A Short Excerpt from The Little Prince with Annotation

! ! !

[f ]-measure word for cloth, picture

m !ng sh ]-boa constrictor

[ji o su ]-ground into pieces

[ch n]-submerge

Notes: This is a basic enough passage in terms of grammar and so forth, so we can just start with an all-inclusive translation: !When I was six years old, I saw a magnificent picture in a book called True Stories from Nature about a early forest. In this picture there was a boa constrictor swallowing another animal. Here is a copy of the drawing. The book said that boa constrictors swallow their prey without chewing. After this, they cannot move and sleep for six month so they can digest the food. I thought about this and the jungle deeply. After a while, I drew a picture of my own with colour pencils. It was the first picture I ever drew. The picture looked like this:" Lets look at one of the sentences: Literally: Big boa constrictor don#t chew fragments prey, then completely swallow down. This is pretty much a place where the order is sequential, the boa constrictor does not chew, then swallows it down. In English, the opposite is true: !The boa constrictor swallows without chewing. " When taken at face value with each character analyzed individually, some of the meanings do not make sense such as chew fragments, but when put together the meaning becomes crush (as in crush into pieces).