Re: THEORY: Ergativity and polypersonalism

On Thu, 20 Jan 2005 17:43:12 +0100, Andreas Johansson <andjo@...> wrote:

>Quoting Tristan McLeay <conlang@...>:
>
>>
>> One curious thing about English though is that it's often painted as a
>> relatively isolating language, but as I understand it (and I might be
>> *wildly* wrong here, which is the simplest explanation) German tends
>> not to use its genitive, preferring expressions including 'von', and
>> doesn't like its simple past tense, preferring expressions paralleling
>> English past perfects, whereas English enjoys the use of both... OTOH,
>> I've never heard anyone claiming that German's a relatively isolating
>> language...
>
>I think the genitive is a bad example, since many would deny that English
>has an inflectional genitive at all. A little-used on surely beats none!
>
>While the German simple past, outside of a couple very common verbs, is
>indeed little used in spoken German (the spoken varieties of standard High
>German, at any rate; I should better not make any generalizations about
>what goes on in dialects),
I think it depends on the region: Southern German disuses the preterite
since the Middle Ages, so that it's only used in very formal language,
whereas it's still used at all levels of speech in northern German.


>it has much more verbal morphology than English,
>so it seems less isolating to me.
I imagine that article morphology and adjective morphology are very mean to
foreigners.

kry@s:
j. 'mach' wust