Re: Attribution, at last

In article <slrnh5ckkg.8jc.dbd@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
David DeLaney <dbd@xxxxxxx> wrote:
Dorothy J Heydt <djheydt@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
mimus <tinmimus99@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Thu, 09 Jul 2009 10:53:59 -0600, Greg Goss wrote:
On one of my other newsgroups, a Dutch guy said that English has this
desperate need for vocabulary because it doesn't inflect enough. He
says that inflecting makes words more flexible, so you don't need quite
so many of them.

Speaking as someone who struggles through Russian/Cyrillic occasionally,
I'll take prepositions over inflection any time.

Me too.

Ditto. I'd rather have my language made out of Legos and Lincoln Logs than
origami, any day.

But, of course, that's because we grew up with English as our
first language. (At least I did and I assume you did.)
Languages may be compared to computer systems, in that the
first one you learn, you imprint on like a baby duck and
judge all subsequent examples by comparing them to the first.

English does have the one advantage that even if you goof up
the grammar rather spectactularly, your meaning can still be
made out with a bit of pondering.

Some years ago Jo Walton said in raseff:


English is very easy to learn how to speak badly -- and be understood,
because it's also a very forgiving language. So one would hope this
makes it easier to learn well because you can try and get somewhere and
be corrected and learn better, you don't have to get it perfect to
achieve communication.

In some languages, if you don't say it right, you haven't said anything,
you might as well just have burped as far as communication goes. In
English, you can totally mangle everything, word order,
pronunciation, grammar, and still have some communication. You can say
"Raining she will," and pronounce "she" as "jee" and "will" as "vill"
and "raining" as "laining" and people will by Jove understand what you
mean and agree, "Yes, it does look like rain."

Dorothy J. Heydt
Vallejo, California
djheydt at hotmail dot com
Should you wish to email me, you'd better use the hotmail edress.
Kithrup is getting too damn much spam, even with the sysop's filters.

.

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