On 2009-10-11, Alan McKinnon <alan.mckin...@gmail.com> wrote: > English is a mess. As a language it's worse than a pig's > breakfast and makes almost no sense whatsoever to non-native > speakers. Mind you, it makes about as much sense to native > speakers as well :-) I had to take 5 years of Latin study in > high school to understand how my own mother tongue works. Sad > indictment for a language wouldn't you say?
At least we mostly got rid of the whole gender mess and only have to worry about objective/subjective case for a few cases. During a mostly futile attempt to learn German, I had occasion to read Mark Twin's essay on Germain articles. IIRC, plotting out all of the combinations for "the" takes something like a 3x9 grid -- Grant Edwards grante Yow! What I want to find at out is -- do parrots know visi.com much about Astro-Turf?