Re: Bostonites. *ZAP*

Josh Brandt-Young wrote:

> Can you not conceive of a language that has more than one infinitival
> form? (Finnish has five!) No, "to" is not a preposition that *can*
> precede the infinitive; it *must* precede the infinitive unless the
> active verb is one of a special group: can, could, will, would, shall,
> should, may, might... What good is it to call "to" a preposition in this
> case? It's certainly not serving a prepositional function!
Right.  It's more like a infintival particle, I guess one could call it.

> What does it matter what part of speech "to" originally belonged to?
> Isn't the important thing how it's *used*? It's like saying that we must
> still declare "pop" to be a verb even when it's used as a noun to mean
> "soda" because that was its original part of speech. You might just as
> well say that the "-ed" we use to form the past tense isn't really an
> inflectional suffix, but rather an adverb meaning "in the past."
Er, you mean a contraction of the past tense of the verb "do", no? :)

> Language is what language is, Nik.
A little calm please. We all make mistakes.

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Tom Wier <artabanos@...>
ICQ#: 4315704   AIM: Deuterotom
Website: <http://www.angelfire.com/tx/eclectorium/>
"Cogito ergo sum, sed credo ergo ero."

There's nothing particularly wrong with the
proletariat. It's the hamburgers of the
proletariat that I have a problem with. - Alfred Wallace
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