Fun with homographs
Tuesday, 4 August 2009 10:24![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
pne“Die Beamten beamten uns aufs Schiff.”
Unrelatedly, I wonder why "halten" is strong/irregular (er hält, er hielt, er hat gehalten) but "beinhalten" isn't (er beinhaltet, er beinhaltete, er hat beinhaltet)—perhaps because it's derived only indirectly from "halten" and more directly from the noun "Inhalt"?
Which, in turn, made me consider how English and German use the opposite polarity for "directly": English has "directly" as basic and derives "indirectly" from it with a negative prefix (or Latin derived the second word with a prefix and English borrowed both words; same thing for these purposes), while German has "mittelbar" (indirectly; literally, something like "mediatable") as basic and derives "unmittelbar" (directly) from it with a negative prefix.
