On 11/3/05, James N. McBride <jnmcbr@xxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> It would seem to limit linguistic creativity. /jmac
Can't comment about Bulgarian but I assume it's fairly similar to the
way things work in Russian. While you can't get creative with the
spelling there is a lot of ability to get creative in other ways. For
instance, in Russian everything declines so there's no ambiguity in
what an adjective or adverb agress with. Because of this there is
virtually no restrictions on word order. In Russian, you can change
word order to change emphasis for instace (the last word in the
sentence having the greatest emphasis). For instance, "I am reading a
book", "I am a book reading", "A book reading am I", "A book I am
reading", "Reading a book I am", "Reading I am a book". In English
most of those examples are incorrect, ambiguous or change the meaning
(unless you want to talk like Yoda) whereas they are all perfectly
valid in Russian. Note that things get a little odd with translating
the examples into English because there's no present tense version of
the verb to be and there's no "a" preposition since in Russian "book"
would have a singular ending for the accusative case. As for what I
meant by changing the meaning; if you look at the example "A book I am
reading", in English the subject seems to change to book instead of I
but in Russian book is still clearly the direct object because of the
way it's declined.
Where you also get a lot of potential creativity is with the amount of
flexibility you have with prefixation. By prefixing a verb you can
change the verb to mean "to begin to", "to do a little", "to complete"
and so on, all with the prefix of the verb. For instance, while in
Russia a friend said that he wanted to go for a walk and by the prefix
he used for the verb I knew that he meant that he just wanted to go
for a short walk.
I could go into further digressions on the creative possiilities
within slavic languages but I suspect we've gone just a bit too far
off topic now.
Token on topic content: if I ever do manage to get back to Russia I
intend to take my OM gear for the photographic opportunities.
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