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> English has such a huge amount of French vocabulary that it does not take a huge amount of effort for an English speaker like me to, say, read a Wikipedia pag

> English has such a huge amount of French vocabulary that it does not take a huge amount of effort for an English speaker like me to, say, read a Wikipedia page in French, despite my limited knowledge of the language. I just tested this out. I visited https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random and tried to understand the page I got. I ended up on https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conte_licencieux https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conte_licencieux and I really have no idea what that page is about. There's a bunch of random words I can understand, but it's not even close to enough to figure out what's going on. > > normal languages don’t dangle prepositions in this way > What's the author's idea of “normal” here? Latin? The article made that quite clear. On the subject of dangling prepositions, it said there were only 2 other languages besides English that allowed them (an indigenous language in Mexico and one in Siberia). > Arabic has no masculine form of “the”. Is it weird? The context of that sentence is the changes that Norse made to Old English. Prior to the Norse influence, the implication is that English had gendered articles. And more generally, Indo-European languages (of which Arabic is not one) have gendered nouns and articles, except for English. It looks to me like you're cherry-picking sentences and trying to refute them, but by taking them out of context you're actually just turning them into straw men.

jdmichal 9y ago
> The article made that quite clear. On the subject of dangling prepositions, it said there were only 2 other languages besides English that allowed them (an indigenous language in Mexico and one in Siberia). Which is not the complete story, at all. English "dangling" prepositions are a direct lineage from Germanic separable verbs, which also still exist in at least German and Dutch. Ich fahre jetzt ab. -- The "ab" is a preposition, just kind of hanging out at the end of the sentence. It is, in fact, part of the verb, where "ab·fahren" means "to leave". The example given, "Which town do you come from?", could be analyzed as exactly analogous, where the verb is actually "to come from".
- eridius 9y ago
  > where the verb is actually "to come from". I'm not sure what you mean by this, because "to come from" isn't a verb, and you can't simply declare that it is. Also FWIW, upon re-reading the article, it says Danish actually also has this (more specifically, it said Old Norse allowed for this, "which Danish retains"). So I guess it's 4 languages, not 3. Not that that really makes any difference here, since the whole point is that dangling prepositions are rather exceptional and nearly all languages don't allow them.
  - jdmichal 9y ago
    > I'm not sure what you mean by this, because "to come from" isn't a verb, and you can't simply declare that it is. "ab·fahren" is analyzed as a verb in German, even though it is clearly a verb with a detachable prepositional particle which modifies that verb. Let's look at some English examples: stand up, stand out, stand in, stand down, stand by, stand back, stand for These all have drastically different meanings from both each other and from the verb "stand". I don't see any reason why they shouldn't be analyzed as individual verbs, same as the German ones. Do you have an actual reasoning behind not analyzing them in that way? And this isn't just some strange idea that I, random internet person, am spouting either: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Separable_verb#Analogy_to_English https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Separable_verb#Analogy_to_Engl...
    - eridius 9y ago
      For all of your examples except "stand for", you have a verb and an adverbial particle. "stand for" (and "come from") is a verb and a preposition. So all of your examples except for "stand for" are already something different. For example, with "come from", "where did you come from?" is the same as "from where did you come?", but there's no equivalent with e.g. "stand up". And conversely, you can "screw things up", but you can't "come <object> from". Anyway, simply put, they aren't verbs. They're "phrasal verbs". Or more specifically, most of them are particle phrasal verbs, and two (stand for and come from) are prepositional phrasal verbs. And you can't just pretend they're the same thing as normal verbs. The Wikipedia page also says particle phrasal verbs (e.g. "stand in") are in the same general category as the separable verbs of other Germanic languages, the implication here being that prepositional phrasal verbs aren't. And in the link you provided, it explicitly says adverbial particles can be separated from the verb. So the point here is that ab·fahren is analogous to particle phrasal verbs in English, and not to prepositional phrasal verbs. So it's like "stand up", but it's not like "come from".

jdmichal 9y ago

> The article made that quite clear. On the subject of dangling prepositions, it said there were only 2 other languages besides English that allowed them (an indigenous language in Mexico and one in Siberia). Which is not the complete story, at all. English "dangling" prepositions are a direct lineage from Germanic separable verbs, which also still exist in at least German and Dutch. Ich fahre jetzt ab. -- The "ab" is a preposition, just kind of hanging out at the end of the sentence. It is, in fact, part of the verb, where "ab·fahren" means "to leave". The example given, "Which town do you come from?", could be analyzed as exactly analogous, where the verb is actually "to come from".

eridius 9y ago
> where the verb is actually "to come from". I'm not sure what you mean by this, because "to come from" isn't a verb, and you can't simply declare that it is. Also FWIW, upon re-reading the article, it says Danish actually also has this (more specifically, it said Old Norse allowed for this, "which Danish retains"). So I guess it's 4 languages, not 3. Not that that really makes any difference here, since the whole point is that dangling prepositions are rather exceptional and nearly all languages don't allow them.
- jdmichal 9y ago
  > I'm not sure what you mean by this, because "to come from" isn't a verb, and you can't simply declare that it is. "ab·fahren" is analyzed as a verb in German, even though it is clearly a verb with a detachable prepositional particle which modifies that verb. Let's look at some English examples: stand up, stand out, stand in, stand down, stand by, stand back, stand for These all have drastically different meanings from both each other and from the verb "stand". I don't see any reason why they shouldn't be analyzed as individual verbs, same as the German ones. Do you have an actual reasoning behind not analyzing them in that way? And this isn't just some strange idea that I, random internet person, am spouting either: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Separable_verb#Analogy_to_English https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Separable_verb#Analogy_to_Engl...
  - eridius 9y ago
    For all of your examples except "stand for", you have a verb and an adverbial particle. "stand for" (and "come from") is a verb and a preposition. So all of your examples except for "stand for" are already something different. For example, with "come from", "where did you come from?" is the same as "from where did you come?", but there's no equivalent with e.g. "stand up". And conversely, you can "screw things up", but you can't "come <object> from". Anyway, simply put, they aren't verbs. They're "phrasal verbs". Or more specifically, most of them are particle phrasal verbs, and two (stand for and come from) are prepositional phrasal verbs. And you can't just pretend they're the same thing as normal verbs. The Wikipedia page also says particle phrasal verbs (e.g. "stand in") are in the same general category as the separable verbs of other Germanic languages, the implication here being that prepositional phrasal verbs aren't. And in the link you provided, it explicitly says adverbial particles can be separated from the verb. So the point here is that ab·fahren is analogous to particle phrasal verbs in English, and not to prepositional phrasal verbs. So it's like "stand up", but it's not like "come from".