on Sun, 19 Oct 2003 04:10:38AM -0700, Erik Steffl insinuated:
> Monique Y. Herman wrote:
> >On Fri, 17 Oct 2003 at 22:37 GMT, Erik Steffl penned:
> >
> >> english has a fairly simple a regular grammar so it's fairly easy
> >> to create english based programming language - the basic control
> >> structures are pretty much english sentences.
> >>
> >> This would be fairly hard todo in other languages that has more
> >> irregular grammar (the ones I know anything about have a lot more
> >> complicated/irregular grammar).
> >
> >
> >Hrm. German and Latin are much more regular than English. French is,
> >too, iirc. English has a *lot* of irregularity.
>
> german is regular?
more so than english, yes.
> with each word changing depending on how it's used in sentence
> (case)???
that's quite regular -- it's called declension, and is well-documented
in any introductory german text.
> gender being pretty much random?
that has nothing at all to do with the grammar -- you're talking about
the lexicon. the gender of german nouns is as arbitrary as the
phonemes that make up english words -- both have some historical
background, but none may make any sense. both are just items to be
memorized when learning the language -- just as we map "fork" to our
concept of that thing with tines we use to eat broccoli, germans map
"die Gabel" onto the same thing -- a word, and a gender to go with it.
same deal.
> in english there are few cases of irregularity (past tense/past
> participle of some verbs, few words have non-standard way to create
> plural and that's pretty much it). each words has at most few forms,
> easily recongizable (as in: the forms are created in same way for
> almost all the words).
again, lexicon. this point has nothing to do with the "regularity" of
language.
> and the structure of the sentence is pretty simple as well.
clearly, you've never tried to map it out. go on, then, i dare you --
write me a regular grammar that can express the grammar of english.
> compare that to german where each words has number of forms
> (depending on what it relates to),
declension
> and these forms are created in different ways for different words.
all part of the lexicon.
> example: in english, if I know the verb (one word) I can pretty much
> use it in a sentence. how many forms of each verb in german do you
> need to know to be able to use it in a sentence?
a root form (lexical); a knowledge of its behavior (also lexical); the
basic rules for declension (a regular part of grammar). answer: one.
</nori>
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