Re: Article wierdness

Doug Dee scripsit:

> If I recall my French correctly, the usual way to raise "Raise your
> hand," is "Levez la main" literally "Raise the hand," even though
> most of us have two hands, so that perhaps "Raise a hand" would seem
> more logical.
This is why I keep arguing that the French "definite" article isn't
really definite any more; it's been bleached of most of its definiteness
and serves mostly as the default determiner, the one that applies when
there is no specific reason to use anything else.

English though is notable for its insistence on redundant possessive
determiners:  "He put his hands in his pockets" is the only idiomatic
way of saying that, even though it's obvious that people normally
put their own hands in their own pockets.

<rant>
I was reading Rickard's _History of the French Language_, and it
struck me forcibly how Old French is essentially Modern English with
Romance words; the word order feels very natural in English, and
even such contrasts as "mange pain" vs. "mange du pain" match English
"eat bread" vs "eat of the bread" exactly; that is, the last (which
is the only form in ModF) is used only when some specific bread
has already been mentioned.

Rickard points out that learning OF requires first forgetting ModF;
in particular, masculine nouns take -s in the singular and drop it
in the plural.

--
Only do what only you can do.               John Cowan <cowan@...>
  --Edsger W. Dijkstra's advice             http://www.reutershealth.com
    to a student in search of a thesis      http://www.ccil.org/~cowan

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