Paratactic

Greek

In What Is Called Thinking?, Martin Heidegger addresses the paratactic nature of Classical Greek texts. Through analyzing a fragment from Parmenides (typically translated "One should both say and think that Being is") Heidegger argues that modern syntactic translations of paratactic Greek texts often leave the meaning obscured. He suggests multiple translations of the fragment that may more closely resemble the paratactic Greek original. These include "needful : the saying also thinking too : being : to be," and "Useful is the letting lie before us, the taking-to-heart, too: beings in Being." Heidegger points to a modern linguistic bias that places paratactic language beneath syntactic language; paratactic language is often viewed as "child-like" or "primitive". He argues that a paratactic sentence a child might say, such as "dog, woof-woof, bad" is not inherently less meaningful than its syntactic equivalent, like "dogs bark and can be dangerous."