Dragaera

A Linguistic Note

David Dyer-Bennet dd-b at dd-b.net
Thu Dec 16 07:15:10 PST 2004

Ken Koester <kkoester at email.ers.usda.gov> writes:

> David Dyer-Bennet wrote:
>
>>Certainly German and Russian (the two foreign languages I've
>>studied at all seriously) have more grammar than English does, it
>>takes a little getting used to.
>>
>
> At least as far as German goes, I would flatly disagree with you; I am
> certain that English has more grammatical rules to master.  The fact
> that English is positional & has lost virtually all of its inflections
> doesn't mean that it has less in the way of grammar.

The fact that I dealt with German as a language learned as an
adolescent, not as a child, may be warping my view here.  But it seems
to me that everything about grammar they taught us in English there
was some German equivalent, and then there was about three times that
much *additional* stuff that applied only to German, not to English.  
-- 
David Dyer-Bennet, <mailto:dd-b at dd-b.net>, <http://www.dd-b.net/dd-b/>
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