Hard News: A Full Sense of Nationhood
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Why this assumption that pointing out grammatical conventions is a moral judgment?
Who made that assumption?
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"English becoming progressively simpler would be a good thing for everybody."
O no it bloody well wouldnt!
There already *is* simple English. It gets you around most English-speaking countries.
And then there is dialectual Englishry- it's in-talk, like cant & guild talk, or the very precise and specific terms used by -medical people/lawyers/bureaucrats/philosophers/fishers et al. It is meant to denote a certain group. It is meant to be a bit exclusive. "Shy a goolie at that berloody kuri." "I loathe double-vowel orthography."
"Fuck, you've already got a pint?!"And then there is my heart & mind passion - deep English. Which has the biggest word hoard of any extant language. Which has rules that are breached often (Russell mentioned the "i before e except after c" one: off the top of my head I can think of rein & meitosis and give us some time - there are many more than those.)
Which grows, galumphing along at the rate of about 20 new words a day - and keeps all the currently dis-used ones lying around in a huge number of dictionaries.It needs a lifetime to learn - a bit of it. As both writer & reader, I will keep on learning it until I die.
And that is an important point: readers have many needs (e.g from the politician or bureacrat requiring an accurate succinct briefing, to the charge nurse needing full up-to-date observations and notes, to the fanfic devotee wanting a looong fix.) No one brand suits all.
Complexity rulz 'k?
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O, and I love the shark anecdotes!
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Agreed, Islander. The complexity of English and its ability/willingness to just grab stuff from other languages are among its strengths.
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Has the difference between it's and its been abolished somehow?
Affect/effect... that's just a pain in the arse.
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It’s good grammar, therefore you should learn it, because it shows you know good grammar.
That was certainly my grandmother's perspective. But I just like good grammar. I don't think it has anything to do with showing that I know good grammar but I can't explain, even without three beers for lunch, why it feels good when I see it.
It's a bit like the difference between seeing someone wearing a well-made jacket and someone wearing one from Hallensteins. It doesn't make the slightest bit of practical difference to my life whether a person is wearing special clothes or more ordinary ones, but seeing the good jacket somehow makes my day a little sweeter. And good grammar does that to me too.
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Complexity rulz 'k?
Word. You don't want to go around simplifying a language that doesn't distinguish between you, one person, and you, several people. That's just madness.
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It’s good grammar, therefore you should learn it, because it shows you know good grammar.
I fear this is the blog-equivalent of the myth of sisyphus and we've started to roll down the side again... anyho0, e e cumming totally f**ked with spelling, grammar and good manners and
I
think
heS
jus'marvellous
in the springtime -
Coming to you as a gift from Maori English - "youse all."
Not just 'you' (koe) or 'youse' (korua +) but koutou katoa! -
and e e is one of my linguistic heroes-
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Further to the shark warning sign example, I once read an account of the difficulties faced by surf lifesavers in getting people to swim between the flags on Auckland's West Coast beaches. A lifesaver approached a group who were about to enter the area of a dangerous rip, and suggested that they swim between the flags. One of their number lost it, angrily protesting that, as he happened to be a cyclist and took so much stick from motorists, he wasn't about to take orders from a lifeguard, and he'd swim where he pleased.
Bloody cyclists. At least you can argue with pedants.
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Who made that assumption?
Well, if the only reason to learn good grammar is to show that you know good grammar, then the only real reason to insist upon good grammar must be to defend the time you spent in learning it, right? So "good" or "bad" grammar is just a power play, a reason for people to say "because of my learnings, my English has value and yours doesn't, and how dare you rub it in my face that you can get by without the rules I religiously stick to"?
That was the moral strawman I saw being put up. Wasn't my intent to put up another strawman in response - if so, my bad...
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and e e is one of my linguistic heroes-
Also, along with Ernest Hemingway and Walt Disney, one of the notable American ambulance drivers of WW1.
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It’s good grammar, therefore you should learn it, because it shows you know good grammar.
That was certainly my grandmother's perspective. But I just like good grammar. I don't think it has anything to do with showing that I know good grammar but I can't explain, even without three beers for lunch, why it feels good when I see it.
It's a bit like the difference between seeing someone wearing a well-made jacket and someone wearing one from Hallensteins. It doesn't make the slightest bit of practical difference to my life whether a person is wearing special clothes or more ordinary ones, but seeing the good jacket somehow makes my day a little sweeter. And good grammar does that to me too.
The point is: If "but it's just good grammar" is the reason to keep apostrophes (and I'm not saying here that that necessarily is the only reason, but let's suppose), then that is circular reasoning.
One could have made exactly the same case about having periods after 'Mr.' and 'Mrs.': "But I just like good grammar. I don't think it has anything to do with showing that I know good grammar but , ... See what I mean?
If we decide the convention serves little to no use, and we drop the convention, then it isn't bad grammar anymore, and you don't have to worry about it lessening your day.
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3410,
This all reminds me of the old routine where wealthy pompous Peter Cook has hired meek Dudley Moore to teach him (from scratch) how to play Beethoven's fifth, on the piano, so that he may perform it for his wife's birthday, a few days hence.
Dud (after having been shouted down whilst explaining that the task is impossible) begins apprehensively with "Ah, well, this is middle C". Pete interrupts with "No, No! That won't do at all. We'll start over here. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5... You just shout the numbers out".
Moral of the story: just because you don't understand the point of some of the rules that govern a system -- and with the English language, whom among us does, completely? -- doesn't mean that "simplifying" or abandoning them won't make the situation even worse.
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Sam, I think you may be over-stating the case Janet Holmes made, then. I don't think she really meant it as that much of a conspiricy.
Well, if the only reason to learn good grammar is to show that you know good grammar, then the only real reason to insist upon good grammar must be to defend the time you spent in learning it, right? So "good" or "bad" grammar is just a power play...
I don't think anyone was saying the only reason to learn good grammar is to show you know good grammar. If the grammatical convention serves a value, then fine. (Heck, I know how to use apostrophes correctly, and if someone can convince me that context isn't suffucient to disambiguate between the vast majority of "its" and "it's" and so on, then so be it - I'm all for keeping them.)
Janet's arguement was that this was a particular instance of there being little other reason to worry too much about this rule. Her argument gave me pause for thought.
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(Heck, I know how to use apostrophes correctly, and if someone can convince me that context isn't suffucient to disambiguate between the vast majority of "its" and "it's" and so on, then so be it - I'm all for keeping them.)
I think it's partly a matter of redundancy, rather than a strict need for disambiguation. In Italian sometimes we use accents not to mark pronunciation but to disambiguate high usage homophones - for instance là (there) as opposed to la (feminine article "the"). But in context it's not as if you'd really get the two mixed up, except understanding happens so quickly that the extra clue might just helps. I often find for instance that when I see its written instead of it's or viceversa I do a little mental double take. Perhaps if the rule and the apostrophe simply disappeared I wouldn't, but I'm not so sure.
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I don't think grammar-nazis have ever been fighting a winning battle, so claims of a Grammanati are wildly conspiratorial.
And for that reason I fully agree that simplifying the language ain't gonna happen on a 'rational' basis, although I always like it when I see it happening spontaneously.
You don't want to go around simplifying a language that doesn't distinguish between you, one person, and you, several people. That's just madness.
Simple madness, even.
It always strikes me as strange when people point out that a part of the grammar can't be lost because it would lead to ambiguity. Like the dropping of apostrophes. Indeed it would lead to ambiguity, if sentences were then constructed in exactly the same way. But, sensing ambiguity, the writer/speaker always has the option of rephrasing unambiguously. The ambiguity of "you" isn't really much of a problem in English, because when it's ambiguous, people ask. Or the proofreader suggests another way. Or, very often, it actually doesn't matter.
Same would go for "its" if it were also to convey "it is" and "that which belongs to it". They all sound the same and yet we seem to be able to use them in speech perfectly well.
"yous" is actually a gift from Maori, an excellent simplification. I will use it, and the fact that it ambiguously conflicts with the word "ewes" has never been a problem to anyone expect people trying to school me (like I don't bloody know!). So I can just as easily ask:
-"Do you want another drink?" <gesturing to the group, or pointing at an individual>
-"Do yous want another drink?" <hands full of drinks, can't gesture>
-"Who wants another drink?" <find another way of saying it to get around the ambiguity that the group pedant is going to hold the drinks up for>
-"Drinks?" <the best one to teach to a foreigner>Popular usage will dictate which ones we're still doing in 100 years.
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The ambiguity of "you" isn't really much of a problem in English, because when it's ambiguous, people ask. Or the proofreader suggests another way. Or, very often, it actually doesn't matter.
Using a language that has the option, and one that doesn't, I feel that the one that doesn't is the poorer for it. The same goes for the delicious palette of subjunctive tenses available to me in Italian. Or for being able to convey gender in the stem of nouns and adjectives. But I was brought up with it, so I'm biased. And of course English has its advantages, like being able to turn any old noun into a verb or adjective. That's positively Helen-Kellerish.
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I figure that anything that makes a language harder to learn is a negative for the human race. But since we're not going to get Esperanto, we could at least slowly reform the worst added complications out just by showing a little tolerance to the ever widening pool of people who speak the language. It could be that more people actually speak English as a second language than as a first one day, in which case medieval-based needs of the native speakers do actually start slipping down the food chain. Of course I'm dreaming of something that's been dreamed of since language began, that everyone in the world could converse easily, but there have been a number of forces working against that since time began, too, so my dreams may be futile.
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BenWilson- ever since languages occurred (and they happen, and have been developed in other species, not just in hominims/hominoids)they get made more complex. Bee dances. Crow-talk. Amerslan.
The human race has coped perfectly well with tone-languages, visual languages, whistled languages, sign languages. We make 'em and then we- complicate them.
Your dreams are futile, and also, rather ill-thought-out.
They kind of reek of "If We Could Talk To The Animals"-
or The Tower of Babel.
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O Giovanni! First HelenKellerish spotted in this wild!
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I often find for instance that when I see its written instead of it's or viceversa I do a little mental double take.
Yeah, me too, to be honest, and I think Mrs Skin said something similar upthread. Well, I'm not planning to stop using apostrophes any time soon. I suspect, like it or not, they will go - especially with the increasing prevalence of text speak. But part of me definitely wants to continue to put my knowledge to use, and wants to say "come on, people, just learn the rules and write properly". (Also, I want those pesky kids to get off my lawn.)
...being able to convey gender in the stem of nouns and adjectives.
How does that work, by the way?
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And anyone who thinks punctuation conventions are little more than the orthographic equivalent of dressing for dinner, or standing up when a lady enters the room, then answer this.
If you were giving instructions to an assassin, would it actually matter if you wrote "Kill the king not, to fear is good" as opposed to "Kill the king, not to fear is good"? Or how about not punctuating the sentence at all, for that extra hint of plausible deniability?
Or how about the newspaper that reported a member of the House of Commons' apology for calling a fellow member a liar thus: "I said he was a liar; it is true, and I am sorry for it." Which, I suspect, was the precise opposite of what the gentleman meant to say, unless he was courting being cited for contempt by the Speaker.
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Islander wrote:
We make [languages] and then we- complicate them. Your dreams are futile
--not least because any living language, used in a social setting, has to be able to encode social signals as well as referential meaning. Hence, for example, Ben's range of drink offers: there are always different ways to say nominally the "same" thing in a fully developed language, though they may differ slightly in social message, emphasis, or presupposition.
@Steve: In most languages, gender distinctions between noun classes are to some extent arbitrary, and not based solely on meaning distinctions -- though there is usually still some correlation between, e.g. "masculine gender" and masculine referent, or "feminine gender" and feminine referent. Remembering which noun belongs to which class is notoriously difficult for second language learners, but is no big deal for first language acquisition because that arbitrary classification can be picked up simultaneously with the words and the concepts they express. The classification itself may not be very helpful for meaning in most instances (which is why English was able to lose it). But if you have a way of marking agreement between nouns and adjectives, then that allows considerably more freedom in how you can position those in a sentence without creating ambiguity (as there may still be only one noun that that particular form of the adjective could go with).
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