Grammatically complex languages

Paloma   Sun Jun 27, 2010 2:53 pm GMT
It almost seems like English doesn't have a real infinitive at all.

/
In future, to love, to be might be spelled as to-love, to-be
and after that tolove, tobe will be infinitives, the same happened to

to day...to-day...today
to morrow...to-morrow...tomorrow
good by...good-by...goodby...goodbye
Franco   Sun Jun 27, 2010 2:57 pm GMT
Maybe Brazilians use diglossia to keep mulattos and blacks illiterate. That would explain why they persevere in using obscure European Portuguese rules that don't reflect anymore in Brazilians' speech. In the end grammar is a posteriory abstraction that reflects and systematises what people speak, not on the contrary. I read somewhere that Lulo da Silva intentionally uses vernacular Brazilian to make it more accepted and less stigmatised in formal situations.
Morad   Sun Jun 27, 2010 6:54 pm GMT
that would explain why they persevere in using obscure European Portuguese rules that don't reflect anymore in Brazilians' speech.

//this is correct.
For example, in Brazil they say TE AMO, ME CHAMO but they're forced to write AMO-TE, CHAMO-ME as in Portugal because Portuguese grammar does not allow clitics at the begging of the sentence (unlike the Spanish grammar: Me llamo)
josh   Sun Jun 27, 2010 7:05 pm GMT
hmm that's interesting about the brazilian disglossia there

and i heard about the balkan sprachbund, but who said romanian doesn't have an infinitive? it does, but it differs slightly from the other romance language kinds. there's the more common short form with just the verb stem without -re, and the long form, with an -re at the end like italian/latin, which has become nominal