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From: alderson@netcom16.netcom.com (Richard M. Alderson III)
Subject: Re: Sumerian / IE (nominal suffixes / declension)
In-Reply-To: coby@euler.Berkeley.EDU's message of 11 Oct 1996 18:45:32 GMT
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References: <53jqrj$k32@halley.pi.net> <53m4kc$ahq@agate.berkeley.edu>
Date: Fri, 11 Oct 1996 22:01:02 GMT
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In article <53m4kc$ahq@agate.berkeley.edu> coby@euler.Berkeley.EDU
(Coby (Jacob) Lubliner) writes:

>Does this passage imply that Humboldt was unfamiliar with, say, Japanese, in
>which a finite verb (in the simple present or past form) can become a
>participle solely by virtue of preceding the noun instead of following it?

Wilhelm von Humboldt's _floruit_ is the late 18th and early 19th Centuries.
Given the trade situation in Japan (closed to all but the Portuguese at
Nagasaki until 1854), it is likely that very few Germans were familiar with
Japanese at the time.
-- 
Rich Alderson   You know the sort of thing that you can find in any dictionary
                of a strange language, and which so excites the amateur philo-
                logists, itching to derive one tongue from another that they
                know better: a word that is nearly the same in form and meaning
                as the corresponding word in English, or Latin, or Hebrew, or
                what not.
                                                --J. R. R. Tolkien,
alderson@netcom.com                               _The Notion Club Papers_
