OT: Tristan's "redundency"

Tristan McLeay wrote at 2003-12-01 22:12:07 (-0500)
 > On Mon, 1 Dec 2003, Mark J. Reed wrote:
 >
 > > On Mon, Dec 01, 2003 at 09:14:20PM -0500, Tristan McLeay wrote:
 > > > Heh. I understand it's redundency.
 > >
 > > You mean "its". :)
 >
 > No I don't. 'it's'=it is. I understand it is redundency.
 >

You're all wrong, because it's "redundancy".

And _what_ do you understand "is redundancy"?  The meaning isn't at
all clear.

If "it" refers to "number agreement on verbs" and what you meant was
to concede that it's redundant and therefore unnecessarily difficult
for Andreas, "I understand [that] it's redundant" would have been
better, "I realize it's redundant" better still.  Or if you really
wanted to use "redundancy", perhaps "I realize it's a redundancy".

The problem, in this case, with "I understand it's redundancy" is that
"X is Y" where the predicate Y is a definite noun phrase is an
equational clause.  I can't see any reasonable referent of "it" which
could be _equated_ with "redundancy", unless it was "the point of
number agreement on verbs", in which case you'd be saying something
quite different to the above, but rather "What's the point?  Well, my
understanding is that it's redundancy".  I can see this as vaguely
plausible now, but not at all convincing.