Obligatory Grammar Rant

[DrStraw]

And then: Me, dutch, too stupid to understand the "1 across", "Leewaard" and "Jamaica" jokes.

Don't worry. I bet that not one in a hundred native speakers would get that one either. Explanation is hidden for those who need it.

When speaking quickly and in some dialects Did you make her is slurred into Jamaica and Leeward is slurred into Lured.

[ethanb]

Which is not a formal synonym for that. There is a difference. "That" is restrictive, while "which" is non-restrictive. Often, "which" is preceded by a comma. Think of the difference between, "Go get the car, which is blue," and "Go get the car that is blue."

Could you elaborate on this. (I am being sincere. I'm not being sarcastic.) Could you explain this more without using the word "restrictive". Thanks.

"Go get the car, which is blue" -- You are to get one car of many. Some of them are blue, and one of those is the correct car. (non-restrictive)

"Go get the car that is blue" -- You are to get one car of many. The one you are getting is the ONLY blue car in the lot. (restrictive)

[ethanb]

That passage certainly wasn't meant as a slur on Americans, and I apologise unreservedly if it came across in that way. Certainly, as John points out, there are plenty of stupidities produced by British English speakers. I was just pointing out a particular example of language usage that I have only ever come across from Americans, and which thoroughly confuses me.

Your feeling of superiority is exactly that which is often seen in discussions about language, when people defend their way of speaking as "correct" and call the others "stupid." It shows a total insensitivity and a lack of awareness of the extent of language differences. It also shows that sometimes it's better to look in a dictionary (I'm sure you can find an American English dictionary on line, if you don't have one) before saying that people are "too stupid to actually know what they are saying." In fact, that comment is one of the most arrogant I've seen in a long time regarding language...

OK, that's fair criticism - looking back now, my post does come across as a bit insensitive, and I can only apologise for that. I certainly shouldn't have used the word "stupid" - a definite case of "post first, think later" (I would like now to edit it out of my original post, but will keep it in so that the subsequent posts make sense.)

I was more motivated by the fact that I first became aware that this was a common American usage was when I was chatting online to a (very intelligent) friend from the US, and happened to casually use the phrase "I couldn't care less that ...", which prompted him to point out that this was the correct usage but that he rarely heard it, everyone else around him used the other form. This debate has now got me genuinely interested in how this phrase came to be used so commonly (and I am very interested in language in general, despite having no qualifications in this area).

I'm American and I didn't get offended by your statement. I find that American culture is much more oriented to the spoken than the written, and that seems to be where all of these misunderstandings occur.

I do disagree with kirkmc in that I believe most of these examples are actual mistakes, not merely changing grammar over time. It seems to me that the purpose of language is to communicate ideas, and changes which make those ideas more difficult to understand are poor ones. I can see John's point about "I could care less" being said ironically, but I think most people don't understand that when they say the phrase - they just didn't hear the contraction and never saw it written out, never thought too much about the meaning and just accepted it as a common phrase. Occasionally you do hear it said with a sarcastic emphasis on "could" and THOSE people I assume do know what they're saying. When the emphasis is on "care" though, I assume they don't.

It seems like some people feel that prescriptivist means that you give any adherence at all to the definitions given by a dictionary or by tracing the etymology of a word. If that is the case then I'm definitely a prescriptivist. I do believe language changes over time, and I have no problem with additions to common usage that make sense. But I feel that changes only made through ignorance (and mishearing a similar-sounding word is a very common example) are simply mistakes and should be corrected.

[John Fairbairn]

A touch of prescriptivism is surely a good thing - the alternative is sheer anarchy. But the first prescriptivists shot themselves in the foot with utterly fatuous rules about split infinitives and hanging participles, not to mention trying to wedge English into a Latin straitjacket. Wedgies don't work - they just leave skidmarks.

What seems to work is making it worthwhile to conform. In very, very rough terms, there is a paradigm in business: Want a job? Learn to spell. Want a good annual report? Learn to write. Want promotion? Learn to communicate. Of course the paradigm then runs into the sand because those who get promoted mysteriously lose the ability to communicate with their staff, but, still, in the early days of a career good English is often considered the most important skill in office work.

Even outside the workplace there are pluses to conforming. You can read newspapers, watch movies, even join educational forums like this.

[emeraldemon]

Så länge det är möjligt att förstå den bakomliggande meningen är mindre grammatiska meningsbyggnadsfel fullständigt irrelevanta. Folk som tenderar att hänga upp sig på sådana grammatiska detaljer har vanligtvis en mycket anal personlighet och är av typen som tar varje tillfälle i akt att få känna sig överlägsna andra. Men vad vet jag, de kan ju vara snälla och duktiga ändå...

Själv är jag inte bara kallsinnig vad gäller grammatik, jag bryr mig faktiskt heller inte ett vitten om huruvida jag blir förstådd eller inte.

Google translate:

As long as it is possible to understand the underlying sentence is less grammatical punctuation completely irrelevant. People who tend to dwell on such grammatical features usually have a very anal personality and is the type who takes every opportunity to feel superior to others. But what do I know, they may well be kind and good anyway ...

I myself am not only indifferent regarding grammar, I do actually not a farthing whether I will be understood or not.

About as grammatical as can be expected.

[jts]

What about the famous Star Trek motto "to boldly go..."? You could easily make it "to go boldy...", I guess, and I'm not saying that's worse - but it doesn't sound clearly better to me either.

"To boldly go where no man has gone before" is almost iambic pentameter, which is why the split infinitive sounds good. Likewise, "To be or not to be, that is the question" is iambic pentameter, which is why not splitting sounds good. If you habitually speak in meter, I'm willing to let you break whichever style guidelines stand in your way!

[Bill Spight]

A touch of prescriptivism is surely a good thing - the alternative is sheer anarchy. But the first prescriptivists shot themselves in the foot with utterly fatuous rules about split infinitives and hanging participles, not to mention trying to wedge English into a Latin straitjacket. Wedgies don't work - they just leave skidmarks.

Prescriptivist joke:

Noah Webster's wife came back from town and caught him dallying with the maid. "Mr. Webster!" she exclaimed, "I am surprised!"

To which the great lexicographer replied, "Why, no, my dear. You are shocked. I am surprised."

What seems to work is making it worthwhile to conform. In very, very rough terms, there is a paradigm in business: Want a job? Learn to spell. Want a good annual report? Learn to write. Want promotion? Learn to communicate. Of course the paradigm then runs into the sand because those who get promoted mysteriously lose the ability to communicate with their staff, but, still, in the early days of a career good English is often considered the most important skill in office work.

The apparent loss of ability to communicate with their staff is a feature, not a bug. By becoming difficult to understand, the superior {sic!} emphasizes that he belongs to a club that his subordinates do not. Language is used to divide.

[kirkmc]

The apparent loss of ability to communicate with their staff is a feature, not a bug. By becoming difficult to understand, the superior {sic!} emphasizes that he belongs to a club that his subordinates do not. Language is used to divide.

Which brings us back to the ebonics issue. I firmly believe that those behind the idea had good intentions, to want to repair the divide between poor, black Americans who speak in a different dialect from the "standard" dialect.

[Fedya]

And then: Me, dutch, too stupid to understand the "1 across", "Leewaard" and "Jamaica" jokes.

Ah, but Dutch is just German with a really bad accent and spelling.

Seriously, I found having a good grasp of English grammar a big help when I learned German, and having that plus the knowledge of German grammar (especially the cases) a help when studying Russian.

Of course, the minute I finally learned everything there was to learn about the German language, they introduced the Verdammte neue Rechtschreibung. Somewhere along the way I obtained a German dictionary from before the previous orthographic reform at the beginning of the last century, which still lists the h in verbs like "thun" and which is in Fraktur. Sometimes I think I should use that dictionary if I have to write in German....

[DrStraw]

Ah, but Dutch is just German with a really bad accent and spelling.

I may be wrong, but I always thought Dutch for closer to English than German.

[flOvermind]

Ah, but Dutch is just German with a really bad accent and spelling.

I may be wrong, but I always thought Dutch for closer to English than German.

To me, Dutch is what I like to call "almost comprehensible". That is, I recognize many words, sometimes enough to understand fragments of the text. Still, I couldn't formulate even a very simple sentence because I don't actually know any words, I can just guess their meaning when I see them.

Linguistically speaking, it is closely related to both German and English, all three of them are West Germanic languages. If you think of it as a spectrum of languages with English on the left and Austro-Bavarian on the right, standard German would be somewhere in the middle, and Dutch would be a bit to the left of it, right next to the northern German dialects. Not surprisingly, that strongly correlates with the geographic distribution

[Loons]

A bit tangentially to the current topic:

I type (here/casually) in exactly the same manner as I speak (with maybe a little more confusion about affects and effects thrown in). I use comparatively a lot've apostrophes for that reason. Should I've been writing in the style of an essay or formal letter ?

[judicata]

A bit tangentially to the current topic:

I type (here/casually) in exactly the same manner as I speak (with maybe a little more confusion about affects and effects thrown in). I use comparatively a lot've apostrophes for that reason. Should I've been writing in the style of an essay or formal letter ?

...why would you?

[hyperpape]

Everything is correct vs. nothing is relevant.

I can't decide if I have anything of my own to add, but this is one of the nicest attempts to lay out a descriptivist account of what (some) grammatical norms are. Unfortunately it's part of an ongoing discussion, so it references a few other blog posts in a way that's not entirely transparent.