By Genitives, Inflections

MrPedantic wrote:It interests me that some modern languages have at least the appearance of greater simplicity (e.g. the loss of inflection) than their counterparts of 900 years ago. This seems counter-intuitive: you would expect a language to evolve towards (not from) complexity.Hello MrPAs far...

Pemmican wrote:Why do you disagree, milky??? Btw: Why is it called "Saxon Genitive"? Does anyone know?? Becuse it is the only noun inflection surviving from Old English or Anglo-Saxon Sorry, there is one more: the plural 's' Inchoateknowledge

Pemmican wrote:The "-s" is the most common suffix left in English by now, it took over several functions: a) plural indicator: one apple - two apples b) 3rd ps sg inflection indicator: sing - he sings c) genitive ending: Jon's house In my opinion, the -s in b) will certainly disappear sometime,...

korin said: >Over approximately 1500 years, the mammoth set of inflections of the Old English has virtually been discarded leaving only 's' (plural nouns, 3rd person singular verbs, and saxon genitive) in modern English. English has become a rather analytic lg, where most of the syntactic...

The "-s" is the most common suffix left in English by now, it took over several functions: a) plural indicator: one apple - two apples b) 3rd ps sg inflection indicator: sing - he sings c) genitive ending: Jon's house It would be erroneous to say that the suffixes in a), b) and c) are the...

The "-s" is the most common suffix left in English by now, it took over several functions: a) plural indicator: one apple - two apples b) 3rd ps sg inflection indicator: sing - he sings c) genitive ending: Jon's house In my opinion, the -s in b) will certainly disappear sometime, it was...

>I do not claim that the plural ending 's' will definitely disappear. However, looking at the direction the English language is heading, the disappearance would come as no surprise. >Over approximately 1500 years, the mammoth set of inflections of the Old English has virtually been discarded...

I do not claim that the plural ending 's' will definitely disappear. However, looking at the direction the English language is heading, the disappearance would come as no surprise. Over approximately 1500 years, the mammoth set of inflections of the Old English has virtually been discarded...

Hello MrP Thanks for the reply. I am lucky I get an confirmation directly from a native speaker to that I had better not say "I'm a Japanese", though I feel somewhat like unhappiness in your way of discriminating the suffices "-an" and "-ese". By the way I feel the word "Japaneses" is much...

Miriam, Many thanks for your thoughtful expansion of Pem's analysis. I'll first address the specific questions you've raised, then re-state more thoroughly the case which the Cambridge book is making for the gerund's redefinition. Consider the following two sentences: 1. I can't stand your...