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Re: Rs

From:Tristan McLeay <kesuari@...>
Date:Sunday, April 6, 2003, 21:55
Jake X wrote:

>[tSr\Ist@n r\oUt] > > >>See, the thing is, in my dialect, 'father' and 'farther' are homophones. >>'Further' and 'farther' are sort-of synonyms (they are both comparitives >>of 'far'). So we basically decided to ditch 'farther' (not as a concious >>effort, mind you). 'Further' and 'furthest' (and perhaps 'more further' >>and 'most furth(er)est') are the only comparitives or superlatives of >>'far', regardless of what you're talking about. >> >> >It's natural for people who have a distinction in pronunciation >to have a distinction in usage. As it is, most people don't really know >what the difference between the words is. >
It wouldn't surprise me if it were one of those made up distinctions that prescriptivists decided to add to it.
>>(In your dialect, it's probably perfectly fine to say something like 'I >>wrote him', but to us, that means you wrote down the lettters H, I and M >>in that order, unless you can't spell.) >> >> >Would you say "I wrote to him"? What do you do when you have both an >accusative and a dative complement? Do you say, "I wrote to him a letter"? >That doesn't sound right to me in English. > >
No. You're right that 'I wrote to him' is correct. But when you have both, you say either 'I wrote a letter to him' (cf. 'I threw a bag to him') or 'I wrote him a letter') (cf. 'I threw him a bag'). Basically, 'write' behaves perfectly normally: if the dative preceeds the accusative, it drops its preposition; otherwise, it keeps it.
>>>"I'm breathing heavily. I can't run any further." >>> >>> >>'I'm breathing heavily. I can't run any more.' (But if I were to use >>either of further and farther, it would definately be 'further'.) >> >> >Yeah, I would say it your way probably too. But I was looking for >an example, and further worked in that case. >
Fair enough :) I guess you could have a subtle distinction with it: 'I can't run any further'=I'm exhausted, but 'I can't run any farther'=there's a cliff in front of me. -- Tristan <kesuari@...> There's no such thing as an infinite loop. Eventually, the computer will break. -- John D. Sullivan