At 09:59 AM 2/21/2003 -0500, Mark A Mandel wrote: > >Yeah. How in hell do English-speakers manage to say "He's gone" without >the absolutely vital grammatical distinctions between the degrees of >certainty implied by "I saw him leave", "I saw him put his coat on and >then I heard the door open and close", "Somebody told me he'd left", and >"I haven't seen him for an hour"? No joke: there are languages where >you can't avoid these distinctions any more than you can avoid verb >tense or biological pronoun gender in English. See...this is why I like having you on the list.