Re: (In)transitive verbs

Christophe Grandsire scripsit:

> Nobody forced you to *listen* to us :))) . You could have done like the
> Dutch: until just a few decades ago, most nobility in the Netherlands
> spoke French, and one of the reasons was to ensure the staff couldn't
> understand what they said. The result is that a certain amount of French
> vocabulary found its way into the main Dutch language, but its grammar
> remained unscathed.
All very well, mon ami, but the Netherlands was never overrun by a
bloody great lot of Normans waving their swords and causing the poor
English (and the Irish too, some of them) to cower in their beds.
Nor was it necessary, if a man was found dead, for the Dutch
in the village to gather and prove that he was one of them and not
French, so that only the killer would be punished and not the
whole village (a process called "the presentment of Englishry").

For two centuries nobody in England spoke English except peasants.
Small wonder we have weird and wonderful words like "redo", a Norman
affix on a Saxon root.

--
You escaped them by the will-death              John Cowan
and the Way of the Black Wheel.                 jcowan@reutershealth.com
I could not.  --Great-Souled Sam                http://www.ccil.org/~cowan