Language X within scope of language Y

[Peter Constable]

> From: John Cowan [mailto:jcowan at reutershealth.com]


> > I'm not familiar with that work, but certainly "Das Kapital" is
> > German even if I refer to it in an English conversation; "Capital"
> > would be English. (/dæs kʰæpɪɾɫ̩/ would be German spoken with
> > an American English accent.)
> 
> It's not clear what you refer to when you refer to it, though.  All the
> translations I have ever seen are entitled "Capital", so presumably when
> you refer to it, you refer to the ur-book which is language independent.

The relevant issue you're hitting on is that titles can cross the line from a linguistic expression that happens to denote an object to become a *name*, names having a measure of language independence that general linguistic expressions typically do not have.


Peter Constable