Re: Languages

En réponse à Nik Taylor <fortytwo@...>:

> Padraic Brown wrote:
> > Actually, I find that a rather curious form of conjugation.
>
> Arguably, French has something like that at the end of adjectives, fem.
> /gra~d/ masc. /gra~/, IIRC.  Essentially, it could be argued that the
> rule is "to form the masculine, drop the final consonant".
>
I think there's nothing to argue about that! Even if in written language the
rule is "add an -e to form the feminine", in spoken language the rule "drop the
final consonnant to form the masculine" holds quite well (other examples than
/gra~d/ vs. /gra~/ are /p@'tit/ vs. /p@'ti/, /vERt/ vs. /vER/, /mov'Ez/ vs.
/mo'vE/, etc...). I once saw this rule taken as an example that grammatical
rules of "deleting something" instead of "adding something" were possible and
actually existed in languages, contrary to what was thought before. But of
course, the written form of French long hid the actual rules...

Christophe.