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Germanic vs. Romance adjective-making tendencies
As is well known, and has been mentioned, German makes use of the agglutinative method, which makes for some really monstrous outcomes, at least in our view. It has certainly been made fun of often enough by various comedians who have an intellectual audience. But the Romance language method, which mostly consists of spreading out the various qualities or concepts, can also make some monstrosities. You get these strings of xxxx de xxxxx de xxxxx de xxxx which are more annoying than anything else, at least to English speakers. French is the worst for this, being the language that has to say, "Qu'est-ce que c'est que cela?" for "What's that?"
English seems to take a sort of middle course between the two methods, which figures, since the language is a Germanic base fused with a bastard French dialect, with some Latin and Old Norse tossed in.
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Hyphenated adjectives revisited
Rapunzel 03/16/01 05:45 PM ![]()
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Re: Hyphenated adjectives revisited
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