On Mon, Oct 20, 2003 at 12:23:04PM -0400, Nori Heikkinen wrote: > on Mon, 20 Oct 2003 01:40:19PM +0200, David Jardine insinuated:
> > Depends what you mean by purity. By European language standards > > it's fairly pure in the sense of not being cluttered up with things > > like redundant inflections, but this is probably because it is > > impure in the sense of having been knocked around by neighbouring > > languages and dialects until there's not much left of it apart from > > what's really necessary to communicate. > > you're kidding, right? if i read you right, you're stating that > "there's not much left of [English] apart from what's really necessary > to communicate"? on the contrary -- it's one of the richest, least > threadbare languages there is! I wasn't kidding and I don't think you read me right. I wasn't talking about poverty - in fact I wasn't making any statements about the language but simply trying to clear up a misunderstanding arising from the way people were using the word "purity". How much you can communicate and with what precision you can communicate subtle differences is a question of the richness or poverty of a language. How little redundancy such as gender agreement or vowel harmony etc is involved is what one of the posters meant by purity. David -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
