if <assignment>:

[Terry Hancock]

On Wednesday 27 November 2002 08:06 pm,  Greg Ewing wrote:
> maney at pobox.com wrote:
> > Dave Brueck <dave at pythonapocrypha.com> wrote:
> >>proof that the language is broken in that area. We don't say, "Is Tuesday 
> >>today?" or "Is 5 your age?", either. :)
> > Is it Tuesday today?
 
> But these sound *really* odd:
> 
>    Is Tuesday it today?
> 
>    Tuesday is it.
> 
> Some people insist that the verb "to be" should take
> the same case before and after, e.g. "I am he" and
> not "I am him". But I offer these as evidence that,
> in English at least, this verb is NOT symmetrical!

Reminds me of Japanese class -- the distinction between
"Is Tuesday today?" and "Is today Tuesday?" is significant by
what it contrasts against -- are you asking if "today" is
Tuesday or some other day, OR if "Tuesday" is today or
some other day (such as "tomorrow").  Suppose the answer
is negative and explained -- the answer to the first question
might be "No, Tuesday is the day after tomorrow." while the
answer to the second is "No, today is Sunday."  The first sounds
odd taken out of context, because the second is more
common.  On the other hand, if you know something bad
is going to happen on Tuesday, you might ask the question
in the first form.

It reminds me of Japanese, because that's one of the main
differences between "topic" and "subject" -- different particles
are used, and it's very confusing for an English-speaker. But
the same information is carried in word order here. Hmm. 

Japanese is also an SOV language like German -- I always
wondered if reverse-polish notation made more sense to
SOV language speakers, since arguably their native language
works that way (certainly infix makes more sense to me, and
that's analogous to SVO which is what English is.  (Usually ;-))).

Cheers,
Terry

--
Terry Hancock ( hancock at anansispaceworks.com )
Anansi Spaceworks  http://www.anansispaceworks.com