On Wednesday, March 27, 2002, at 03:23 , jarkko.hietaniemi@nokia.com
wrote:
> Secondly, as you say, dictating what the plural in various languages
> should be, borders on arrogance, but is probably just plain old
> silliness.
Even more arrogantly speaking, the very notion of plural forms may well
be just plain old silliness. Chinese has none, neither does Japanese
and I belive neither does Korean. It seems the older (or may I say, the
more mature) the language is, the less sintactic sugar it has. I can
brag all about how syntactically simple Japanese is but it seems Chinese
have us all beat with respect to that.
Besides, I would rather be silly than arrogant so I respect what the
speakers think is right. If they say euros, that's euros to me when I
am talking to them. In Rome, Romans should always be right.
I may be more arrogant on English than others because English because,
first of all, English no longer belongs to the UK and US; it belong to
"us" with all lower cases. Second of all, it's my second native
language (if I have such things as native languages). So I may even say
what the textbooks and dictionaries state otherwise. I say Christianism
even though spell checkers yell at me. To me it is one of the cults
that should be postfixed with -ism.
I consider the very lack of Academee Ingrais is the bliss rather a
shortcoming. It is okay to "grok" or name a monkey kwijibo -- so long
as it is spelled in Alphabet. English enjoys new words on-the-fly.
What a pity Kanji on-the-fly is a taboo, at least on Unicode ;)
Oh, I am a silly man so let me get back to silly-walking on the subject.
So I go silly and let me ask you guys a silly question. How come ghoti,
oops, fish, is fish no matter how many of them you count? And what is a
singular form of sheep? shoop ?
Dan the Silly Man
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Tue Mar 26 2002 - 15:29:33 EST