Week V

[ReidSchluter]

This past week I was working heavily with verbs & the perfect tense. I found when reading 'De Telegraaf' and similar sources, that the biggest inhibiting factor to my overall understanding was verb comprehension. As it was the point in my book that they were teaching perfect tense & past participles (which Jan says constitutes the majority of completed action statements in Dutch), I decided to use an auxiliary source for important Dutch verbs in order to boost my overall understanding. I learned about 40 verbs all together that will come up frequently. I also learned their stems, and how to conjugate them. My book hadn't really gone over verbs in much detail, so the benefits on my overall comprehension of Dutch has been very noticeable already.In terms of the questions from the reading:1. Something that is true for all natural languages i.e. all languages have nouns & verbs2. Verbs3. Since there is a lot of variation to the amount & usage of verbs across different languages4. Development of nasal vowels5. Infants fist sounds will be the most common sounds in their native language6. analytic - little inflection; synthetic - much inflection; agglutinative - elements arranged loosely together7. VO places verb before object, whereas OV places object before verb8. Because they link clauses9. They are placed in a contrasting arrangement10. The consistent ordering of words in a particular fashion11.12. Each language requires that the markers be place in a particular way in accordance with clause order13. VSO, OSV, & SVO14. They are effected by nominal modifiers15. In both, relative clauses are formed with implied relative pronouns16. The genitive typically appeared before the noun much more frequently17. They fall after the noun, unless they're being modified by an adverbial expression18. It's mainly noticeable in the structure of folk talesREVIEW PROBLEM #1This seems to be relatively in line with their respective language groupings. Being analytic, English has little inflection, and that is certainly visible in the formation of it's past participle in this example. Meanwhile, Greek is synthetic which means that it has much inflection. Again, this is evident in the forms that it takes in conjugation, which are generally much more complex than in the examples from English & Japanese. Finally, Japanese is agglutinative, which means elements loosely arranged together. This is viewable in the simple examples provided in the question, and my Japanese-speaking friends offered a few more examples to emphasize this point.