Re: CHAT: An introduction

--- In conlang@yahoogroups.com, Christophe Grandsire
<christophe.grandsire@F...> wrote:

 > > > Why is it always French which suffers from such dislikes? :((((
 > >
 > >Why, isn't that a sign that something *is* wrong with the language? ;-)
 >
 > No, that there's something wrong with the rest of the world! ;)))

What an American point of view!  ;-)))

No, really, French is tough for outsiders to learn.  I had
the huge advantage of mnemonic assistance from my contact
with French as a child, and still found it terribly difficult.

Though I guess German, which I'm fond of, has the same measure
of unlearnability, and thus the same bad reputation among
those who had it in school.  =P



 > "Pinnacle of morphological genius"? But that's *exactly* why the case
 > system was eventually scrapped in French: not enough distinction between
 > all the forms, and a mixed thing that made people constantly make
mistakes
 > (and feminine words had the -s as pure mark of plural already anyway).

Pretty much the reasons why I dropped noun and adjective
declension in Modern Jovian.  That and the fact that I can
economize a lot of syllables by reverting to the nominative
form.  =)

The personal pronouns and the indefinite article have the
nice feature of being pretty well distinguishable in all
forms (if one minds the mutations), so it suffices to mark
the cases there.



-- Christian Thalmann

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