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

Amy seems to be using "that" (in English) and "das" (in German) as a kind of definite article, as in "you that daddy frog" (you are the daddy frog) / "du das Mami Frosch" (you are the mummy frog).

(And I think that her German "das" is the demonstrative-used-as-definite-article, rather than the homophonous German definite article "das", since where she previously had definite articles, it tended to be uniformly "die" -- as in "Das - die Daumen, das - schüttelt Pflaumen, das - heb' auf, das - bringt nach Haus, und das - alle auf!".)

Reminds me of how Romance definite articles derived from Latin demonstratives.

Ontology recapitulates phylogeny, or what was it called. I swear Amy is going through centuries of grammatical changes and innovations in dozens of languages, all in two years.

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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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