Kretz)
The Great Turmerc Debate 622No, can you? How did you determine how the two spellings are pronounced exactly? How does the spelling "yacht" relate to any...
It was apparently those ancient Danes that we have to blame for compound verbs in English. I don't know if they survive in modern Danish. There's no system to them - people just have to learn lists of them - put off, put out, put up with etc etc. The size of our vocabulary also causes problems - we often have a variety of words from different languages meaning much the same thing but with subtle variations. But for survival purposes, speakers of Germanic and Latin languages can often find an English word not too different from their own.
We tend to ignore a large part of our vocabulary for everyday purposes to avoid sounding pompous. We make a few words do a lot of work. We confused German friends (with excellent English) by saying we'd had the cats "done" (i.e neutered). But in context English speakers would have known exactly what we meant. Mrs C. teaches English and finds the difficulties her students have depends on their native language. Speakers of Eastern European languages, for example, have great difficulties with articles ("the" and "a") - I buttume they'd find French much the same and German even harder. Those students whose lives bring them into contact with a lot of spoken English tend to leap ahead of the others in getting the hang of English idioms. -- Phil C.
