--- Greg Morrow <dr.elmo at whiterose.org> wrote: > Philip Hart wondered aloud to the group: > >So why > > the army's strength was sufficient > >but not > > the strength of the army's was sufficient > > > >Presumably because nouns became less inflected through laziness? Hm. Are speakers of English lazier than speakers of Russian or, for that matter, Hungarian? (I think Hungarian has lots of noun inflections--but I've been wrong before.) Also, since we mostly don't have cases in English, we have to be careful about things like word order. Is that less lazy? > It's different semantic content. The former is possessive, the strength > > that the army possesses; the latter is an origin, the strength that > comes from the army. "The strength of the army's" isn't grammatical for me at all, and I don't see any distinction between "the strength of the army" and "the army's strength." > The difference isn't very significant, but grammar, so I > > understand, often makes very big hay out of narrow distinctions. E.g., > the > rules for which article you choose make astonishingly nit-picky > distinctions based on context and noun category that the speaker is only > > vaguely aware of. One of the most common errors I hear among ESL > speakers > is the use of "the" where a native speaker would use a null article. ... Another place where we can be accused of industriousness. Russian has six cases, but no articles, and our articles seem like a lot of unnecessary effort to Russians. > ObDragaeran: > > Since Fenarian is mostly Magyar and I don't recall Vlad making any > comments > about Fenarian vis-a-vis Dragaeran, we can presume that Dragaeran is not > > vastly different from Magyar as human languages go, and Magyar's not > particularly strange compared to IE languages despite being wholly > unrelated. So we can guess that Dragaeran is probably not tonal and > probably not polysynthetic. First, I think Vlad's native language is Dragaeran. His grandfather speaks Dragaeran with him unless he can't think of a word. I have the impression from somewhere that Vlad's Fenarian is not fluent at all. Second, I've read some books by bilingual people, and they usually don't comment on differences that are mostly of interest to linguists, though they may mention differences in concision, connotation, etc. I've had many conversations with native (and Native) speakers of American Indian languages, and the same applies--I've heard them say that you can say something in Navajo but not in English, or that their language isn't normally written (that was Tewa), but I never heard the Navajo speaker comment on the fact that English wasn't tonal. > Given Dragaerans' unusual size, one might expect vocal tones to be > generally lower than humans. That will train ears to a lower pitch, > which > will result in a few things--Vlad will probably perceive human women as > being squeaky; Dragaeran operas will have no sopranos, but the altos > will > be able to blow the back wall off with volume, even without > sorcery. Tall people typically have lower voices than short people, but it's a very rough trend. The obvious example is that a man and a woman of the same size will often not have the same vocal register. Another example is that sopranos are often pretty big--Joan Sutherland, for example, had no trouble with the high notes. I believe the throat, mouth, and sinuses are more important to sopranos' high notes than the trachea and chest. Tenors are another matter, but Pavarotti is taller than a lot of basses. Vlad has mentioned Dragaerans singing a couple of times, and has failed to point any differences from human singing. I'm inclined to agree with you about Dragaeran opera singers and the back wall, though. The idea is a bit scary. > Dragaeran will probably also avoid the /i/ phoneme, which will > > give Dragaerans a pronounced accent when speaking Fenarian. Football players seem to be able to say /i/ as well as eight-year- olds. > Of course, with an actual practicing linguist on the list, I probably > sound like a complete fool. Good thing we don't let that stop us. Jerry Friedman __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Small Business $15K Web Design Giveaway http://promotions.yahoo.com/design_giveaway/