blutoonwithcarrotandnail wrote:What you are saying is that the confusion created by the sentence
of stating that my dad loves his kids and then my uncle loves his kids
- that nobody is sure in the final statement whose kids they are talking
about so they used EJUS.
This makes sense if i am interpreting it correctly.
Thanks.
MarcusE wrote:This seems like such a useful distinction to be able to make that it makes me wonder why Spanish abandoned it. "Cicero le dio un regalo a su hija" could mean his daughter or somebody else's daughter.
benissimus wrote:MarcusE wrote:This seems like such a useful distinction to be able to make that it makes me wonder why Spanish abandoned it. "Cicero le dio un regalo a su hija" could mean his daughter or somebody else's daughter.
Just a thought... as an empire and its language expand and you have more people speaking Latin as a second language in, say, Hispania, then these linguistic features that are more difficult for new speakers to acquire are the first to be neglected.
blutoonwithcarrotandnail wrote:SUUS is possibly ambiguous in its natural usage but EJUS is not.
Correct?
calvinist wrote:Benissimus is exactly right. When non-native speakers pick up a language in a natural setting (not a classroom) they usually simplify the language as much as possible and stamp out any irregularities... Spanish being a perfect example with it's loss of case endings, neuter gender, etc. The interesting thing is that the only irregularities that usually remain are in words and structures that are very high frequency such as the verb "to be" cp. English is, am, was, are.
yes, they spoke Vulgar Latin as a first language which had already lost most of the elements of Classical Latin probably by being introduced as a second language, and I never said that was the only way languages were simplified, just one instance in which they are.. trust me I live in SoCal and I hear non-native English speakers making chop suey of English regularly.... but I don't want to argue man, just putting my two cents in.loqu wrote:calvinist wrote:Benissimus is exactly right. When non-native speakers pick up a language in a natural setting (not a classroom) they usually simplify the language as much as possible and stamp out any irregularities... Spanish being a perfect example with it's loss of case endings, neuter gender, etc. The interesting thing is that the only irregularities that usually remain are in words and structures that are very high frequency such as the verb "to be" cp. English is, am, was, are.
Oh I cannot agree at all. First of all because, according to your reasoning, Italian (the closest to be called 'natives') wouldn't have lost the case endings and neuter gender, which it has (let me remind you that only Romanian has preserved -and partly- the declension and the neuter gender).
Apart from that, Baetica and other parts of the Empire (such as the coast of Tarraconensis) were rather well romanized regions so that we cannot consider these inhabitants to speak Latin as a second language (in fact, pre-Roman languages died out in few years because of the good Romanization). Latin was the first and only language to most population in Hispania as it was in Italia -- but, of course, it was Vulgar Latin in both of them, not Classical one. And we all know Vulgar Latin had lost a whole bunch of classical features from the beginning on.
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