Re: North Wind and Sun in Obrenje

 --- 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

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