Gotta jump in here. I know some German. I have training in linguistics, which means I know *about* languages that I could not survive in for a moment. And I have experience with English as a Second Language.
I have to take umbrage with the assertion that English is hugely difficult or complicated. Except for spelling, or course, which is inexcusably complex by any standard. But grammar is relatively simple in that the overwhelming syntactic governance is order: subject-verb-object characterizes most well-formed sentences. Compare with German: Der Mann gab der Dame einen Hund. (The man gave the woman a dog.) These variations are (loosely) equivalent: Einen Hund gab der Mann der Dame. Der Dame gab der Mann einen Hund. You cannot flip the order around in English without creating nonsense. What preserves the meaning in German is the declension of the nouns. 'der Mann' is marked as subject (nominative) in any position; 'einen Hund is direct object (accusative); 'der Dame' is indirect object (dative). English has no declension outside of personal pronouns, so order is critical 99% of the time. Hence the famous quote about newsworthy topics: 'Dog Bites Man' is not news. 'Man Bites Dog' deserves at least a mention. 'Ein Hund Beißt einen Mann' would mean (more or less) the same thing in either order if declension is preserved. Since COBOL is English-inspired, syntactic order is crucial there too. 'MOVE SPACES TO LINE' could in no way be replaced with 'TO LINE MOVE SPACES' even if the goal is to rhetorically emphasize the destination. Same is true for other high-level languages like REXX. Even assembler requires a specific order depending on the instruction. You cannot grammatically mark an operand such that flipping order would preserve the meaning. . . J.O.Skip Robinson Southern California Edison Company Electric Dragon Team Paddler SHARE MVS Program Co-Manager 323-715-0595 Mobile 626-543-6132 Office ⇐=== NEW [email protected] -----Original Message----- From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Steve Beaver Sent: Thursday, June 01, 2017 6:59 AM To: [email protected] Subject: (External):Re: Language Skills English is not a mechanical language with a lot of grammatical rules. The was long time known as the mongrels language since it pull parts and pieces from other older languages Steve -----Original Message----- From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Peter Hunkeler Sent: Thursday, June 1, 2017 12:40 AM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: Language Skills > Us native English speakers have to deal with the world's most > complicated language (citation needed), so we have no extra capacity > to learn other languages. We're sorry :-) LOL. Mankind loves to be challenged, and this explains why that most complicated language in the world is now ubiqutious :-) -- Peter Hunkeler Native Swiss German ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
