Me:
>> I mean, really, who cares if a noun is definite or not?
Richard:
> I do.
But this is my whole point. Using "a" and "the" seems so
absolutely vital to English speakers. Why, we can't even imagine
how we might comprehend things properly if this contrast of
definiteness weren't strictly adhered to.
... And yet, Beijing is doing just fine without them as we speak.
"I drove _the_ car" in Mandarin is simply expressed as "Wo kai
che le" unless you want to emphasize somehow that it's your car,
"Wo kai wo-de che le", or unless you want to really state it was
THAT car as in "Wo kai nei-ge che le."
Get the point? So we see that English speakers are clinging onto
"definiteness" like drowning rats to a riverbank even though in
the end, that feature is evidently not vital to language
comprehension.
Likewise, Jens objected to my ideas on PreIE because if I'm
correct, it would appear then that for whatever reason IE speakers
were clinging on to "thematicism" as a vital feature of their
language instead of letting it go because it would seem "easier"
from a grammaticists perspective. Well, obviously they clung on to
it long enough for it to show up in Reconstructed IE and there
would have been many points in time and many events of drastic
language changes at which point IE speakers could have chucked
this athematic/thematic dichotomy out the proverbial window. They
didn't, and the fact that they didn't has no bearing on the
weakness of any theory. In the end, it's a matter of conjecture
as to why they never did.
That's all anyone can say on that subject. Now back to the battle
of PreIE :)
> It can be a great help in assessing whether you've missed part of
> the tale. I get confused when the wrong article is used.
I presume you don't read any good Chinese novels then. Of course,
neither can I. All I can read are kindergarten books for now <:(
At least I know how to sing "Frere Jacques" in Mandarin, although
I must say, their version is much more violent to animals.
= gLeN