Re: Juvenile fooleries (was Re: Neanderthal and PIE (Long!))

On Thu, Oct 16, 2008 at 22:29, Eugene Oh <un.doing@...> wrote:
> Christophe's post contained the clause "battling gods was not considered
> unusual", which made me a little confused for a while: since when did it
> become standard fare for humans to challenge the preeminence of deities?
> Then it struck me, after approximately 5 milliseconds. It also reminded me
> of the other thread about participles. I gave it a brief thought, and don't
> think Latin, Greek or any of the Romance languages have such an ambiguity.
> Neither do Chinese, Japanese or Korean. Does German? Or is English is only
> language with such a muddle?
English doesn't even have that muddle, unless I'm misunderstanding
your ambiguity -- the interpretation "gods who do battle = not
unusual" needs a plural verb in my 'lect ("battling gods *were* not
considered unusual).

German has inflections, so an attributive participle would need an
ending ("Streitend_e_ Götter waren nicht ungewöhnlich"). Also, its
nominalisations for "process or habit of verb-ing" look like
infinitives rather than participles -- compare "Singing is fun" with
"Singen macht Spaß" (literally, "to-sing makes fun"), removing that
possibility for ambiguity. You'd have "Streiten gegen die Götter war
nicht ungewöhnlich", or something similar.

Plus, I don't think you can have a direct-object construction --
something along the lines of "Insulting the gods is normal" would turn
either into "Die Götter zu beschimpfen ist normal" or "Das Beschimpfen
der Götter ist normal" -- the former with a clause as subject ("To
insult the gods is normal") and the second with a nominalisation of
the verb as subject, but with the original object turned into a
genitive ("Insulting of the gods is normal"). (The ambiguity there
being whether the genitive represents the original subject or the
original object of the nominalised verb.)

Cheers,
--
Philip Newton <philip.newton@...>

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