Re: French and German (jara: An introduction)

----- Original Message -----
From: "Henrik Theiling" <theiling@...>
To: <CONLANG@...>
Sent: Friday, June 06, 2003 2:43 PM
Subject: Re: French and German (jara: An introduction)


> Hi!
>
> Harald Stoiber <stoiberh@...> writes:
> > On Thu, 5 Jun 2003 21:25:37 +0100, Jan van Steenbergen
<ijzeren_jan@...> wrote:
> >
> > >Fraktur, IIRC. Personally, I find them very pretty. No, then try German
> > >hand-written text from those years... Pure horror!
>
> 'S"uterlin' is the name of that script.
>
> > The major difficulties of German could be (to a native
> > English speaker):
> > 1) grammatical gender, often quite arbitrary
> > 2) the cases - even though English has them, too, but
> > often hides them behind prepositions or word order
>
> I think the problem that never disappears for most non-native speakers
> are mistakes with the determiners and the adjective endings.  The
> latter seem to be very, very hard it remember.  My theory is that the
> discrepancy between number of grammatical positions and number of
> endings is simply too confusing:
>
> There are six forms of 'red': rot, rote, roten, roter, rotem, rotes,
> of which one is easy: 'rot' ([Ro:t] to clarify the pronunciation),
> this occurs only in predicative position and does not have any concord
> constraints: 'Das Buch ist rot.' - 'The book is red.'
Let me see if I've got this right...

Das rote Buch
Der rote Hund(surreal)
Die rote Hose
Ein rotes Buch
Ein rote Hund
Ein rote Hose
Den roten Hund
Einen roten Hund
Dem rotem Buch
Einem rotem Buch
Der roter Hose
Einer roter Hose
Des rotes Buch
Eines rotes Buch

Correct?

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