English articles are not nonsense
Standing Bear wrote: Russian grammar is different than ours in many ways, including the omission of common nonsense words that we call 'articles' like 'the' in many cases... Actually, English articles have a specific meaning: they indicate whether you are talking about one specific instance or general instances. It is a common misconception that English articles, number, and French word gender are nonsense or dispensable. They have no meaning, but they provide essential cross checking to reduce errors in communication. They function somewhat like parity bits. Take two French words which sound similar but are of different genders. The use of le or la earlier in the sentence acts as a clue or heads-up for the listener. If he has trouble hearing the sentence because he is in a noisy environment, he backtracks, replays the sentence in his mind, and checks whether there was a le or la. You can always have a language without articles, number or gender. We get along fine without gender in English. Japanese has none of these things, yet Japanese people communicate perfectly. But of course they have other techniques to reinforce meaning, cross-check and reduce ambiguity. Incidentally, yesterday someone mentioned the distinction between green and blue. The most common Japanese color word, ao, is both blue and green. So when you are driving with a Japanese person and he tells you the traffic light has turned blue, he means green. When Americans first learned Japanese, I expect some of them wondered whether Japanese people are colorblind. Not at all. They have dozens of other words for colors which describe fine gradations between various shades of blue and green. The most common pair after ao are: sora-iro and midori which mean sky-color (blue) and leaf-color (green). - Jed
Re: English articles are not nonsense
an english teacher is teaching his class about positive and negative words. In english, as you know, a double negative is a positive, whereas in some languages, such as russian, a double negative is simply more negative. however, there is no known language where a double positive can be a negative. from the back of the room, comes wafting up a pair of words from the class clown. yeah right. On 5/3/05, Jed Rothwell [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Standing Bear wrote: Russian grammar is different than ours in many ways, including the omission of common nonsense words that we call 'articles' like 'the' in many cases... Actually, English articles have a specific meaning: they indicate whether you are talking about one specific instance or general instances. It is a common misconception that English articles, number, and French word gender are nonsense or dispensable. They have no meaning, but they provide essential cross checking to reduce errors in communication. They function somewhat like parity bits. Take two French words which sound similar but are of different genders. The use of le or la earlier in the sentence acts as a clue or heads-up for the listener. If he has trouble hearing the sentence because he is in a noisy environment, he backtracks, replays the sentence in his mind, and checks whether there was a le or la. You can always have a language without articles, number or gender. We get along fine without gender in English. Japanese has none of these things, yet Japanese people communicate perfectly. But of course they have other techniques to reinforce meaning, cross-check and reduce ambiguity. Incidentally, yesterday someone mentioned the distinction between green and blue. The most common Japanese color word, ao, is both blue and green. So when you are driving with a Japanese person and he tells you the traffic light has turned blue, he means green. When Americans first learned Japanese, I expect some of them wondered whether Japanese people are colorblind. Not at all. They have dozens of other words for colors which describe fine gradations between various shades of blue and green. The most common pair after ao are: sora-iro and midori which mean sky-color (blue) and leaf-color (green). - Jed -- Monsieur l'abbé, I detest what you write, but I would give my life to make it possible for you to continue to write Voltaire
Re: English articles are not nonsense
Jed, So much language is lost in translation yet the English language has become the language of the world of business, air travel and encroaching into science as a universal medium for the exchange of ideas via the internet. Picking up on your color comment, in Rev.21:19 , the writer observed the foundation of the walls were made of 12 different colors of stones ( jewels). Half of these colors have never been identified. Hmmm. If there are 3 primary colors why mention four times that ? Richard - Original Message - From: Jed Rothwell [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: vortex-L@eskimo.com Sent: Tuesday, May 03, 2005 11:28 AM Subject: English articles are not nonsense Standing Bear wrote: Russian grammar is different than ours in many ways, including the omission of common nonsense words that we call 'articles' like 'the' in many cases... Actually, English articles have a specific meaning: they indicate whether you are talking about one specific instance or general instances. It is a common misconception that English articles, number, and French word gender are nonsense or dispensable. They have no meaning, but they provide essential cross checking to reduce errors in communication. They function somewhat like parity bits. Take two French words which sound similar but are of different genders. The use of le or la earlier in the sentence acts as a clue or heads-up for the listener. If he has trouble hearing the sentence because he is in a noisy environment, he backtracks, replays the sentence in his mind, and checks whether there was a le or la. You can always have a language without articles, number or gender. We get along fine without gender in English. Japanese has none of these things, yet Japanese people communicate perfectly. But of course they have other techniques to reinforce meaning, cross-check and reduce ambiguity. Incidentally, yesterday someone mentioned the distinction between green and blue. The most common Japanese color word, ao, is both blue and green. So when you are driving with a Japanese person and he tells you the traffic light has turned blue, he means green. When Americans first learned Japanese, I expect some of them wondered whether Japanese people are colorblind. Not at all. They have dozens of other words for colors which describe fine gradations between various shades of blue and green. The most common pair after ao are: sora-iro and midori which mean sky-color (blue) and leaf-color (green). - Jed
