We are all modernists and beyond.

[womzilla]

In living languages, both semantics and syntax are statistical phenomena, not absolutes.

Comments

[womzilla.livejournal.com]

Oops, I meant to comment on the last paragraph separately.

I have no doubt that you and the Pennsylvania Dutch were both speaking versions of English. But it's possible that you weren't speaking the same language. If English were less flexible about word order, just that one syntactic change might have been enough to render you mutually unintelligible.