English drives me batty!!!

[Caedmon]

Now here's an example of splitting some words:

He said he loved my sister.

Only he said he loved my sister.

He only said he loved my sister.

He said only he loved my sister.

He said he only loved my sister.

He said he loved only my sister.

He said he loved my only sister.

see how the meaning changes. kinda interesting.

If English hadn't lost much of its morphological endings (suffixes that tell you how words function grammatically), the sentences above, though perhaps grammatically "incorrect" or nonexistent in our "standard" English, could hold similar, if not identical, meanings, or at least the word order wouldn't hold as much sway over meaning.

 

[Globalnomad]

must be from Gaelic or some Germanic language..otherwise I have no clue.

Now here's an example of splitting some words:

He said he loved my sister.

Only he said he loved my sister.

He only said he loved my sister.

He said only he loved my sister.

He said he only loved my sister.

He said he loved only my sister.

He said he loved my only sister.

see how the meaning changes. kinda interesting.

love and peace
Jonathan

Thanks, Jonathan, that's a good example of how the function of a word is determined by its place in the sentence!
In the first example, the word "only" qualifies "he" (=nobody else said it).
In the second, it qualifies "said" (=he didn't say anything else).
In the third, it qualifies "he"(according to him, nobody else loves my sister).
In the fourth, it qualifies "loved" (he had no other action-relation to her than the action of loving. OK, this is a weird one, you would not interpret the sentence this way in reality.)
The fifth and sixth are clear, I won't explain.

Caedmon, you seem to disapprove of the fact that English works this way. "Hold such sway over"... that's a slightly judgemental way of putting it. Why? That's simply how English works - in other languages, it's word forms that "hold the sway"; in English, it's their order. SOMETHING has to "hold the sway"! This is as good as the old declension system...

 

[Caedmon]

Caedmon, you seem to disapprove of the fact that English works this way. "Hold such sway over"... that's a slightly judgemental way of putting it. Why? That's simply how English works - in other languages, it's word forms that "hold the sway"; in English, it's their order. SOMETHING has to "hold the sway"! This is as good as the old declension system...

I didn't disapprove of the fact that English works this way, and I didn't intend to sound judgmental. Honestly, I didn't give much thought at all to the fact that I said "hold sway." I forgot about the phrase two minutes after I posted it.