Quote:
This level of understanding (based on only 10 syllables) is far, far beyond Watson's! (But I have no idea when AI may catch up, re: AlphaGo.)
Follow-up question (greedy): does ふるえて眠れ have any ancient, literary context, or was it an original coinage just for the 1964 movie ?
Ed,
I'm not aware of any older allusion of the phrase, but just to expand a little on why it sounds "poetical": apart from the 7-syllable metre, which is a backbone of most Japanese poems, it exhibits vowel harmony. Within a 7- (or 5-) syllable unit there is a tendency to make all the vowels "back" (a and o) or "forward" (i, e, u). These are my own terms, but the phenomenon is common in Uro-Altaic and other languages. For example, you will see it a lot in Russian poetry and folk songs (but in Russian the u is a back sound, whereas the Japanese u is more like ü, and since ancient Japanese had eight vowels rather than the modern five, there was even more scope for vowel harmony then).
As a trivial example of how vowel harmony works in practice, sake is rice-wine in Japanese and -ya is suffix meaning dealer. But a rice-wine dealer is sakaya rather than sakeya.
As a less trivial example, take this line from a Russian poem/song (Одинокая гармонь) by poet laureate Mikhail Isakovsky: Снова замерло всё до рассвета. He used what I regard as a huge proportion of a o and u, which you could say went well with the Stalinist architecture so prevalent during his life. But it would be unfair to overlook the subtleties. In this line, the e sound in замерло is a neutral one, as the stress is on the za-, so the only pure forward sound is the e in рассвета. All the back "dark" sounds fit the word picture - All has closed down till morning - but the open e beautifully adds rays of sunshine to it (and рассвета = dawn). The rest of the poem also makes skilful use of vowel painting. That may be why so many of Isakovsky's poems have been turned into songs. choirs like the Red Army Choir and the Pyatnitsky Choir have used lots of his work. I'd be a bit surprised if most people here didn't know Katyusha, at least as a recognisable tune
This digression is partly to explain why word nerds like me feel sensitised to phrases like ふるえて眠れ. Similarly, I even have a theory that an important part of Rabbie Burns's poetic skill is his love of the w sound:
Now westlin winds and slaughtering guns
Bring autumn's pleasant weather.
The moorcock springs on whirring wings
Among the blooming heather.
Now waving grain, wild o'er the plain
Delights the weary farmer.
But no matter how nerdy you think that is, computers may have already out-Alphaed us as regards stylistics. I read the blurb of a pseudo-linguistics book on this topic recently. I think it might have been called How to Write a Bestseller. Although this was by yet another author who tells you how to do something wonderful yet for some strange reason never does it himself, the research mentioned may not have been entirely fanciful. I gather someone did some tests where famous authors tried to write things under a pseudonym, but the computer could tell who the author was by analysing the style. Even more impressive (to the author - not to me) was the fact that even when the writer knew he/she was under test, and so tried to change style and vocabulary, AlphaWord was not fooled.