On Monday 12 October 2009 21:58:14 Volker Armin Hemmann wrote: > On Montag 12 Oktober 2009, Grant Edwards wrote: > > On 2009-10-11, Alan McKinnon <alan.mckin...@gmail.com> wrote: > > > English is a mess. As a language it's worse than a pig's > > > breakfast and makes almost no sense whatsoever to non-native > > > speakers. Mind you, it makes about as much sense to native > > > speakers as well :-) I had to take 5 years of Latin study in > > > high school to understand how my own mother tongue works. Sad > > > indictment for a language wouldn't you say? > > > > At least we mostly got rid of the whole gender mess and only > > have to worry about objective/subjective case for a few cases. > > which makes english a horrible, horrible language.
Spot on fella, spot on. If anyone disagrees with you, have them write C without parentheses. Yup, that's what English tries to do. Then we have our fancy professors who try and tell you that "will" as in "will speak" is a word. It isn't. The proof: define "will" in that sense, and do it in such a way that someone unfamilar with verb tenses can get it. It can't be done :-) What you *can* do is show how "will speak" and "have spoken" are different. But then you have defined not two words, but one compound verb. Which is how Latin and German work after all... Another idiocy: "I will speak", what does that mean? Future tense? Someone being emphatic? Something else? > > During a mostly futile attempt to learn German, I had occasion > > to read Mark Twin's essay on Germain articles. IIRC, plotting > > out all of the combinations for "the" takes something like a > > 3x9 grid > > it is always hard to go from chaos to order. I truly pity foreigners trying to learn English. But at least English is willing to absorb any idea or word from any other language and just use it (unlike say, French). In theory you could pollute English with decent German grammar and slowly deprecate the idiocies over time. Might take a few hundred years though... -- alan dot mckinnon at gmail dot com
