--- In
cybalist@yahoogroups.com, enlil@... wrote:
> 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."
How verbose! "Khap rot" would do in Thai, unless you really needed
to know who drove the car, and that you were talking about the past,
not the present.
> 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.
It is obvious it can be done without. Latin and most Slavonic
languages also lack articles, but that doesn't mean they aren't
useful enough for Greek, Romance and the Germanic languages to have
acquired definiteness markings.
Allgedly tense is not necessary either. I know number isn't, but I
do encounter cases where its lack causes serious ambiguity.
The point is that redundancy is a great aid to communication if you
know the system.
> 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 <:(
The closest I got is reading and writing private letters in Thai,
though I did have to translate a legal statement into Thai the
weekend before last, as the available professionals would not work
over the weekend. I had to be careful because of the insufficiency
of appropriate 3rd person pronouns; Thai may get away with one
general word for he/she/they, but the conscious Middle English
avoidance of a 3-way merger makes life easier for English speakers
today. (I did have someone to check my grammar; I got told off for
using too formal a first person pronoun.) I had had to translate the
witness's account in her own words into English for the lawyer to
make coherent. I had to restore the optionally omitted past tense
markings as the difference between present and past tense was crucial
to the case. I made sure they weren't omitted in the translation of
the formal statement.
Thai may not be a good example; Thais seem not to place any value on
clarity; they esteem brevity.
Richard.