pne: A picture of a plush toy, halfway between a duck and a platypus, with a green body and a yellow bill and feet. (Default)
[personal profile] pne

I'm always amused when Amy uses grammatical constructs that don't occur in English and/or German but do occur in other languages -- either because she's omitting something which is required in en/de, because of a rule she deduced which doesn't apply to en/de, or some other reason.

For an example of the first, consider zero-copula sentences such as "I not hungry" or "That — my chair" which are fine in Russian, but not in English or German.

For an example of the second, consider something I heard just now: "Two greens stars!". English doesn't inflect adjectives for number, but why not? Russian or Greek, for example, do, as does German.

For an example of the third, consider "Wills' und Brot?" (literally, "Do you want and bread?", meaning [I think] "Do you want bread, too?"). In Greek, that would be just fine ("Θέλεις και ψωμί;"), since και is both "and" and "also". (Leading to signs such as "ΕΧΟΥΜΕ & ΠΙΤΣΑ" We have pizza, too, which looks odd to me since I'd never associated the ampersand with the meaning "also".)

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pne: A picture of a plush toy, halfway between a duck and a platypus, with a green body and a yellow bill and feet. (Default)
Philip Newton

June 2015

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