A NEW LOOK AT CANTONESE EXPLETIVES
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nowadays marked off by punctuation; and we are left to guess how far the pattern of stress and accent in modern jargon the “superfixes” — which in the spoken languages of today serve to break what is said up into words and phrases, still runs (like so many other features of this family of languages) on the same rails as ran Sanskrit and the Zend-Avesta.
Modern English has virtually got rid of cases, except in the personal pronouns; of tenses, except present and past; of voice and mood; it never had aspect; it lost its genders way back; number is inconsistently sketched. And the spirit of the language leads away from the dependent clause (hypotaxis) to the parallel clause (parataxis) preferred in the Celtic languages.
While thus losing some precision, English has gained in flexibility; we shall see later, it would not be unfair to say that English has become more Chinese and in particular, words can be switched from one class to another with a facility rare in this highly formalized family of languages.
Thus the common verb "to fall" meaning to move towards the earth's centre, besides the regular pattern of fall, fell, fallen and the verbal noun falling also makes a noun fall, meaning the event of falling, or a quantity of snow or rain which falls; falls, meaning water flowing down over rocks, overfalls meaning much the same in the sea, fallout, a modern term meaning particles of radiation which come down like invisible rain, and outfall meaning the end of a pipe where other particles, but not of radiation, are discharged into the sea.
To a foreigner attempting to learn idiomatic English the logic of some of these compounds can be bewildering. A homecoming is much the same as coming home; but upsetting is the very opposite of setting up; and if a competitor is played out the result may be that he is outplayed, only to be once again both played in and played out with musical honours at the prizegiving.
This is perhaps as far as I should go on the first half of my theme, which recounts difficulties in the acquisition of idiomatic English by those whose mother tongue it is not. They have to learn the rules before they can safely begin to break them, whereas the English don't bother to learn the rules and go by the "feel" of the language: though, indeed, they might find it easier if they did learn the rules, beginning with the rules of Latin and Greek.