----------
> Van: Christophe Grandsire <Christophe.Grandsire@...>
> Aan: Multiple recipients of list CONLANG <CONLANG@...>
> Onderwerp: Re: THEORY: Question: Bound Morphemes
> Datum: dinsdag 6 juli 1999 9:08
>
> At 11:48 05/07/99 -0700, you wrote:
> >Christophe Grandsire wrote:
> >
> >> >>>> Of course, this hasn't happened in English -- yet. But it might.
> >> >>>> Already I notice that many of my students -- and one or two of
the
> >> >>>> contributors to this list -- write `a lot of' as `alot of',
suggesting
> >> >>>> that they feel the article to be fused to the following item in
this
> >> >>>> case, at least. There is nothing to stop English from doing the
same
> >> >>>> thing that Basque has done, but at the other end of the noun
phrase.
> >
> >> In Euskara, even if the article is written as a
> >> suffix, and even provokes phonological changes in words where it is
> >> attached, it is attached at the end of the _noun phrase_, not the
noun,
> >> showing thus exactly the same behaviour of 'the' (but in mirror
image). For
> >> example:
> >>
> >> emakumea (woman-the): the woman
> >> emakume gaztea (woman young-the): the young woman
> >>
> >> In this respect, English and Euskara function quite the same (the
> >> difference being that Euskara do such things also with plural and case
> >> endings, they come at the end of the _noun phrase_, not the noun).
> >
> >Indeed, it shows great similarity between Basque and English.
> >The difference is that in Basque the article is completely fused,
> >whereas in English it remains a separate word, both in spelling
> >and speaker's intuition, but that could easily change over time.
> >
>
> Well, in oral, I can't see any difference between the English
article and
> the Basque one. The only one I can see is the fact that when phonological
> changes happen, it's on the article in English, and on the stem before
the
> article in Basque. For the rest, they behave exactly the same. But since
There is another difference. In English, the article remains (because it is
a
separate word?), even if the noun is inflected (e.g. gets a genitive 's').
In Basque, the article -a is replaced by -ren in case of genitive.
> I'm no native speaker, maybe I'm misleading. Don't you think "the"
remains
> a "separate word" only because it is written separately? Don't forget
that
> many people confuse the linguistic reality with the written reality (it
> took 2000 years for grammarians and linguists to stop making this
mistake).
> For example, most French educated people are unable to count the number
of
> vowels in our language. They answer with considerations of writing to
> questions about phonological structure. It comes from our education that
> put the emphasis more on the writing than on the language in itself.
>
> >To fuse or not to fuse articles, that was the original question
> >here; apparently the answer is that it works fine either way.
> >
> >
> Of course.
>
> Christophe
Grandsire
> |Sela Jemufan Atlinan
C.G.
>
> "Reality is just another point of view."
>
> homepage :
http://www.bde.espci.fr/homepage/Christophe.Grandsire/index.html