Theiling Online    Sitemap    Conlang Mailing List HQ   

Re: "The" and possessives

From:Roger Mills <romilly@...>
Date:Wednesday, May 23, 2001, 0:47
Muke Tever wrote:

>>===== Original Message From tom@wolframite.net ===== >>>If I wanted to say the 'the' version without the definite article, I'd
use a
>>>pronoun: "the year minus its nineteen". I think that one isn't
ambiguous
>>>because 1977 as a value isn't likely to have that kind of possession >ascribed >>>to it. >> >> Indeed - but you haven't made "nineteen" indefinite by using "its". A >>possessive makes a word definite just as the word "the" does. After all,
if
>>you say "her car" you are still implying that there is just one car to
which
>>you are referring. > >Now, I didn't say I wanted to make it _indefinite_, I said I wanted to say
it
>without the definite article. ;p What I had in mind (but apparently
decided
>not to put in the message) was how I might express that kind of
construction
>in a language without a definite article.
Just wondering-- is it a peculiarity of English (perhaps other Germanic?) that we count thousands by hundreds? "nineteen hundred" "twenty-five hundred"etc.?? To a Romance speaker, e.g. Spanish, "mil novecientos setenta y siete menos/sin su diecinueve" would probably require some processing before they figured it out....?

Replies

Irina Rempt <ira@...>
Christophe Grandsire <christophe.grandsire@...>