Re: Languages

From: "Jeff Jones"


> These are all obviously declensional classes. If Latin can have them, why
> not French? The drop-the-final-consonant rule applies to only one class.
Six declensional classes (and we haven't even gotten rolling yet)? Oy.

> Probably. But Latin has a special rule for Present participle declension,
> IIRC.
I'm not sure what you mean here. They decline like third declension i-stems.

> Elision environment could simply be an extra column in the declensional
> tables.
AND an extra column to boot. Double oy. Latin looks like a day at the beach.

From: "Nik Taylor"

> Right.  There's no way of predicting from the masculine form what the
> feminine form would be (going solely by phonetics), but you can predict
> the masculine from the feminine.
But going solely by phonetics, there is also no way to predict which
adjectives are going to drop final consonants and which aren't. I, at least,
see no predictable system emerge when I notice that:

/Sod/ goes to /So/ (hot), but /Ryd/ remains /Ryd/ (rough)
/las/ goes to /la/ (weary), but /lis/ remains /lis/ (smooth)
/p@tit/  goes to /p@ti/ (small), but /bRyt/ remains /bRyt/ (raw)
/mHEt/ goes to /mHE/ (mute), but /bEt/ remains /bEt/ (stupid)

etc., etc. etc.

(by /H/, I meant the uspside down "h" in IPA -- the "ü" when it's used as a
glide. Hope I got it right, too lazy to go to the Kirshenbaum site)

Back to Jeff Jones:

> I'm waiting for French to have a major spelling reform before I seriously
> attempt to learn it.
Bonne attente! :)

Kou