Date: 12 Apr 2000 14:18:47 +0200 From: Juergen Nickelsen <jnickelsen@acm.org> To: Anatoly Vorobey <mellon@pobox.com> Cc: chat@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: BSDCon East Message-ID: <x7ln2j4imw.fsf@goting.jn.berlin.snafu.de> In-Reply-To: Anatoly Vorobey's message of "Tue, 11 Apr 2000 19:50:29 %2B0200" References: <20000411195029.00602@techunix.technion.ac.il>
next in thread | previous in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
Anatoly Vorobey <mellon@pobox.com> writes on freebsd-chat: > Consider, for instance, just off the top of my head, "many a X", > or "Would that Y". Such constructions aren't covered in > dictionaries or texts for foreigners. How would one know that the > former is used as a deliberate archaism? The answer is, of course, "read a *lot*, all kinds of stuff from the highest literature to Usenet, and pay attention to what you read." Even after learning English for nine years at school, it took me several years of reading until I was comfortable reading English texts. Another several years later I am still sometimes baffled by a sentence where my parser has to backtrack two or three times. > Consider a sentence going "Granted, X has blablabla..., but...". > How is a dictionary going to help a foreigner to parse it? Granted > what? Granted who to whom? :) Isn't this a figure common in other languages? It certainly is common in German, but, granted :-), English and German *are* quite close. > English syntax *is* fiendishly difficult, no in the least > *because* it's so irregular: "rules" are violated so often that > one has the feeling that anything goes -- except that it doesn't. Yes. Once I was writing some 20 pages of a technical text in English. This wasn't particularly difficult, but here and then there was a sentence which I knew I hadn't got quite right -- not that it was really wrong or that it was incomprehensible, but it didn't *sound* right, not really English, like it had been written by a non-native speaker (which it was). An american colleague who proofread the text made just miniscule changes to these sentences -- she inserted a word or deleted another, slightly changed the order of the sentence, or replaced a word with a better one. And voila!, the sound was right. -- Juergen Nickelsen To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message
Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?x7ln2j4imw.fsf>