Re: Rating Languages

Quoting Nik Taylor <fortytwo@...>:

> Speaking of English, has anyone else encountered "be staying" for
> "live"?  E.g., "I'm staying at the Avenues [an apartment complex]"
> I don't think I've encountered it used for a place that you own, it
> might be restricted to rental situations.  Still, I'd use "live" in
> those cases.
Yeah, that's what I often use, actually.  The problem is that in
English, we (unlike German speakers) don't have a widespread colloquial
word to say where you're residing, as opposed to the fact that you exist.
In German, you can say "Ich wohne am John-F.-Kennedy-Allee", which doesn't
have the lexical ambiguity of English's "I live on JFK-Allee".

> Oh!  And a fairly major one
> 23. Past habitual?: I used to eat: "He used to eat meat, until he
> became a vegetarian"
>     And its negative: I didn't used to eat
Right.  I think it's fairly clear that "used to" is now a grammaticalized
unit ['just@], in colloquial speech at least.  Not quite sure what lexical
category it is, though; it seems to me to be more adverbial than auxiliary.

==============================
Thomas Wier <trwier@...>

"If a man demands justice, not merely as an abstract concept,
but in setting up the life of a society, and if he holds, further,
that within that society (however defined) all men have equal rights,
then the odds are that his views, sooner rather than later, are going
to set something or someone on fire." Peter Green, in _From Alexander
to Actium_, on Spartan king Cleomenes III