Re: THEORY: Question: Bound Morphemes

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
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