Re: Jovian's Verbs From Hell

Quoting Christophe Grandsire <christophe.grandsire@...>:

> > I'm a non-native speaker too, and I find the isolation helpful.
>
> For the written form yes. I was talking about spoken language, where
> usually half the syllables are swallowed in English. Makes your
> isolated forms rather difficult to recognise...
One wonders what exactly can be meant here if it's
meant in seriousness.  Do you mean the haplology
and syncope that's especially common in British
English (e.g. 'laboratory' [l@bOr@tri])? Or do mean
pronunciations like [wUdn@] for <wouldn't have>?

> > Another difficulty is that the subjunctive present forms of one
> > conjugation often look like the indicative forms of another
> > conjugation.  /=P
>
> You find that a *difficulty*? I think on the contrary that it's one of the
> things that make it easy to remember the subjunctive present!
Gentlemen, gentlemen.  Perhaps we should tone down the level
of discourse here.  It's clear that people have different
mnemonics for foreign language acquisition, and it's probably
not fair to criticize on that fact alone.

 =========================================================================
Thomas Wier
Dept. of Linguistics  "Nihil magis praestandum est quam ne pecorum ritu
University of Chicago sequamur antecedentium gregem, pergentes non qua
1010 E. 59th Street   eundum est, sed qua itur." -- Seneca
Chicago, IL 60637

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