Would you buy a modern translation of Human Action?

Miscellaneous General
41
  1. From other books written in normal English at the time, it is clear that no on said “rectangular triangle”.

Which other books from the 1940s? Examples please.

does not make it a properly written book. (…) it is still poorly written.

Stop stridently acting like your preferences reflect some kind of obvious standard. For my purposes, it was beautifully written. And if it was written the way you seem to want it to have been, I wouldn’t have enjoyed it nearly so much. And others among the many people who couldn’t put it down upon its first reading would likely say the same.

Human Action is not your style. Stop making it out to be more than that.

And it would make sense that it wouldn’t be your style. Consider the way you write about economics compared to the way I write. You LOVE hypothetical examples. And you like to write about them in everyday language. I prefer to write direct, positive expressions of economic concepts and their interrelations. So it would make sense that Human Action would resonate with me, because the way Mises writes is the way I think. And that is simply not the case with you. Some people may prefer your posts to mine, because they think my posts are pedantic. Some people may prefer my posts to yours, because they think your posts are overly loose and inexact. But both of us would quite reasonably take offense if someone came in here calling either of our posts “badly written” because either of our styles don’t resonate with him.

It gains, not loses, clarity if every sentence that contains the word “category” were just omitted.

That would gut the meaning of the paragraph you quoted. I don’t think you fully understand that excerpt yet. It might be your attitude that is getting in the way, and that that is the real “distracting mosquito” to be concerned about.

One does not have to be a gifted writer to know that something is poorly written. One has to be a gifted writer to rewrite it.

There may simply be no elegant way of expressing a given idea without butchering its meaning. If you yourself are not a gifted writer, you have no way of knowing if that is the case or not.

  1. No. My point is that had English been Mises’ native language the whole book would look different. Which seems to me undeniable.

That was not your original statement. You evidently thought Human Action was a translation.

42

  1. I have plenty of Math books from that era and earlier [you can examine some on the web].

  2. Well, I’m glad to see you recognize my styler, means you are reading my posts. To summarize what I think is your argument here, you seem to be saying that there are no standards of good English, only personal preferences. I can but appeal to authority. Ask someone who edits English for a living. Until then there is no point in continuing this line of debate.

  3. Have you been sprinkling in ad hominem these last few paragraphs, Grayson? Yes, there must be some deeper meaning that escapes me. All I got was exactly what could be learned from leaving out every sentence that says category.

  4. I disagree. Again, ask a pro if there exists a level of competence in editing called “knowing something is clearly wrong with this sentence, but not having the expertise to fix it.”

  5. [Dunno what happened to 5]. Yes, in my first post I had assumed it’s a translation. I’m not denying that and am not trying to hide it. And indeed what I wrote after I was told it’s not a translation is, of course, not my original statement. We agree on that. They are [in my opinion] valid comments nontheless.

Bottom line, I think the heart of the matter is what I mentioned above, that we seem to be disagreeing whether writing is accountable to a standard.