12!

It's late, and last minute school work has consumed my energy to put very much work into this post, so I'm going to simply record a little bit of interesting language that I stumbled upon in the midst of my work.

As I was working, I found myself writing a sentence similar to the following:

...becoming so far separated from all that surrounds him as to be unable to properly respond.

(Notice the emphasized words.)

After typing that, I immediately went and corrected the bold section to the following:

...becoming so far separated from all that surround him as to be unable to properly respond.

After making this correction, I became fascinated by how the difference of one letter, in this case a choice in verb marking, made such a large difference in meaning. When the verb is marked for the third person singular, "surrounds", I read it such that the word "all" is a third person general pronoun referring to the world around him, hence expressing a non-human entity. The change to a plural verb form, "surround", does a fair deal more than just change whether I interpret the subject as being singular or plural. Written that way, I interpret "all" as referring to the people that surround him. That one letter changes the entire clause from being concerned with inhuman entities to being concerned with a group of people. I'm still not exactly sure why, but it struck me enough that I figured I'd post it here.

The Prolegomena will be finished, and I do have some links to toss out. All in good time.

-lelandpaul