>>>> 2008/04/27 10:11 -0400, Thomas Dickey >>>>
thanks - I'd neglected this area. (I was aware of the issue with plurals,
but hadn't really considered the problem of fragments...)
<<<<<<<<
Nor I, but already in English with the "s"-plural, with its three variants
by sound, there are problems: busses, busts, birds. English has vestigial
subject-agreement, and there are dialects that completely abandoned it,
but there are languages with full subject-agreement, and sometimes
object-agreement besides--which sometimes involve also gender. Because of
pronouns, which mediate cross-sentence agreement, it well may be needful to
make every message its own block, however wasteful it is in some languages.
As for the plural, consider this: I moved from a part of the country where
the plural is less used ("where Main & Jefferson street meet") to one where
it is more used ("where Main & Jefferson streets meet"), and this is only
North-American English. The variation among languages is greater.
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