Re: OT: English and schizophrenia
| From: | Thomas R. Wier <artabanos@...> |
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| Date: | Tuesday, August 7, 2001, 9:15 |
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Yoon Ha Lee wrote:
> On Tue, 7 Aug 2001, Raymond Brown wrote:
>
> [snip]
> > English verbs are about the easiest you'll ever see if you happen to be an
> > English speaker! But my own experience of my continental neighbors is
> > somewhat different.
> >
> > For many years we had foreign language students stay with us for their year
> > in Britain. I'd always assumed the thing they'd complain most about
> > regarding English was our crazy orthography. Not a bit of it. Almost
> > without exception the biggest grumble was "English phrasal verbs".
Yeah, they're weird. That's the first thing my German prof mentioned about
English's difficulty. One I like to use when explaining it to students I tutor
in linguistics is:
(1a) Jack and Jill ran up the hill.
(1b) Jack and Jill ran up the bill.
(2a) *Jack and Jill ran the hill up.
(2b) Jack and Jill ran the bill up.
(2a) is ungrammatical, while (2b) isn't. It's a good way to teach 'em
constituent structure.
> You know, I've heard similar from English language-learners. And if
> you think about it, some of them seem to me really hard to guess, you
> just have to know them:
>
> to hand out (out of what?)
> to give a hand, to give a helping hand (the latter is a bit easier to
> figure out, for me)
> to wear out (out of what?)
> to turn in (for the night, for the evening)
> to turn up (at someone's place, unexpectedly)
> to turn out (of someone's house, probably that someone's own)
I don't think I'd find these particularly more confusing than German
constructions of roughly equivalent weirdness: absaufen, Ausgleich,
Anschluß, etc.
===================================
Thomas Wier | AIM: trwier
"Aspidi men Saiôn tis agalletai, hên para thamnôi
entos amômêton kallipon ouk ethelôn;
autos d' exephugon thanatou telos: aspis ekeinê
erretô; exautês ktêsomai ou kakiô" - Arkhilokhos
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