Re: "Each Other"
From: | Christophe Grandsire <christophe.grandsire@...> |
Date: | Friday, January 23, 2004, 13:32 |
En réponse à Mark J. Reed :
>Which reminds me of another odd (to my native English mind)
>quirk of Spanish: when describing a group of people performing
>identical activities, the number of the object is appropriate for
>each individual, not for the entire group. Thus, for example, the
>Spanish for "The children washed their hands and faces" literally
>translates the last bit as "hands and face", because each child has
>only one face. The word for "hands" is plural not because there
>are multiple children, but because each child has two.
I've always found English to be odd and ambiguous here (how do you know
whether "they wash their hands" means: "they wash each other's hands",
"each one washes his own hands", "each one washes a single hand of his",
etc...?) French behaves like Spanish, and I have always trouble with the
English behaviour here.
Christophe Grandsire.
http://rainbow.conlang.free.fr
You need a straight mind to invent a twisted conlang.
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