Re: OT: Official language post

At 9:46 PM +0200 4/1/03, Christophe Grandsire wrote:
>En réponse à John Cowan <cowan@...>:
>
>>
>> That's because Dutch is simple, easy, and obvious (until you get kicked
>> in
>> the head by some lexeme like "opstanding", the meaning of which nobody
>> would
>> ever guess),
>
>And until you come to the little "particles" which keep provoking me, or to the
>strange transformations groups "preposition+neuter 3rd person pronoun or
>demonstrative" can undergo ;)) (For instance, in "Daar heb ik zin in": "I'm
>feeling like having that", "daar", which normally means "there" here
>means "that" and is actually the complement of the preposition "in"!!! In
>short, the group "in+dat" - "dat" being "that" of course - became "daarin" -
>normal behaviour, see the fossilized form "therein" in English - which in turn
>was cut and the whole sentence was put between the two parts! Still dare say
>that Dutch is simple and obvious?! ;))) ).
'daar' is easy -- 'er' is the problem particle!

Dirk
--
Dirk Elzinga                                               Dirk_Elzinga@byu.edu

"It is important not to let one's aesthetics interfere with the appreciation of
fact." - Stephen Anderson