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Re: North Wind and Sun in Obrenje

From:Jan van Steenbergen <ijzeren_jan@...>
Date:Monday, August 19, 2002, 12:23
 --- John Cowan wrote:

> As X increased, Y increased in proportion. > > Jespersen, the Danish linguist and anglolinguaphile, once translated > "The more the merrier, but the fewer the better fare" into lots of > European langs, and noted how much more verbose all of them were. > Verbless sentences are pretty rare in English, but this type is > systematically verbless. IIRC the second "the" is a survival of the > old instrumental case.
This is, at least, the case in Polish: im ... tym ... /tym/ is the instrumental case of the demonstrative pronoun /ten/ (M) or /to/ (N). I don't know where the word /im/ comes from, but its form suggests it is an instrumental, too. So, literally the expression could be best translated: "with what ... with that ..." Jan ===== "Originality is the art of concealing your source." - Franklin P. Jones __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Everything you'll ever need on one web page from News and Sport to Email and Music Charts http://uk.my.yahoo.com

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P. M. Arktayg <pmva@...>