Re: CHAT: New Member With Questions

At 6:58 pm +1100 15/3/01, Tristan Alexander McLeay wrote:
>>However, prepositions are prepositions in English.  For instance, in that
>>sentence "Where do you come from?", it should read "From where do you
>>come?"--we just don't talk that way much anymore.
>
>The fact remains, though, that I, as a Native Australian English speaker do
>not say 'From where do you come?',
Nor do I as a native English English speaker.

Did any _ever_ say "From where do you come?"  I doubt it, except as an
artificial hypercorrection.

The earlier form was: "Whence do you come?" ("Whence comest thou?" is even
earlier, if speaker to one person).

Surely, as the use of so-called "prepositions" at end of clauses became
more common place, "Where do you come from?" developed as an alternative?

[snip]
>
>>Remember how teachers always said never to end a sentence with a
>>preposition?
>
>Actually, they never did that to me.
Nor to me - and I was taught grammar, pretty thoroughly as well, in a
traditional grammar (where the most important subjects were Latin and
cricket!) in the 1950s.

I do, however, remember the (apocryphal?) saying of Churchil being quoted -
"That is a rule up with which I will not put" - to show how silly the
superstition of 'not putting a preposition at the end of a clause' was.  It
seems our teachers of the 1050s were a little more enlightened than David's.
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At 2:08 am -0500 16/3/01, David Peterson wrote:
[snip]
>"rule" came to be is because, way back when they were writing grammar for
>students in American/British schools, they decided that since you can't end a
>sentence with a preposition in Latin, you shouldn't be able to in English
Not, as I've said, in my traditionalist British school.

>(makes no sense, but, nevertheless, that's where the rule came from.  They
>give the same reason for not allowing split infinitives, e.g., "to boldly go
>where no one has gone before" [I'm watching Voyager right now :)]).
Even tho those Latin infinitives which do consist of two parts, e.g.
amaturus esse [future active], amatus esse [perfect passive], amatum iri
[future passive] _can_ be split!

Barmy, if you ask me.

>To make a little more sense, I think there are two things called
>"prepositions" in English: true prepositions and locative adverbs.  For
>instance, the "in" in "I am in the house" is different from "I walk in the
>room".
  ????
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At 9:56 am -0500 16/3/01, Padraic Brown wrote:
>On Fri, 16 Mar 2001, David Peterson wrote:
[snip]
>> For
>>instance, the "in" in "I am in the house" is different from "I walk in the
>>room".  The first is a true preposition, and you can't end a sentence with it
>
>The Doctor is in.
Quite so - and:
The Doctor walked in.
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At 8:35 pm -0500 16/3/01, David Peterson wrote:
>In a message dated 3/16/01 6:56:35 AM, pbrown@POLARIS.UMUC.EDU writes:
>
><< The Doctor is in. >>
>
>That's a shortening of "The Doctor is in his office", or something similar.
>At least, I always believed so...
Er - you mean, like "The Doctor walked in" is a shortening of "The Doctor
walked in the room" or something like that?

Another thing I remember being taught in English grammar classes 50 years
ago was "By their deeds shall ye know them", i.e. one determines what a
word is doing by its function in a sentence whereas in Latin (and Greek)
there are specific morphological affixes that help mark out the "part of
speech."  I guess that because Latin was so central to our education, the
English staff were keen to point up the differences between English &
Latin, not the similarities.

Anyway, we were taught that in both the sentences "The Doctor is in the
house" and "The Doctor walked in the room" _in_ is functioning as a
preposition, whereas in the sentences "The Doctor is in" and "The Doctor
walked in" it is functioning as an adverb.

This distinction is recognized in the Jespersen's Novial; in Novial Lexike
(1930) we read:
-u forma adverbes fro prepositiones: _inu_, _kontru_ = in tum (in dar),
konter tum.

Li medike es in li hause.
Li medike es inu.

And doesn't Vorlin use the suffix -u in a very similar way?

Ray.




=========================================
A mind which thinks at its own expense
will always interfere with language.
                   [J.G. Hamann 1760]
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