Re: OT: Latin subject-verb agreement

On Dec 13, 2007 9:17 AM, caeruleancentaur <caeruleancentaur@...>
wrote:

> I'm trying very hard not to sound rude, but IMO you don't know any of
> the details.

Ouch.  Sorry, Father, but I gotta say you kinda blew the "not sounding rude"
bit there.


> Am I correct in believing that English is not your L1?

I'm pretty sure Tristan is a native Anglophone; he is at least one of very
long standing (Aussie chapter).

You can still hear some of us say (depending on the milieu), "It is I."  And
> serious works still use it, as in the English translation of the
> Biblical story of Jesus walking on the water, wherein he says, "It is
> I.  Do not be afraid."

I think Tristan was just saying that English is rather less consistent in
its use of case distinctions than other languages.  I'm not sure how true
that statement is, either;  "c'est moi" is a good example of French doing
likewise.  How often do you see that sort of thing in the more seriously
caseful langs (actual question, not rhetorical)?  Do Germans say »Es ist
mich«?


> while the Classical writers may have used the Latin cases properly, I
> find it hard to believe that the hoi polloi did not misuse them.  I
> should think that this "misuse" of the cases was what led (at least
> in part) to the development of the Romance languages.

That's sort of the question.   Case is such an exceptional thing in English,
and so conflated with schoolbook larnin', that we Anglophonic types have no
intuition about how likely it is to be misused in other langs.

-- 
Mark J. Reed <markjreed@...>

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