On Wed, 27 Mar 2002, Dan Kogai wrote: > On Wednesday, March 27, 2002, at 03:23 , [EMAIL PROTECTED] > wrote: > > Secondly, as you say, dictating what the plural in various languages > > should be, borders on arrogance, but is probably just plain old > > silliness. > > Even more arrogantly speaking, the very notion of plural forms may well > be just plain old silliness. Chinese has none, neither does Japanese > and I belive neither does Korean. It seems the older (or may I say, the
Korean can form plural nouns by adding U+B4E4. It can sometimes be added to adverb and verb-root with some other connotations. Of course, this doesn't mean that Korean has a strict set of rules as to where to use plural and where not to. > more mature) the language is, the less sintactic sugar it has. I can > brag all about how syntactically simple Japanese is but it seems Chinese Hmm, it depends on how you look at languages. **To me** Japanese is the most difficult languages among languages I tried to learn :-). (btw, most of Koreans find it easier to learn Japanese than English. In my case, exactly the opposite is the case.) I would say exactly the same thing for Korean if I were a foreigner trying to learn Korean. Simply, it seems **to me** agglutinating languages like Japanese and Korean are too difficult (syntatically complex) to learn after that 'magic-age' of 10-something. (I know there's no clear-cut border among typological classification of languages...) > brag all about how syntactically simple Japanese is but it seems Chinese > have us all beat with respect to that. Well, English has become 'Chinese-like' (i.e. more like isolating languages and less like inflecting languages) recently(?) with less and less inflection. One example is that there are a number of nouns that act as a verb without any change in the form. > I consider the very lack of Academee Ingrais is the bliss rather a > shortcoming. It is okay to "grok" or name a monkey kwijibo -- so long Yeah, that is indeed a blessing and, I believe, partly explains why English has become so widely used. Another part might be what I wrote above: the relative simplicity of English grammar compared with other inflecting languages. Of course, there must be other (more important) reasons - socio-econo-political. Jungshik Shin
