Re: OT: Corpses, etc. (was: Re: Gender in conlangs (was: Re: Umlauts (was Re: Elves and Ill Bethisad)))

At 10:28 AM 11/11/03 +0100, you wrote:
>Quoting Isidora Zamora <isidora@...>:
>
> > Andreas wrote:
> >
> > >Swedish, of course, packs duplicate definite marking into every other
> > >sentence!
> >
> > How does it do that?  I don't think I'm familiar with Danish doing anything
> > similar.
>
>I think this particular nicety is restricted to Swedish and Norwegian.
I can verify that Danish definitely doesn't do anything of the sort.  I
thought that using plural adjectives to agree with singular definate nouns
(which I can see from your example below is also done in Swedish) was kinda
strange, but using both markers for definiteness might beat that for
strangeness, or perhaps not - it's no worse than what you have to go
through in French to negate something.

>Well, say you've got a noun, f'rinstance _en bil_ "a car"; the definite form
>is _bilen_ "the car", with a suffix. If you instead had a nominalized
>adjective, say _en stor_ "a big one",
I think that this is a difference between between Swedish and
Danish.  (Maybe a Dane on the list can confirm it.)  All of my instincts
for constructing Danish tell me that the Danish for "a big one" is "en stor
en," exactly the same as in English, where you must use the pronoun "one"
with the adjective.  Further instincts tell me that the definate would be
"den store en," with necessary adjective agreement.

Isidora

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