[The Soul of the Far East by Percival Lowell]@TWC D-Link book
The Soul of the Far East

CHAPTER 4
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For example, "The merry monarch who ended by falling a victim to profound melancholia" becomes "To profound melancholia a victim by falling ended merry monarch," and the sympathetic hearer weeps first and laughs afterward, when chronologically he should be doing precisely the opposite.
A like inversion of the natural order of things results from the absence of temporal conjunctions.

In Japanese, though nouns can be added, actions cannot; you can say "hat and coat," but not "dressed and came." Conjunctions are used only for space, never for time.

Objects that exist together can be joined in speech, but it is not allowable thus to connect consecutive events.

"Having dressed, came" is the Japanese idiom.

To speak otherwise would be to violate the unities.


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