--- In
cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "andythewiros" <anjarrette@...> wrote:
>
> It's what we're taught, what can I say?
My answer would be the same. As a native speaker you learn the gender of nouns as an extra feature or phoneme of the word. I can't recover from memory any kind of difficulty it caused me in learning my first language. It seems to be a problem only for adult learners. Vestjyder speaking 'proper Danish' or some compromise have the same problems getting gender right as English-speakers will.
> In parts of England people say "we was", "you was", "they was", so
> the simplification trend was perhaps artificially stopped by
> teachers and other upholders of old-fashioned grammatical rules,
> when it reached "am", "are" and "is".
Actually until the early 20th century Danish and Swedish officially distinguished in the present tense between -er (-ar, -er) in all persons singular and -e (-a, -e) in all persons plural. Two modal verbs were inflected like this
present
skal kan
skal kan
skal kan
skulle kunne
skulle kunne
skulle kunne
past
skulde kunde
skulde kunde
skulde kunde
skulde kunde
skulde kunde
skulde kunde
infinitive
skulle kunne
ppp
skullet kunnet
Add to that that Danish pronounces -nd-, -ld- as -nn-, -ll-. A system like that has to fail sooner or later the failing modal verbs dragging the rest of the system with it.
This is what we have today
present
skal kan
skal kan
skal kan
skal kan
skal kan
skal kan
past
skulle kunne
skulle kunne
skulle kunne
skulle kunne
skulle kunne
skulle kunne
infinitive
skulle kunne
ppp
skullet kunnet
BTW I'm intrigued by the fact that the whole stripe of middle Germanic dialects, OE OS Old Dutch have 'Einheitsplural', one single plural for all persons in the plural. French uses 'on' + 3sg for 'nous + 1pl, in my opinion to avoid the differently stressed, therefore deviant forms of 1pl (as is 2pl). Perhaps the substrate language (Venetic?) stressed like Latin, and therefore wanted to eliminate the 1pl and 2pl?
Cf
http://tinyurl.com/363llr9
Torsten