Date: Tue, 26 Mar 96 8:33:12 MET From: Greg Lehey <lehey.pad@sni.de> To: mrami@minerva.cis.yale.edu Cc: lehey.pad@sni.de, freebsd-chat@freebsd.org Subject: Re: cvs commit: ports/editors/bpatch/pkg COMMENT Message-ID: <199603260736.IAA02239@nixpbe.pdb.sni.de> In-Reply-To: <Pine.BSF.3.91.960325084108.1609O-100000@mramirez.sy.yale.edu>; from "Marc Ramirez" at Mar 25, 96 8:06 pm
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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. That makes more sense. But it's a moot point whether it's easier to learn endings or auxiliary verbs and prepositions. >>> 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. Hmm. Aren't we talking about a different kind of Umlaut here, the so-called i-Umlaut which hit German in the 13th century? It hit English, too, but they didn't bother to introduce a symbolism to indicate it--that's one of the reasons why English vowels are so difficult to guess. How do you pronounce the 'a' in 'tomato'? With or without i-Umlaut. > 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. I don't know if I'd call that an irregularity. The word has been weakened. > 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'. It'll be interesting to see what influence street language has on the mainstream language. I think it's fair to assume that it's not doing anything towards unifying the language, though. I would imagine that the developments in street language in Los Angeles, Cincinnati, Miami, New York, London and Sydney would have little in common. Greg
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