Re: data, news, pants, scissors, people [was: Proper verb agreement when referring to a company or firm]

On Sun, 19 Mar 2006 12:48:19 -0800, Alexei A. Frounze wrote:
[...]
I'm not sure about happy. Even if we know that the languages are similar or
related or have a common ancestor, it doesn't enable us to understand each
other better, we still need to learn the current language of someone else in
this family to be able to talk to them.

Well, at least not always. Knowing Russian "хлеб" somewhat
helps to understand OE "hlaf", bread, modern English "loaf"; and
in general, knowing any Slavic language might help with grammar
and lexicon of many conservative IE languages (especially
Baltic, the closest relations, and _very_ conservative in
preserved grammar and lexicon; Lithuanian even has, as far as I
know, all three IE types of stress). But, as an extreme
counterexample, Russian "два", two, hardly helps to understand
Armenian "erkar", long (both from PIE *dew-).

--
Alec
St.Petersburg, Russia [30E18 59N56]
.

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