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Apr. 9, 2005 Someone criticized my recent article, "Reforming English Grammar", apparently misunderstanding what I was recommending. So let me express my ideas more clearly. This critic cited the phrasal verb, "I will have been married", as an example of the sort of construction that makes English more precise than other languages, as if you cannot say, "I will have been married," in other languages. Quite the contrary, we have, "j'aurai été marié", "habré sido casado", "Ich wird verbunden worden" and "ya budu pozhenen" in French, Spanish, German and Russian, for example. My argument was not that we should simply abandon constructions like this. My argument was that the the whole sequence, "will have been...-ed" could be reduced to a single word, but it would have to be a new word. If it were merely instituted that "wilv", for example, replace the whole cumbersome sequence, we would have, "I wilv marry". This would be a more efficient and streamlined diction, but it would take a willingness and ability to change. This critic referred to this construction as the "past perfect", when in reality it is the "future perfect passive". This reference suggests only a superficial acquaintance with linguistic analysis. This critic challenges my contention that English verbs and pronouns are needlessly complicated, arguing, in effect, that the idle intricacies of the English language have made England and India more prosperous than France and Germany. On this point, I would like to mention that Arabic has five words for "you": anta (masculine singular); anti (feminine singular); antuma (dual epicene); antum (masculine plural): antunna (feminine plural). In Arabic, the dual denotes two people, while the plural denotes three or more. So if having a complicated system of pronouns were correlated with a high rate of employment, as this critic suggests, everyone in Mauritania would be working around the clock. Apparently, this critic feels that people who consider the irregularity of certain verbs, like "think...thought", "buy...bought", "may...might", etc., nonsensical, may be "left-wing socialists". Aren't all socialists left-wing, or are there right-wing socialists too? And what does regularizing irregular verbs have to do with socialism in the first place? Anyone who likes unproductive grammatical forms should take up Russian. Russian has three genders, six cases of pronouns and nouns as well, a full declension of adjectives and an extensive conjugation of verbs, without a "regular" verb in the entire language. Furthermore, the accent jumps around unpredictably in all the paradigms, with the result that whole books are devoted to stress patterns in Russian flexions. This does not make Russian any more precise or expressive than English in the long run. Nor is it reflected in the rate of employment in Russia. Neither did it keep Russia from going socialist. I recognize that most people are very resistant to change. It probably took ages to convert from Roman numerals to Arabic numerals, and it seems to be taking forever to convert to the metric system. But who would argue that Roman numerals are better than Arabic numerals, which, incidentally, Arabs call Indian numerals, merely because they were invented by the more Western people of Italy? And if the metric system came from France, so what? I don't view these things from the standpoint of parochialism, provincialism, nationalism, party affiliation or religious persuasion. In the spirit of objectivity and science, I look at the facts. And a very noticeable fact is that the English language could stand reform. ------------ About the author Thomas Keyes: I have written two books: A SOJOURN IN ASIA (non-fiction) and A TALE OF UNG (fiction), neither published so far. I have studied languages for years and traveled extensively on five continents. Email: udikeyes@yahoo.com Tell a friend about this site! ------------ All articles are EXCLUSIVE to Useless-Knowledge.com and are not allowed to be posted on other websites. ARTICLE THIEVES WILL BE PROSECUTED! |
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