation
Canadian institutionsCanadian Linguistic Association
Fundersnot available
KeywordsRhetorical questionLinguisticsDependent clauseComputer scienceOrder (exchange)PhilosophySentenceEconomics

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

The Greek conditional construction ἐὰν μή is usually translated into English using unless, which is a portmanteau combining the ideas of a conditional if and a negative not. Sentences containing ἐὰν μή ‘unless’ can often be challenging to translate for a combination of reasons: 1) in the majority of cases, the usual order of protasis (conditional clause) and apodosis (consequence clause) is reversed; 2) typically, both clauses are negative (or the protasis is negative and the apodosis is a rhetorical question expecting a negative response); 3) at the pragmatic level, the protasis usually describes the only situation or fact that would invalidate the apodosis. In this paper I will show that in many cases conditional sentences with ἐὰν μή ‘unless’ can be rephrased by removing the negative elements in both clauses and making explicit the pragmatic idea of exclusivity. However, this type of rephrasing is not always appropriate, and I discuss a number of situations in which it should potentially be avoided.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.001
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.000
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesInsufficient payload (model declined to judge)
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Theoretical or conceptual · Consensus signal: Theoretical or conceptual
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: Empirical
Teacher disagreement score0.355
Threshold uncertainty score0.997

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0010.000
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.000
Science and technology studies0.0000.000
Scholarly communication0.0000.000
Open science0.0000.000
Research integrity0.0000.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0040.000

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.060
GPT teacher head0.268
Teacher spread0.207 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it