Discussion Groups / British English / June 2004

I think that Japanese is grammatically different enough from English
that it's not quite the same -- because "wa" is a "topic marker",
saying "watashi wa neko" to mean "I like cats" (which can be done
given the appropriate conversational context, or at least I believe
so) creates a different structure than the equivalent English phrase.
Even "watashi wa neko desu" does little to change that because "desu"
has a rather vague meaning, particularly in recent casual speech where
people can say things like "wakaranai desu".

-Chris

Naah, not impossible, only rare.

Not to me.  I'd interpret the two versions a little differently:

"I'm the 2 o'clock, he's the 3 o'clock" would answer the question "Which of
you is which" if the answerer interpreted this to mean "Which of my (regular
hourly) appointments were each of you booked in for?" (Maybe she's a
psychoanalyst.)

"I'm 2 o'clock, he's 3 o'clock" would answer the same question, if the
answerer interpreted it to mean "What time was I supposed to see each of
you?"  (She doesn't have her whole day divided into a series of
appointments.  Maybe she's an engineer and they're salesmen, who rang her up
and told her they would be by at those times.)

No doubt one could think of a suitable scenario for the hybrid version too
...

John

In this context, I pretty much agree.  If the context hadn't set up
the word "appopintment", though, it can work.  Say the one person is
speaking or manning a booth at two and the other at three.