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client questions perfectly good translation
Thread poster: Anne Brackenborough (X)
Jeff Allen
Jeff Allen  Identity Verified
France
Local time: 23:03
Multiplelanguages
+ ...
analytic and synthetic word constructions Jan 9, 2005

andycw wrote:
I was questioned once because I'd placed an adjective after a noun and, of course, in English they "always" precede the noun.

This was the second time that particular client had questioned something so I decided to give him an English class.

I called him up, said I found his question fascinating and enthusiastically launched into a long explanation of how there were many such instances in English....usually influenced by the French original.

Court martial
Secretary General
Director General
letters patent..etc....

This, naturally, took me on to the subject of past participles and the fact that, whereas Spanish and English no longer distinguish between transitive/intransitive (have/haber), in French and German the difference had been retained (étre/sein).

This then led to a painfully long explanation of the difference between "analytic" and "desinence-based" languages in general....and so on.....


The following book is very good for lots of examples of comparative analytic and synthetic based language constructions between English and French.

Picone, Michael D. 1996. Anglicisms, Neologisms and Dynamic French. (Lingvisticae Investigationes: Supplementa Vol. 18.) Amsterdam: John Benjamins. 462 + xii pp. ISSN: 0165 7569 ISBN (USA) 1 55619 258 4

I did a book review of it for the Journal of French Language Studies Volume 11, Issue 02, September 2001, pp. 292-293

see:
http://www.ling.ed.ac.uk/linguist/issues/12/12-2317.html
&
http://journals.cambridge.org/bin/bladerunner?30REQEVENT=&REQAUTH=0&500005REQSUB=&REQSTR1=JournalofFrenchLanguageStudies/Vol11No02
(note: the 1.5 page book review is available online for free at the 2nd web link)

Also look up Armin Schwegler on the web who wrote a book on analytic and synthetic language constructions. Look up the following with a search engine:
armin schwegler synthetic analytic

Jeff
http://www.geocities.com/jeffallenpubs/
 
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