Picking up on your " color" comment, in Rev.21:19 , the writer observed the foundation of the walls were made of 12 different colors of stones ( jewels). Half of these colors have never been identified. Hmmm. If there are 3 primary colors why mention four times that ?
Richard
----- Original Message ----- From: "Jed Rothwell" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: <vortex-L@eskimo.com>
Sent: Tuesday, May 03, 2005 11:28 AM
Subject: English articles are not nonsense
Standing Bear wrote:
Russian grammar is different than
ours in many ways, including the omission of common nonsense words that we call 'articles' like 'the' in many cases...
Actually, English articles have a specific meaning: they indicate whether you are talking about one specific instance or general instances. It is a common misconception that English articles, number, and French word gender are "nonsense" or dispensable. They have no meaning, but they provide essential cross checking to reduce errors in communication. They function somewhat like parity bits. Take two French words which sound similar but are of different genders. The use of "le" or "la" earlier in the sentence acts as a clue or heads-up for the listener. If he has trouble hearing the sentence because he is in a noisy environment, he backtracks, replays the sentence in his mind, and checks whether there was a "le" or "la."
You can always have a language without articles, number or gender. We get along fine without gender in English. Japanese has none of these things, yet Japanese people communicate perfectly. But of course they have other techniques to reinforce meaning, cross-check and reduce ambiguity.
Incidentally, yesterday someone mentioned the distinction between green and blue. The most common Japanese color word, "ao," is both blue and green. So when you are driving with a Japanese person and he tells you the traffic light has turned blue, he means green. When Americans first learned Japanese, I expect some of them wondered whether Japanese people are colorblind. Not at all. They have dozens of other words for colors which describe fine gradations between various shades of blue and green. The most common pair after "ao" are: "sora-iro" and "midori" which mean "sky-color" (blue) and "leaf-color" (green).
- Jed
