有关于 -how to translate?

[kvetch]

Fuller sentence is 有关于我们这个哈比人的母亲。。。

The website implies that it's supposed to be read as 有关 and then 于. I've translated it as "concerning this", but I'm still confused whichever order you read it in-why would you need the 于?

Thanks in advance

[imron]

Which website?

[kvetch]

Mandaread. Has this nifty thing where when you hover over a bunch of ambiguous characters it'll group them for you. This is the text I'm reading.

http://mandaread.com/read/832/1/the-hobbit#

I've only come across 于 to mean "和", and I can't find any grammar rules concerning yu on its own. Even if you're reading it as 有  关于, I don't understand the placement of  有 either, like it seems a little off to me.

[skylee]

Consider "as regards". "regarding", "in respect of", "about", "as to", etc.

 

PS - Actually I don't understand the question.  I don't think it is "a little off".  有關於 is commonly used IMO.

[陳德聰]

有关 is to be related. 于 is a preposition here making it "to be related to".

 

Put it in the sentence and you get "relating to" and skylee has offered some less literal translations in #4. The difference between "关于" and "有关于" is perhaps similar in register difference to that of "regarding" and "about".
 

I've gone and found the "whole" sentence, which is actually a fragment in the first place "有关于我们这个哈比人的母亲--对啦，到底什么是哈比人？" and it could have also been written without the 有.

[roddy]

When you say you've only come across 于 to mean "和" - might you be getting mixed up with 与?

[kvetch]

Got it. Thanks to both of you.

[imron]

As a side note, as much as I love the Hobbit, I'm going to recommend avoiding it at this stage in your learning.  Although it might feel that you know the story and therefore it's going to be easier, it has a number of things going against it:

 

1) As a translation, it might not always be the most natural Chinese.

2) It's going to have a lot of vocab that you're never (or rarely) going to see anywhere else, or which will appear with a different gloss for different books - orcs, elves, various weapons and so on.  You can even see this on page one - 霍比特人 vs 哈比人.  I'm guessing the latter was the original translation, but then 霍比特人 was popularised by the LotR movies and so that's what most people will know, hence the reason it's called something else in the title.  What this means is that you may end up spending a disproportionate amount of time on vocab that is not so useful at this point.

3) It's going to have a lot of names transliterated in to Chinese and that's going to throw off any automated parsing, which in turn is going to throw off you and you'll spend significant time trying to parse and understand something that just turns out to be a name.

[kvetch]

"When you say you've only come across 于 to mean "和" - might you be getting mixed up with 与?"

...Yes. That might have added to my confusion. 

Imron, thanks for the advice-going spend my time on something more useful-once I get off this forum that is.

[imron]

The forums do have plenty of suggestions for books. Check out the books sub-forum, specifically the short story threads. Also see various threads about graded readers.