Date: Mon, 25 Mar 1996 20:06:53 -0500 (EST) From: Marc Ramirez <mrami@mramirez.sy.yale.edu> To: Greg Lehey <lehey.pad@sni.de> Cc: freebsd-chat@freebsd.org Subject: Re: cvs commit: ports/editors/bpatch/pkg COMMENT Message-ID: <Pine.BSF.3.91.960325084108.1609O-100000@mramirez.sy.yale.edu> In-Reply-To: <199603251022.LAA00988@nixpbe.pdb.sni.de>
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On Mon, 25 Mar 1996, Greg Lehey wrote: > > English has only 4 noun forms, compared to German's 7 > > I don't understand what you're trying to say here. German still has a > dative, which has all but completely disappeared in modern English. > Apart from that, they're the same. My point was that nouns in English inflect for less than in German, and since there's no need for article-noun aggreement, this adds up to less rules to learn. Of course, English just shifts the complexity... (Hmmm, I need to express future tense; should I use 'about to', 'fixing to', 'going to', or 'will'?) So it's easier to get yourself understood, but harder to express shades of meaning. > > If I wanted to, I could get into the ten declination types in > > German, but I don't. :) > > I don't understand this, either. Umlauting rules left over from Proto-Germanic. Analogous to English drink umlauting to drank and drunk and sing to sang, sung but think (same vowel) umlauting to thought, thought. And work, a different vowel from think, umlauting to wrought, wrought. Of course, in Old English the verbs were singan, drincan, thencan, and wercan... there the umlauting was regular. English has few such rules (work, for example, has already been regularized), which is the only point I was trying to make. And as time goes on, such irregularities will go away. If you listen on the streets of the US, in many places the third person singuar inflection has disappeared, and 'to be' has been regularized in conjugation as well 'I be, you be, he be, we be, I was, you was, we was, etc.) The times, they are a-changin'. > > Verbs > > > > English has four forms for weak verbs (walk, walks, walked, walking) while > > German has ten (kaufe, kaufst, kauft, kaufen, kaufte, kauftest, kauftet, > > kauften, gekauft, kaufend). > > This argument is flawed. You're mixing endings and tenses. I am mixing endings and tenses, yes, but they are both inflections. Again, English inflects less information into its particles, which means a student doesn't have to learn a gender and case marker to use a word. > > If you want a really good (bad?) example of > > vestigal spelling, though, you could always look at French, e.g., quel and > > quelle, both pronounced [kwel]. French las lost a gender distinction in > > the spoken language, but retained it in the written one! > > That depends on where in France you are. The 'e' at the end of > 'quelle' is definitely pronounced in the South, and also for emphasis > in the North. And this is just one aspect of gender. If somebody > says "Tu es folle", you don't need to read it to know they're talking > to a female. This is true. Of course, my grandparents still use 'hit' for the neuter pronoun... (Of course, they don't use the dual pronouns anymore, so there's still hope for them) > I think I'd go for Spanish as easier than English. :) Marc. -- A child of five could understand this! Fetch me a child of five.
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