illogicality and languages

Guest   Wed Feb 13, 2008 7:45 pm GMT
the most illogical thing to me is the the French writing with all these endings that were dropped in XII century but are still written: ils venaient (11 letters = 6/5 sounds)
Guest   Wed Feb 13, 2008 9:39 pm GMT
That confers sophistication to French. So when you find a new French word you wonder "which letters are really pronounced?" It's misterious. French is not a language for vulgar people.
greg   Wed Feb 13, 2008 9:58 pm GMT
'guest' : « Well this has to do with history, not "adding" an '-s'.
We didn't one day wake up and decide: "Oh, let's add an '-s' to third person singular verbs, but not the other persons." »

Le même principe s'applique exactement aux genres grammaticaux. CQFD.




'Guest' : « the most illogical thing to me is ***the the*** French writing [...] ».

Apparemment ce n'est pas un monopole du français...
Guest   Wed Feb 13, 2008 10:05 pm GMT
"That confers sophistication to French. So when you find a new French word you wonder "which letters are really pronounced?" It's misterious. French is not a language for vulgar people"
>>That is the stupidest thing I ever heard, but oh well, I guess you guys have to tell yourselves that having such irregularities is a good thing so you won't feel bad, what else can you do about it.
Guest   Thu Feb 14, 2008 2:00 am GMT
<<That confers sophistication to French. So when you find a new French word you wonder "which letters are really pronounced?" It's misterious. French is not a language for vulgar people. >>

(: Maybe it's time for English to look again to French for inspiration. We could stop pronounding the -s (and -es, etc.) at the end of 1st person singular verbs, but still write them. We could satisfy Greg by removing this one illogicality from English, but preserve backward compatibility with all the old texts. English spelling is already so bad that nobody'd ever notice another silent 's'. :) Isn't there already some obscure dialect somewhere in the UK that doesn't pronounce this 's' at the end pof verbs?
Guesty   Thu Feb 14, 2008 7:47 am GMT
<< That confers sophistication to French. So when you find a new French word you wonder "which letters are really pronounced?" It's misterious. French is not a language for vulgar people. >>

You could say that...or you could say that it confers that the writing is illogical and impractical. However you want to look at it.

<< That is the stupidest thing I ever heard, but oh well, I guess you guys have to tell yourselves that having such irregularities is a good thing so you won't feel bad, what else can you do about it. >>

Ha! Good point.
Xie   Thu Feb 14, 2008 9:37 am GMT
>>English DOES have grammatical gender:

>>I know this isn't the definition of "grammatical" gender, but where does it state that grammatical gender has to show disctinctly different forms? What if all forms coalesce into a single form?

I don't consider those as real gram. genders, but, rather, as a result of social construct - gender equality (where sexual wouldn't even be the right word to start with).

The Chinese used to refer to everyone using the same pronoun, with more honorific pronouns toward elderly people, people of higher status, etc. Until almost a century ago the Chinese didn't have the second person singular for FEMALES, and it's been said that the creation of 'she' 她 may have been a result of both the tendency toward gender equality and the tendency of the then comtemporary scholars to borrow things heavily from Japanese and English, in particular.

But then, you can also tell some sort of illogicality. We have two personal plural pronouns, namely one for all males or males + females and another for all females. There must be some other languages that do not even have 2 such pronouns - they may use a masculine one regardless of the real females, and if a man is counted along with 1,000,000 women, these 1,000,001 people still are described by a masculine plural pronoun. Equal or not?
Guest   Thu Feb 14, 2008 1:28 pm GMT
apparently in Hebraic when you've got one man and more than sixty women, you can use a female pronoun, but I think in every indo-european language the rule is the same like in Chinese
Guest   Thu Feb 14, 2008 4:03 pm GMT
<<(: Maybe it's time for English to look again to French for inspiration. We could stop pronounding the -s (and -es, etc.) at the end of 1st person singular verbs, but still write them.>>

Uh, How about No.
Besides, that's -s/-es at the end of 3RD person singular, Genius.
How about this: We extend the -s to include ALL persons and numbers, like Scots and Scandinavian? "I sits, you sits, he sits, we sits, you sits, they sits"? huh? That would be logical. Historical too.

<<Isn't there already some obscure dialect somewhere in the UK that doesn't pronounce this 's' at the end pof verbs?>>

The English speaking world is not going to pattern its speech after some obscure local dialect. Would you pattern your Spanish after some remote village somewhere in the Andes? Well then.
Guest   Thu Feb 14, 2008 4:45 pm GMT
<<How about this: We extend the -s to include ALL persons and numbers, like Scots and Scandinavian? "I sits, you sits, he sits, we sits, you sits, they sits"? huh? That would be logical. Historical too.>>

Not a bad proposal, at all. This technique would help out with the verbs like 'sit', 'put', etc, that don't change in the past tense, assuming that the -s is only added to all persons/numbers of the present tense.

<<Would you pattern your Spanish after some remote village somewhere in the Andes? Well then.>>

Just about anything would be an improvement over my current Spanish. :)
guest   Thu Feb 14, 2008 4:59 pm GMT
<<This technique would help out with the verbs like 'sit', 'put', etc, that don't change in the past tense>>

the past tense of 'sit' is 'sat'
Guest   Thu Feb 14, 2008 5:31 pm GMT
<<the past tense of 'sit' is 'sat' >>

Whoops -- should have been 'set' (as in the earlier post)