Re: comma before "or"

On 7/09/2006, Robert Lieblich posted this:
riclanders@xxxxxxxxx wrote:

[ ... ]

Once again, David, you apply ignorance where real thought is required..
This may come as a surprise, but verbs are not unique to the English
language. In fact, verbs are the easiest things for non-Native speakers
to get right. In other words, "dropping verbs" is an artifact of your
ignorance not something non native English speakers actually do.

And to think I was worried that I might have missed all the fun.

The specific omitted word was "are," one of the many inflections of
"to be." Without getting into the issue of the universality of verbs
(perhaps Franke can tell us whether Chinese has verbs), I'd like to
point out that many languages get along quite well without "be". Hebrew and Arabic are two such. Omission of "to be" is indeed
characteristic of many non-native speakers and writers of English.

That said, I do think this riclanders person sufficiently fluent in
English to be a native speaker. Others seem to have done a thorough
job addressing his wit and his temperament.

Throw in Russian and a few other Slavic languages, just to get the lack of "to be" into Indo-European.

--
Gene E. Bloch (Gino)
letters617blochg3251
(replace the numbers by "at" and "dotcom")


.

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