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Rex Bachmann

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Brian Perry wrote:
[I said:
language[/I]]Quote:
Your quote leaves out kine, though the spelling doesn't (necessarily) show its plurality.
We most certainly agree in all essentials.
 

Rex Bachmann

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a language [I said:
system[/I]]Quote:
Then you either haven't read or have not understood---or reject outright? (with what evidence?)---the points of the posts I have referred you to. There will never be such a standard in so large and dynamic (as in "motile", growing, and diverse) a populace! Ever!
 

Rex Bachmann

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Ooooops. I make a boo-boo!
grammar said:
They're homoPHONES (exact sound-alikes that mean different things and have distinct etymologies), not homoNYMS (a harder concept to grasp and define, but involving the same lexeme ("word") having different meanings but the same historical origin).
As the kids (who might one day not be able understand each other!) say, "my bad". (Comes from doing long posts at 4:30 in the morning.)
 

Rex Bachmann

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Brian Perry wrote:
Again, I'm unsure what you're getting at with this challenge, and it makes it hard for me to give an intelligent response. Everything I have to say pertains to what linguists call natural language or, to be more precise, natural human language. As mathematical language, computer language, and the like do not fall into the category of natural human language, I make no claims about them whatsoever.
I still fail to see what that has to do with my statement. In case it has been misapprehended, it means to say that, without spoken language ("speech"), there would be, and can be, no writing at all. Writing is, properly speaking, not language, but a highly imperfect representation of language.
Note, I did not say "no speech, no language", so I suspect that your challenge actually reveals the common bias that has been inculcated in this and most "Western" societies that "writing = language", which just 'tain't so.
 

Brian Perry

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I will be glad to address that question once I understand why you are asking it in a thread that's been about standards within the English language proper (as well as about "proper English").
The reason I ask is that your challenge to Joe struck me more as a rebellion against the "power elites" than a refutation of Joe's basic argument, which I simply took as a desire to have people write or speak English better. You have a point in Joe's possibly mistaking "of" for "'ve," but when you pointed out the origin of "acs" you seemed to be saying that it was all right to use "acs" as a legitimate substitute for "asc." (Maybe I misinterpreted your comment here.) While "acs" may have been accepted at one time, anyone using it now should be politely told that it is clearly NOT acceptable and makes the user appear ignorant.

I don't think anyone here is advocating locking down the English language at its current state (not that there even is a true state); there will always be transitions in usage, grammar, and vocabulary. But what is wrong with wanting people to know what is currently proper usage? I think most people would agree that someone who says, "Me go to store" rather than "I am going to the store" needs to be corrected, even if the underlying meaning of his phrase is perfectly clear.

As for speech vs. writing, I concede the point that the former was a prerequisite for the latter. I also think, however, that you're not giving writing the credit it deserves. While it's true that, as you say, writing is an imperfect representation of speech, can it also be said that some things are more richly conveyed in written form?
 

Rex Bachmann

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Brian Perry wrote:


Quote:



. . . when you pointed out the origin of "acs" you seemed to be saying that it was all right to use "acs" as a legitimate substitute for "asc." (Maybe I misinterpreted your comment here.) While "acs" may have been accepted at one time, anyone using it now should be politely told that it is clearly NOT acceptable and makes the user appear ignorant.






First of all, I added it as an aside in response to the following:


Quote:



I have heard people say this on numerous occasions, clearly enough that there is no question that "would" and "of" are separate words. If that weren't the case I wouldn't have said "say or write", I would only have said "write." When it happens this is as clear to the hearer as someone saying "Ax" instead of "ask" . . . [emphasis added]





This is nonsense. The former is a case of homophony, in which both forms are pronounced [uhv]---it's the its vs. it's (non)problem---, while "ax" [æks] and ask [æsk] are clearly not homophonous. Hence, an inept comparandum and an untrue statement.

How does that in and of itself make something "correct" or "incorrect"? If you follow this scenario to its logical conclusion, what you are really saying is that the political group that favored the ask-variant of the verb won out in a socio-political competition and imposed its standard---its "will", if you will---on those who preferred, or had settled on, the aks-variant. That's what I've been trying to say all along. That fact doesn't necessarily make the "winners" evil, or the "losers" victims, but it is an undeniable social factor in our use of language.

Note that 've in, e.g., I've is pronounced only as [v], so the spelling serves to cover two allomorphs (phonetically conditioned variants of a "word" or suffix) of have (which is also the third allomorph, and the lexical form from which the other two are derived). Careful elicitation technique will show that any native speaker will recognize the [v] in I've as a "reduced" form of have. (The "reduced" form of of ([uhv]) is simply [uh] as in "incorrect" adverbs, such as sorta, kinda, and the like.)



Quote:



The reason I ask is that your challenge to Joe struck me more as a rebellion against the "power elites" than a refutation of Joe's basic argument, which I simply took as a desire to have people write or speak English better.





"A rebellion against the 'power elites' "? It is no such thing. Man is a hierarchical animal. There have probably been "power elites" as long as humans have been organized in large groups. That's nothing new and hardly to be changed. I merely wish to hammer home the message that the whole business is totally arbitrary. "Correctness" is not some absolute, it's subject to the judgment of whoever holds the power. Of course, that changes with time. I find that too many people in the U.S. seem to believe that this society is above and beyond that, because the political system is "democratic". Well, the social system isn't nearly as "democratic" as some Americans think (despite the "first-name-mania" that has swept the society in the last two generations). Such thinking manifests itself exactly in these bits of declaration of social control and pressure. (And, no, I'm not for "anything goes", so don't interpret anything I say to mean that.)

As to "having people write or speak English better", the former is certainly a desideratum of an educated populace, if, by that, it be understood to mean writing clearer (less ambiguous) and tighter (more precise), less wasteful prose. That is certainly necessary for the communication and exchange of ideas, especially, so-called "higher ideas", that are likely to be the objects of discussion or perusal in the written form and at long distance. Writing is a skill, like any other, and people do it well only if they practice, practice, practice continually, something we're doing less and less of in this audiovisual age. (And if and when "voice-recognition" technology is "perfected", watch out! There'll be no more "hands-on" writing, either by pen or by keyboard, and a valuable mediative step in the "writing" process will have gone lost.)



Quote:



As for speech vs. writing, I concede the point that the former was a prerequisite for the latter.





"Was" and is.


Quote:



I also think, however, that you're not giving writing the credit it deserves. While it's true that, as you say, writing is an imperfect representation of speech, . . . can it . . . be said that some things are more richly conveyed in written form?





Certainly. One of the major points that often seems to go unremarked is that "spoken language" and "written language" are not isofunctional. They complement each other, the latter being an instrument of precision in communication that would be far more difficult to attain in speech, which requires instantaneous output. "Written language" requires some different skills from those involved in speech, although in many "pre-literate" societies of the world there have been classes of poets and "remembrancers" whose profession it was to memorize traditional (oral) "texts" right down to the last intonation (ancient India and Ireland, come to mind). So, precise complex recording and preservation of "text" can be done without writing. But such is reserved only for the very few, and it is far less efficient than writing.


My problem with most of these schemes comes when they are extended recklessly to apply to people's everyday spoken language.

Some would have us base our courses totally on a purely prescriptive model. In general, I'm not in favor of English courses serving, in effect, as courses in mere etiquette. I would like to see English taught to high-schoolers and collegiates who are native speakers as if it were a foreign language, and on linguistic principles.

In a language like English with its basic structural monosyllabicity and with the orthography (system of spelling) it has, one nowadays often notices the confounding of word sets such as the following:

(1) their, there, they're
(2) your, yore, you're
(3) then, than


This is to be seen even on these boards, where misspellings of this sort are pronounced as often as not to be evidence of someone else's "lack of intelligence", lack of education, or the like. And it need not be the case at all. (I make these types of errors all the time myself and know very well that none of those types of judgments applies to me.)

Anyone who understands the principle, or---I should say---the phenomenon of homophony in language would not be so quick to make such judgments. The linguistic etiology of the homophony in these particular examples is the neutralization of contrast of the core vowel sounds of the separate words involved. That means that originally different vowel sounds in the midst of identical phonological contexts came to be, in effect, the same vowel. In linguistics such sets are called minimal pairs, that is, all the comparanda (i.e., the examples) are exactly the same except for one "minimal" sound (a phoneme) that contrasts each word by means of the differing corresponding sound in the compared examples. In modern English, it's the vowel sounds that are mostly likely to vary from dialect to dialect, while consonantism remains pretty much constant. In ordinary English classes, I believe this phenomenon (corresponding consonants being all the same) is called assonance, e.g.:

(1) (g)nat
(2) net
(3) (k)nit
(4) (k)not
(5) nut

This set of words in actual pronunciation displays "assonance" in that every corresponding consonant sound---there are only two---in each word is the same; only the corresponding vowels differ: [æ], [e], [I], [ah], and [uh], respectively. These are phonemes because their sound lets the speaker contrast the otherwise identical phonetic string [n. . .t], so that he knows, in the first case, that he's hearing about a kind of insect, in the second, about a (usually) woven material used to catch or screen out things, in the fourth case, about a clotted material OR (homophony!) the negative adverb, etc. Words that at one point in history of the language start off sounding one way may lose sounds or have particular sounds, especially vowels, change features (i.e., become other sounds). So knot and not became homophones in English presumably when English gave up allowing the consonant cluster [kn]- to begin a word. (Yet, note, the orthography ("correct spelling") has remained conservative.)

In the cases of some dialects, any given change may come to pass, while in others it may not.

Just to take ONE of the examples from above:

then and than. I have seen these more and more often confounded in written English. At some point I began to wonder why and then I started to listen to ordinary speakers more carefully when they used either of these. What I've noticed is that more and more speakers of American English are neutralizing the vowel contrasts between these two. It's subtle, but one must listen carefully. So, instead of saying [then] for the temporal adverb and [thæn] for the adverbial of comparison, the "neutralizers" are pronouncing EACH of these as something like [thuhn] when the words bear no stress (most of the time). If both of these are pronounced exactly alike in these people's dialects---that is, they have become homophones, despite the conservatism of the orthography of written English (there's no separate vowel letter in the orthography for the vowel sound [uh]---what the "misspellings" are telling us is, not that the speakers didn't necessarily learn how to spell in school---more often than not they did (I did.)---but that they're taking the conventional spellings they learned and applying them willy-nilly to what for them are homophones (exact sound-alikes). (It seems to me that then is more often substituted for than than the other way around.) It thus becomes a linguistics issue, rather than just a matter of "ignorance" or "lack of intelligence or learning", as it is usually labelled.

This has also been happening with their/there vs. they're and your/yore vs. you're. Homophony has set in, also disrupting an archaic and already chaotic system of spelling. "Education" alone---as in "Don't do this!"---won't stop this (any more than it does with "illicit" activities, such as extramarital sex, drinking, drugging, etc.). A more detached (i.e., here linguistic) look at these types of phenomena in schools and colleges would, I think, produce far better results. People would have some sense of what is happening in the production of "errors" in English, as well as why these things happen. (Language---"speech"---is never a thing writ in stone, and it inevitably changes over time and distance.) Then teach 'em some "book English"!!!

Other topics (some of them "pet peeves" of the language "purist" in me):


(a) Why is it that most young children "need to be corrected" to say "an apple" rather than "a apple" in most American dialects?
(b) "Prepositions" at or near the end of "sentences" (actually "clauses") (that is, coming somewhere after their object, or without explicit object in the clause): e.g., "That's the best answer I can think of right now." "Bad" grammar, yet everybody uses it. Why?
(c) "The Queen of England's hat." Clearly (to any native speaker), the hat belongs to the Queen and not to England, yet the possessive ending is attached to the name of the place rather than the designation of the person. Why?
(d) "Joe Tucci is one of the better writers of his generation", instead of " . . . one of the best writers . . .". (A HUGE "pet peeve" of mine.) This ties in with the use of phrases like one another vs. each other for the reciprocal. (Is this distinction even taught any more in schools and colleges?) Why? A linguistic approach could lead to much greater insight among speakers (and writers) here. (But, alas, it surely wouldn't alter linguistic behavior.)
(e) A slight variation on your example below. Many of the same people who have problems with the perfectly comprehensible "Me gotta go now." have no problem with hypercorrected examples, such as "The boss invited my wife and I to dinner." or "just between he and Jane" (cf. "between you and I"), even though the exact, same linguistic phenomenon allows both to be comprehensible and at least semi-accepted among modern native speakers of the language. (Cf. also, in this regard, "It's me" vs. "It is I.") Why?
(f) Controversies such as gender and number confusion in pronouns and verbs: e.g., "The people get the government they deserve" or "The people get the government it deserves"? Or "A people gets the government it deserves"? Why the (allowable) variation?
(g) The English verb would be taught by classes rather than as "regular" vs. "irregular". A linguistic analysis of the verb system, indeed, reveals patterns to that "irregularity" that would be very valuable for speakers to be able to recognize when they try to put together/compose pieces of formal writing. A lot more valuable than telling people not to use this form or that. Why isn't "brang" the past-tense form of bring, if sang is the past-tense form of sing and rang the past-tense form of ring???

And one can multiply these kinds of examples endlessly.



Quote:



I don't think anyone here is advocating locking down the English language at its current state (not that there even is a true state) . . .





Really? I get the idea that's exactly what some here, and in general, believe they can do. Indeed, this is the kind of thinking that attends almost all of these comments about "correctness", whether they are conscious and acknowledged or not. That's what I'm fighting. I do not wage a campaign in favor of any kind of sociopolitical "rebellion".

The standard, idealized form of a language is itself only a dialect of that language---and most often, a highly artificial and hybrid one, at that---, no more "intrinsically" important than any other. The others are not "decadent" or "decayed" states of this ideal, as so many purists would have us believe. Every recoverable stage of any human language known to us has some prior history, some prior stage at which the rules were different from what can clearly be seen to be in effect at the present stage. It is a never ending ("dynamic") process.



Quote:



But what is wrong with wanting people to know what is currently proper usage? I think most people would agree that someone who says, "Me go to store" rather than "I am going to the store" needs to be corrected, even if the underlying meaning of his phrase is perfectly clear.





Well, this proves my point. "Me go to store" is "bad" or "incorrect" only because we say so. As you point out, there is no fundamental misunderstanding among native speakers of what the phrase means. For the purpose of verbal (spoken) communication, why "need" it be corrected in ordinary social situations? Note that kids' talk, like: "Me and Davy were playing baseball this afternoon, Mom." is also "incorrect", but "sounds a whole lot better" than the other example, doesn't it? Worse still is the alien carpet monster Horta's English in the original Star Trek episode, "Devil in the Dark". The words "No kill I" it burns into the rock with its acid. (How it learned English at all, much less how to print perfectly readable Roman alphabet, we will leave to the diviners among us.) There Captain Kirk can't tell whether the creature is requesting not to be killed or stating that it will not kill. That kind of ambiguity is not linguistically acceptable because native speakers cannot disambiguate between possible interpretations. So, there are levels of "correctness". It is not an absolute.

In general, your post is replete with the misconceptions and the social value judgments that are attached to the drive for "correct English"---and I'm talking about the spoken language here. To wit:



Quote:



. . . you seemed to be saying it was all right to use "acs" as a legitimate substitute for "asc."





Whether it is "all right" with you or with me is not the issue. Other speakers do not need our permission to speak their language (English). For better or for worse, it's a totally democratic process. Each native speaker votes, merely by speaking his language every day of his life. That's something you purists just can't get through your heads, and why those prescriptive rules applied to the spoken language never eliminate all those "errors". And, just as with gene replication, there are always new errors, "mutant memes", with each succeeding generation (even within generations) of the same speech community. Hence, evolution. (You might've heard of it.)



Quote:



While "acs" may have been accepted at one time . . .





. . . . It may be "accepted" again! Usages go in and out of "fashion", which is my whole point in bringing up word history. Civilization, "as we know it", survived before, and will survive still, even if "acs" becomes the "acceptable" form and "asc" is consigned to the "ashbin of history".


Quote:



. . . anyone using ["acs"] now should be politely told that it is clearly NOT acceptable and makes the user appear ignorant.





"Clearly NOT acceptable" to whom?

"Should be politely told . . ." Why? Is it worse than bad breath or b.o.? Is it "b.b.o."?


Quote:



But what is wrong with wanting people to know what is currently proper usage? I think most people would agree that someone who says, "Me go to store" rather than "I am going to the store" needs to be corrected, even if the underlying meaning of his phrase is perfectly clear.






"Most people would agree . . ." So what? A blatant appeal to authority and "group-think". Authorities have been known to be wrong. (Ask Giordano Bruno.) Likewise, the crowd. (Hint, hint: McCartheyites. Southern lynch mobs.)

". . . needs to be corrected" Why? Will someone die, if it isn't? (My definition of "necessity".)

What makes only one version of English "correct"? That question never gets answered, except by appeal to authority. ("The book/my English teacher/my mommy/the Pope/etc. says so.") It is only by historical accident that dialect X has won out over dialect Z in the memic competition for the minds of the speakers of a given language. And this comes through the power of the speakers of dialect X to impose a standard on the speakers of other dialects of that same language. ("A language is a dialect with an army . . .") There is nothing intrinsically "correct" about one well-formed construction in the language as opposed to a competing well-formed construction in the same language. For example, "John is poorer than Dick." vs. "John is more poor than Dick." The plain old -er-suffixed comparative is currently losing out to the analytic comparative construction more + ADJECTIVE(/ADVERB), at least in mainstream American dialects. Sometimes you get mixtures of the two, such as "monstrosities" like "John is more poorer than Dick." I've caught myself saying things like this. It's a phenomenon called double marking or hypercharacterization of the linguistic structure. Here I use both the suffix and the more, each of which could, and, historically speaking, "should" be used separately, with the adjective to make a comparison. ("well-formedness", by the way is the characteristic of any given linguistic entity to fit into the overall grammatical pattern of its language as to sound, form, and meaning, and/or (where appropriate) syntax (the rule-governed order of "meaningful units"), so as to be understandable to the native speakers of that language.)

Obviously this isn't absolute, and when a dialect "wanders off" too far, it, in effect, becomes another language. That's how Dutch, Frisian, and English differentiated from each other, and Afrikaans from Dutch (comparatively recently). That's the stammbaummodell (tree-branching model) of language change. That's normally how it works. Of course, in the real world there arise social complications that re-introduce contact and influence of one group with or over another or others from which it has already separated in its (distant) past. These include such things as war (usually attended by conquest) and trade. Note, as an example, the great in-take of "Anglicisms" into modern German. They're absolutely all over the place.

Of course, there have been, are, and always will be the determinists, whether of the racialist, religious, economic, or the like, sort, who believe in the overwhelming power of one factor in the outcome of the world we have before us, because they are immune to the concept---actually, the "meme"---of multivariate-factor analysis (i.e., the scientific method). With their (usually) teleological bent, these people are not to be convinced that things are, or could be, any different from what they are, except for their one preferred factor. Nothing I say will touch them.

If you "preachers" are consistent in unsolicitedly instructing those who don't meet your standards, will you instruct the son of some British earl you (over)hear saying things like "The government are pushing forward with the new tax legislation", as so many educated British and Irish people do these days even in formal writing situations, in---ahem---good English? "Sorry, m'Lord, that's 'the government is . . .'", Or will the unsolicited "lessons" be, as usual, reserved for the "Okies" and "hillbillies"---terms nowadays pretty much replaced by the comic, yet ultimately odious, catch-all "trailer trash"---and the Southern rural or Northern "inner-city" blacks?

You "preachers" have to decide what you're really all about.
 

Brian Perry

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I said:

Why? Will someone die, if it isn't? (My definition of "necessity".)
That illustrates the basic difference in our opinions. I don't think correcting grossly outdated or non-standard usage is life or death either, but I believe that encouraging my children to think "Me go to store" and "I am more poorer than John" are suitable phrases will severely affect their ability to succeed on this planet.
 

Rex Bachmann

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[I said:
deaf and dumb[/I]]Quote:
I still don't see what such legislation would have to do with the "quality" of English among native speakers---it certainly won't affect that, but I'll say this: whatever I personally think of such efforts, I believe that they won't successfully do what their supporters think they will do. They'll just get a few politicians elected or re-elected in the near term. When those politicians are gone (and forgotten) the "problems", if such they be, will still be there and still need to be addressed properly (and effectively).
 

EdR

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Hi Brian,

but I believe that encouraging my children to think "Me go to store" and "I am more poorer than John" are suitable phrases will severely affect their ability to succeed on this planet.
You don't need to encourage that, normal children (meaning children that don't have serious learning deficits, or brain damage) will learn all but the most arcane grammatical points (for speaking!) automatically, without explicit 'encouragement'. All the child needs is simply exposure to speech from other people.

The truth is, the sinlge most influential source of linguistic information is a child's peer group, family is certainly influential, but much less so compared to his or her peers.

OTOH, encouragement and explicit training is needed for writing.
 

Rex Bachmann

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Brian Perry wrote:
"Me go to store . . ." Have you heard them say such a thing? If so, where did they hear it?
"I am more poorer than John . . ." more poorer is an example of a hypercharacterized comparative construction, as I said before. With its two, redundant markers, I don't think it's long for this world (but, I've heard enough people use it. . .).
There will always be pressure to conform, no doubt about that,---that's what makes for group coherence---and degree of conformity is always a factor in societal "success". Teaching one's children reasonably is one thing, making a crusade of it to others, as some people here and elsewhere have seemed to suggest, is another.
 

Brian Perry

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"Me go to store . . ." Have you heard them say such a thing? If so, where did they hear it?
Of course not, it was just a hyperbolic example. What I have heard (as a real-world example) is "I had went to the store" rather than "I had gone to the store." Or, "I seen the movie" as opposed to "I saw the movie" or "I had seen the movie." While I view such mistakes as relatively minor, they are nonetheless mistakes. Clearly you feel they are not.

By the way Rex, I think your knowledge of the English language and linguistics is impressive and believe it is false humility for you to say you often confuse "there" and "their" or "then" and "than." Perhaps you occasionally make the mistakes as typos (don't we all?) but I'm confident that you don't really confuse them.
 

EdR

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Believe it or not, there are various kinds of errors in children's speech that are indicators of successful learning.
Errors such as "I hitted the ball" are a sign that the rule for past tense (add '-ed' to a verb, as in "I melted the butter") has been picked up by the child, and he is rightfully applying it to every case where it could go...the only reason we see 'hitted' as erroneous is because it's an exception to the rule. 'Hit' doesn't take a tense marker.
Another classic example is plurals for words like 'sheep' and 'fish' that don't take an '-s' (although I swear I hear 'fishes' more and more). A child that picks up the rule for plurals will begin to apply the 's' to every word to create plurals, later they will learn that there are exceptions to the rule.
It's worth repeating that parents don't need to ever express these rules explicitly. In fact, they really couldn't since there are far too many rules, and many (most?) of them are only codified by trained linguists. But we all use them to speak without effort.
Children's brains have evolved to tease out the rules that drive language from examples of everyday speech...and languages have evolved to be easily absorbed by young brains.
 

Karl_O

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Sorry that this post is off-topic, but for those of you who like to dabble in linguistics would want to read a New York Times article on Spanish spoken in New York City.
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/05/nyregion/05LANG.html
(Requires registration to read)
I hope the article dealt with the issues mentioned by the intelligent people on this thread.
 

EdR

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Sorry that this post is off-topic
Hardly offtopic! This thread has drifted far from its original question...but it's been a fun ride.
Thanks for posting that, it's an interesting study...I hope I get to see the results.
BTW, I'd be very interested to hear some reading recommendations from Rex, maybe some books for language enthusiasts, or general audience?
I've already posted a few in this thread, but I will add:
The Symbolic Species: the co-evolution of language and the brain
Genes, Peoples, and Languages
This is not a linguistics book per se, but language figures into the discussion of ancient human migration.
 

Rex Bachmann

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Brian Perry wrote:


Quote:




What I have heard (as a real-world example) is "I had went to the store" rather than "I had gone to the store." Or, "I seen the movie" as opposed to "I saw the movie" . . . . they are nonetheless mistakes. Clearly you feel they are not.





(Sigh.) They are discrepancies or deviations from standardized English grammar.

Now, this is a perfect example of why linguistics should be part of the curriculum of teaching English grammar. It would go a long way in helping you and other "purists" understand why such "errors" as had went and I seen have arisen---and will continue to arise---in the language to learn about the role of analogy in language change.


The speakers you refer to are only following a rule which says, in effect, "preterite (a.k.a. past tense) and perfect participle are to have the same form in all verbs". That's a relatively new rule, but one that looks like the "correct" grammatical formation for future English.

English verbs can be divided into classes according to how they form their past tense (which is called by descriptive grammarians by its Latinate name, the preterite).

For the overwhelming majority of verbs, the preterite form and the perfect participial form are identical. This includes, but is not limited to, the so-called regular verbs ending in the dental ([d] or [t]) preterite marker (usually spelled -).

Examples:

make, made, made (probably < *maked)
have, had, had (probably < *haved)
say, said, said (probably < *sayed)
send, sent, sent (so bend, lend, rend, spend, etc., but mended, bended, as in "on bended knee", vended, etc.)
lay, laid, laid
wait, waited, waited
rear, reared, reared
thrash, thrashed, thrashed
hesitate, hesitated, hesitated

(Note many monosyllabic verbs that end in dental (or alveolar) sounds form their principal parts like hurt, hurt (not **hurted), hurt, which is best analyzed as a zero-preterite in modern English, cf. wet, bet, set, etc.)

Although some of the above are slightly "irregular", they mostly belong to this dental-preterite class, which includes most of what are popularly called "regular" verbs in all Germanic languages. Germanicists call them weak verbs. Now, take a pair like fly, flew, flown (a "strong verb") vs. "new" fly flied flied (a "weak verb" derived from the noun fly, a neologism and technical term in baseball), as in "So-and-so flied home in the fifth inning."

Since the overwhelming majority of verbs in English (and all Germanic languages, for that matter) fall into this latter type, when "new" words (verbs) are added to the language, by analogy this is the type they fall into because it is productive.


The minority of verbs, called strong verbs ("irregular"), falls into a nonproductive category and form their preterites with a simple core-vowel change (called ablaut in the grammars). (Test: they are listable; see the back of your favorite "unabridged" dictionary; and they often have to be memorized, even by native speakers, because their formation is not predictable.) Examples:

sit, sat, sat
bid, bad(e), bidden
ride, rode, ridden
fight, fought, fought (archaic fought(en))
wring, wrang, wrung
throw, threw, thrown
lie, lay, lain 'to recline' (vs. lie, lied, lied 'to tell an untruth', which has a separate origin)
come, came (dialectal come), come
rise, rose, risen
choose, chose, chosen
wind, wound, wound



So, the phenomenon you're agitated about consists of a new rule that re-orders how these verbs work, discarding the old system of vowel alternation as much as possible. It replaces the old perfect participial form with the old preterite, or the old preterite form with the old perfect participle, so that the verbs in question end up "looking like" the other type, the so-called weak verbs, whose preterite and participial forms have ALWAYS looked alike, since they don't depend on core-vowel alternation (e.g., bark, barked, barked). (Analogy.)

One finds, then, for instance,

sink, sank, sunk =====>
sink, sunk, sunk

see, saw, seen =====>
see, seen, seen

(likewise the truly irregular verb do, did, done =====>
do, done, done).



Some dialects may have forms like **goed for went or gone for went, sung for sang, sunk for sank, drunk for drank, etc.

It's a far from chaotic process of language evolution, whether we like to think of it so or not.


(Note that the third "principal part" above, the participle, "should" be sunken, drunken, etc. These forms are, for modern speakers, hypercharacterized by both the quality of the core vowel and the affixing of -en. Many of these participial forms are obsolete as the third "principal part" of their associated verbs, but some survive, confined now solely to use as attributive adjectives (as in "sunken treasure", or "drunken tirade"). So, you see, some changes from the older system have already been "accepted" as the norm in "proper English".)


So, what we have is the reformation of grammatical rules and grammatical categories. A focus in classroom pedagogy on grammatical rules and grammatical categories and their development in English "grammar" would facilitate understanding of how phenomena of irregularity come about in the development of language in general. We might still choose to correct them in a piece of writing, but we could no longer see the speakers as strictly being "in error", as so many of us do now.



Quote:



. . . I think your knowledge of the English language and linguistics is impressive and believe it is false humility for you to say you often confuse "there" and "their" or "then" and "than." Perhaps you occasionally make the mistakes as typos (don't we all?) but I'm confident that you don't really confuse them.





Even at the risk of seeming ungracious---I'm sure you're well-educated, and well-intentioned, probably a fine, upstanding citizen---, I just have to say this: You seem to have failed to grasp the nub of about 85% of what I've been saying. This isn't just a matter of "honest disagreement". You just don't get it. And, of course, part of that may well be due to the limitations of trying to communicate such ideas on-line. It ain't easy trying to get across these concepts to a naive (as in "untrained") audience.

First of all, if you re-read my long post carefully you will find, I think, that I use the word confound, not confuse in this regard. That's no accident. I do not confuse, I confound, as do the other people I have seen undergo/experience this phenomenon. (I'm giving them the benefit of the doubt.) As a native speaker, I do not "confuse" the meanings of the words in question. I know a comparative construction ("[thæn] X") from a temporal statement ("[then] X"). I merely confound the phonetic strings that the language has assigned to represent these concepts. That is the nature of homophony. If the language keeps developing in that direction with regard to these two lexemes, it might lead to a case of homonymy (where the same phonetic string [thuhn] will have replaced [thæn] AND [[then] altogether and have absorbed their functions (here, meanings) under one lexeme). That's the nature of language evolution.

The one major point, if no other, that I've tried (unsuccessfully, it seems) to get across is that, despite higher education (within certain limits), despite reasonable "intelligence" (within the "norm"), it does not matter. Language comes with a salient and not insignificant feature called variability (Linguistics 101). That means there is no one way to speak a given language. There is no one way even to write a given language. My point was, and is: being educated and "smart" does not exempt me or you, or anyone else from the phenomenon of language variability or language evolution. We are all subject to it, despite ourselves and our best efforts not to be.

Written language can forestall change by codifying certain "rules", but it can never totally avoid it. Eventually, it, too, must yield, or become totally obsolete. A good case in point is the King James Bible. Its text is in the process of being replaced in churches all over America today with the new, revised modern version exactly because it's centuries old and has become incomprehensible to most speakers of the language. (Gone are the days when people were taught to read through Bible-training.) Most speakers don't understand Jesus's command to "suffer the little children (to come unto him)" and, so, the phrase is often lifted way out of context and used to mean something it didn't at all mean when the text was translated.

These are forces ("change or die") that are a whole lot bigger than the strength of one's will power, level of one's education, and one's native intelligence combined. Just psyching oneself up to use only "proper English" won't hold back the tides of change. Won't!

In the end, the barbarians always crash the gates. They always win eventually. The very thing that has attracted them, the benefits of civilization, leads to its destruction.

And this reminds me of a quote I heard, or read, in junior high school---I don't know to whom to attribute it: "The eventual destruction of mankind is civilization." A broader, more encompassing way to look at it is that everything in creation---everything we "know" about---bears within its very make-up the seeds of its own destruction. That's part of its "essence".

entity birth =====> entity maturity =====> entity death

A language, as an "organic" entity, is no different (although languages do not really "die" unless and until all their speakers die off).

Some can't seem to move past the static model of language, as some monolithic, unchanging, and inviolable . . . . social institution(?). What can I tell you? For me, it is a dynamic living thing to be studied and marvelled at. What you call "errors" I see as evidence of processes. It's a matter of perspective.
 

Karl_O

Stunt Coordinator
Joined
Dec 3, 2002
Messages
56
Rex's recent post shows a reason why English is a difficult language to learn. Another thought is: why do we make the world's languages (including English) difficult to learn and complicating? Why not make them easiler or simplier?
 

EdR

Second Unit
Joined
Oct 29, 2002
Messages
432
Rex's recent post shows a reason why English is a difficult language to learn. Another thought is: why do we make the world's languages (including English) difficult to learn and complicating? Why not make them easiler or simplier?
Interesting question.
The first thing I would say is that no one makes languages simple or easy, languages change and mutate by way of communities of speakers. The French have tried to legislate away the infiltration of English (mostly technology-related) words. It's not working because language change isn't a top-down, executive style process, it happens via groups of individual speakers (the sole exception being the use of threat, coercion and so on to enforce a decreed change in speech, and even this has a limited effect). As Rex has made clear, it's not a guided process and it's not 'logical', it's capricious and arbitrary. Although some amount of change from generation to generation is simply a young group of people setting themselves apart from the older generation, exactly how they go about creating change is unpredictable.
The second part is a bit more complicated. When you say English is hard to learn, I must assume you mean as a second language...because children have no problem learning English if they were born and raised in a community of native speakers, even without any formal education. Of course, this is true of any language on Earth. In fact, children born and raised in a bilingual community are capable of learning two languages equally well (and show an overall improvement in IQ).
Language is effective for us humans because all normally equipped people can learn it without effort, mostly before the age of 4. It's probably no coincidence that language acquisition happens during a time when the brain is still being 'wired', neurons are growing and changing their connections to each other. And this, in turn, is why it's difficult for adults to learn second languages. The major brain regions are set, rewiring still occurs but on a much smaller scale. One thing is certain...if you didn't acquire at least one language as a child, you will never learn one at anything approaching a native level, or even the level of a 3 year old.
In some sense it is a function of language to be easily acquired by children. I know that sounds strange, but think about it; if a given language was difficult for children to learn, it would probably end up being partially learned or learned poorly, which would then threaten it's primary function - communication. If languages were easy for adults to learn, then they probably wouldn't be very effective or expressive. It's hard to ponder 'what if...' scenarios about language because our evolution (especially our mental/brain evolution) is closely tied to the evolution of language. Once language got started sometime in the last few million years, it altered the course of our evolution, and in so doing altered its own properties and characteristics.
So to address your original question, Karl. Languages are specialized for acquisition by developing brains. All the developing brain needs is sufficient exposure to a language to learn it. Once brain development is 'done', acquiring a new language is difficult...but because you have acquired (at least) one native language already, your brain is at least capable of adding more, but this learning must be done through hard work, study and concentrated effort.
(By the way, it might be of interest to you second-language people that words in your 'new' language actually occupy their own 'territory' in your brain. Words from each language are segregated (usually only millimeters from each other), and categories of words, like nouns, verbs, etc are kept separate as well, this is true of native language words as well - so our 'folk' distinction of nouns from verbs from adjectives reflects the way they are actually divided in the brain!)
 

Brian Perry

Senior HTF Member
Joined
May 6, 1999
Messages
2,807
We might still choose to correct them in a piece of writing, but we could no longer see the speakers as strictly being "in error", as so many of us do now.
I think we agree more on this subject than you'd like to admit.

Despite what you may think, Rex, I too am fascinated by language though not to the degree you obviously are. Your posts are like a virtual textbook on the evolution of English. But at the end of the day, we have current standard usage and current nonstandard usage. While it's a fun academic exercise to point out why someone may be deviating from the norm, it matters little--from a practical standpoint--whether the nonstandard usage stems from an outdated construction or a "new and improved" version that may (or may not) become standard in the future.

Little Johnny in school: "I seen Harry Potter yesterday."

Teacher: "You mean, 'You saw Harry Potter yesterday.'"

Little Johnny: "No, I am correct. In future enlightened generations, 'I seen' will be the favored usage because the preterite and perfect participle have the same form."

Teacher: "Very impressive, Johnny. But for now, please say 'I saw.'"


EdR,

With an infant son, I am very interested in the processes of children learning a second langauge. I had read about the ease children have in learning multiple languages and how it becomes difficult as an adult. Would you recommend teaching a young child a second language, and if so, at what age should he begin? It sounds as though there's a limited window of opportunity before his brain is "wired."
 

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