On Wed, Oct 22, 2003 at 06:47:13PM -0700, Erik Steffl insinuated:
Nori Heikkinen wrote:
on Sun, 19 Oct 2003 12:38:45PM -0700, Erik Steffl insinuated:
...
of course, you can create various complex and ambiguous sentences in
english, the point is that you can take few forms of sentences and
have a working language (that's pretty much what BASIC (talking
about programming language) is).
you can do that in both languages.
let's say you have a function called isRed(x) (returns true if x is
red). Now how would you call this function in german? it would never
be in agreement with all possible x (grammatically).
how so not?
istRot( dieGabel )
istRot( dasMesser )
istRot( derLoeffel )
how are any of those less grammatical than their english equivalents:
isRed( theFork )
isRed( theKnife )
isRed( theSpoon )
??
not sure if this is the best example
nope, guess not. try again if you're trying to make a coherent
argument.
- perhaps in this case it would be acceptable to use istRot,
regardless of gender of x.
in fact, in german, adjectives only agree with nouns if they
IMMEDIATELY PRECEDE the noun. so you have "die Gabel ist rot" (the
fork is red), but "die rote Gabel" (the red fork) -- note that the
feminine "-e" only applies to the adjective "rot" in the case in which
it immediately precedes the noun.