Date: Mon, 25 Mar 1996 16:31:19 +0000 (GMT) From: Paul Richards <p.richards@elsevier.co.uk> To: narvi@haldjas.folklore.ee (Narvi) Cc: jkh@time.cdrom.com, asami@cs.berkeley.edu, p.richards@elsevier.co.uk, fenner@parc.xerox.com, freebsd-chat@freebsd.org Subject: Re: cvs commit: ports/editors/bpatch/pkg COMMENT Message-ID: <199603251631.QAA08872@tees> In-Reply-To: <Pine.BSF.3.91.960323140710.20093A-100000@haldjas.folklore.ee> from "Narvi" at Mar 23, 96 02:13:34 pm
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In reply to Narvi who said > > It isn't actually at all hard to learn - the trick allways is speak so > that it sounds nice to your ears. That they you can get almost all of the > grammar right (except for the commas). And there really aren't that many > special cases (I haven't yet found out how you make sure from which > gender a given word is other than learning by heart). Perhaps you should > consider hard languages in which there are 14 or more cases. > Actually, that's a really bad thing to do. English has rather bizarre grammatical rules that have nothing to do with the way we speak it. I think that's basically the issue, the rules are evolving to match the different way we know speak. If you find a dictionary that's, say, 20 years old it categorically states that it should be 'an' before vowels and that the vowels are 'a, e, i, o and u'. Modern dictionaries tend to say the same thing mostly but I have found other grammatical texts that state that 'a' can be used before 'u' depending on pronunciation. Basically, "we just don't talk proper no more" :-) I neatly side-tracked the whole issue in my thesis my changin all occurences of unit to node :-) -- Paul Richards. Originative Solutions Ltd. (Netcraft Ltd. contractor) Elsevier Science TIS online journal project. Email: p.richards@elsevier.co.uk Phone: 0370 462071 (Mobile), +44 (0)1865 843155
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