Re: THEORY: Question: Bound Morphemes

Raymond A. Brown wrote:
>
> At 10:38 am -0700 4/7/99, Charles wrote:
> >Raymond A. Brown wrote:
> .....
> >> No English speaker that I've ever met - and I've met quite a few in my 60
> >> years - intuitively considers 'a/an' to be an unstressed variant of 'one'.
> >
> >It's pretty clear to anyone who learns the French/Spanish word for "a/an".
>
> To which At 10:42 pm -0500 4/7/99, Nik Taylor correctly responded:
> ....
> >That's hardly "native intuition", and anyways, I've learned those, and I
> >still don't see "one" and "a/an" as being analogous IN ENGLISH.
>
> Indeed, it's also bad linguistics.  If one has to appeal to other languages
> to describe English, then there is no end to the analogies one might find.
> Except in communities, e.g. Welsh speakers, where virtually everyone is
> bilingual to some degree, one can describe a language synchronically only
> in terms of itself.
>
> Also, of course, the anglophone community is notorious for the number of
> monoglots it contains.  The majority of English speakers, alas, know no
> Spanish or French, so the arguments sucks yet again.
I agree that the argument sucks. The "a/an" connection with "one" is
plain as the nose on one's face. Duh! And has been so for 1000 years,
from Old English through Norman French conquest till today, and
in all the languages of western Europe, at least.