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Post by Pete on Jun 28, 2008 0:17:40 GMT
If I was to correct posts, I would have probably, after extensive checking, written (wrote?) "there're". And, of course, this is a subjunctive and should be "If I were ...". That said, my wife considers me to be something of an uber-pedant so far as the subjunctive is concerned. If you're interested, Vadim, there's a thread on the subjunctive from a few weeks ago.
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Post by Pete on Jun 28, 2008 0:20:59 GMT
You're making a claim about English grammar that can be demonstrated to be false. I can provide evidence that your prescription is not how English really behaves: there's has been used with plural subjects for the past 500 years. Goofy, I think one of the earlier posts was trying to make the point that 500-year-old grammar is not necessarily correct now (if, indeed, it was then - Bill used to take a lot of liberties with the language). If you can show that "there's three" has been considered to be correct throughout the last 500 years, your point might be valid.
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Post by Paul Doherty on Jun 28, 2008 0:49:19 GMT
Correct only has meaning when we are testing agaiunst an agreed standard, surely? If I claim to be writing HTML and I write <h>A heading</h> that would be incorrect: no version of HTML recognises an <h> tag.
So is there an agreed standard for English? In the sense of one universally accepted and comprehensive standard, there is not. So we cannot say that honor is incorrect English -- because it is correct for American English. It could be argued to be incorrect British English, however, and if I wrote honor in a text otherwise written in British English, I think it might be concluded I had made an inadvertent mistake, given that no version of British English misses out the u.
So some core matters are agreed in all versions of English, and if we restrict ourselves to standard English the core area expands considerably. Errors made in these core matters can surely be described as incorrect. If I consistently want to write "went" as "wentk" -- I wentk for a walk -- I think we might safely describe that as incorrect English. It may be correct Paul-language, but it's not correct English. If I consistently write bairn for child, however, it's only incorrect if I claim I'm writing standard English.
The trouble is that, by definition, the core matters are not controversial, and we never discuss them here. Matters we discuss here can usually not be described as correct or incorrect, because we have no agreed standard by which to measure their correctness. Twoddle can claim that there is requires, without exception, a singular object, but goofy (or anyone) can dispute that there is any such rule, and maybe offer evidence of reputable "rule-breaking" usage.
Changing "correct" to "standard" or "conventional" helps a little, because it suggests that the benchmark is not some agreed rule-set, but rather a simple measure of how something is usually said or written. Plenty of problems still remain of course: what is the usual way of writing or saying something? We need to define the group, geography, education level, register, situation, age, era and so on. Scope for lots of dispute!
But, given I have defined my standard, we might agree that bairn is correct for my text. If I then write bain once or twice, we may conclude it's a typo and therefore a mistake and incorrect.
Some linguists have had the descriptivist credo so drilled into them that they react badly to any mention of "correct" or "incorrect". This is unnecessary; one can be a descripivist and still accept that people make mistakes and say and write things by mistake that they would willingly describe as incorrect. It's just that we have to know what benchmark we are judging something by.
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Post by Dave on Jun 28, 2008 2:29:35 GMT
I know many of you carefully check each post. I'd love to know if that's true. I don't check my posts, and (as we have an edit function) I sometimes post without previewing and then change any typos I notice in the resultant post. Even though there's an edit function on this board, I still use the "Preview" button before posting--a habit from the APS board (without edit). Sometimes I'll use the "Spell Check" button also. [Perhaps these use up pageviews also!]
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Post by Verbivore on Jun 28, 2008 3:48:37 GMT
I always use the preview before posting, but don't bother with the spelling checker (didn't know there was one) as my Firefox add-on Australian English Dictionary (vers. 2.1.1) does that on the fly (and is, for an American idea of Oz English, reasonably good). It catches (most of) my typos.
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Post by goofy on Jun 28, 2008 5:05:36 GMT
Correctness is determined by the context and the audience. Language appropriate for informal conversation is not appropriate for formal letters, and vice versa. If correctness is some sort of fixed unchanging ideal that most speech is at variance with, then it's not a very helpful notion. Goofy, I cannot agree with this statement. I think you (and others) are conflating the concepts of correctness and appropriateness. Language does have a set of rules, even though those rules change over time. The phrase "there's three" might be acceptable or, indeed, appropriate, in speech but it is still incorrect. And however appropriate it may be when said, in written English it is just plain wrong. I'm not saying there's three is correct. I'm saying it's grammatical. It's part of the rules that native speakers use to produce and comprehend utterances. The fact that it's been used for 400 years, and is still used by native speakers like me and Paul, convinces me that it is grammatical. It's used in informal contexts, and it is not used in formal contexts. But informal does not mean incorrect. It just means informal. To call structures that are part of the grammar of native speakers "acceptable in speech and yet still incorrect", just seems completely unhelpful. It implies that spoken language is somehow defective and that there's an ideal language we have to strive for. But this is just not true. Correct is meaningless without defining a specific register, audience, dialect, etc. And if the rules of correctness don't describe how we use the language in specific registers, dialects, with different audiences, etc, then there's something wrong with the rules, not the users of the language. So on reflection, I am conflating correctness with appropriateness, because you can't have a concept of "correct" without considering the context. And I am saying that there's three is correct in some contexts and incorrect in others. And I pretty much agree with what Paul said. As I've said before, the concept of correctness as most English speakers understand it today did not exist before the 18th century. When people say that Shakespeare took liberties with the language, they seem to believe that the same concept of correctness existed in the 17th century, and that Shakespeare deliberately violated these rules, but that is not obvious to me.
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Post by Pete on Jun 28, 2008 6:29:47 GMT
Goofy, thank you for taking the time to set oput your position so clearly. I think we have plenty of areas of agreement, although overall we may have to agree to differ. Correct is meaningless without defining a specific register, audience, dialect, etc. And if the rules of correctness don't describe how we use the language in specific registers, dialects, with different audiences, etc, then there's something wrong with the rules, not the users of the language. I think Paul said something useful on another thread: some rules are so fundamental that we don't bother to discuss them. Until now, I would have said this to be true of the rule that a pural object of the verb to be takes "are", not "is". On reflection, I accept the idea that different English dialects might not have the same rule. But I suggest that this is nevertheless a fundamental rule of British English, north American Engish, Australian English and South African English, i.e. of the grammar of most of the major 'dialects' of English. I am equally happy to accept that these are rules that apply to written formal English and that the rules are often not applied to informal speech with the same rigour. Indeed, to take that a stage further, I think you are suggesting that the rule actually does not apply to spoken or informal English, which is often quirky, colloquial or even plain informal. When people say that Shakespeare took liberties with the language, they seem to believe that the same concept of correctness existed in the 17th century, and that Shakespeare deliberately violated these rules, but that is not obvious to me I agree with you but doesn't this undermine your use of Shakespeare, etc., to demonstrate the aptness of the usage you are defending?
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Post by goofy on Jun 28, 2008 12:51:32 GMT
Indeed, to take that a stage further, I think you are suggesting that the rule actually does not apply to spoken or informal English, which is often quirky, colloquial or even plain informal. Yes. I'm saying there are implicit rules that can be discovered by examining the relevant evidence. Any explicit rules that we write down should describe the implicit rules; they shouldn't exist independently of how the language is actually used. Spoken English differs from written English in many ways; therefore spoken English and written English follow different implicit rules. I don't see why. The Shakespeare quote shows how long the usage has been around. That's one of the reasons I think it's grammatical. The fact that prescriptive rules as we understand them today did not exist in the 17th century isn't relevant to that point. It is relevant if you say that Shakespeare "broke the rules", because you then have to explain what explicit rules, if any, existed in the 17th century for him to break.
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Post by Pete on Jun 28, 2008 13:51:10 GMT
Spoken English differs from written English in many ways; therefore spoken English and written English follow different implicit rules. I think I am beginning to come round to your way of thinking. After all, we all accept that language evolves and also, I think, that the evolution is lead by the spoken language. So any given rule may be correct for a particular form of language - spoken, written, formal, informal - as well as for a particular time or, indeed, place. Anarchy!
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Post by Paul Doherty on Jun 28, 2008 17:09:08 GMT
As I've said before, the concept of correctness as most English speakers understand it today did not exist before the 18th century. We have to be careful with statements like that. I'm sure that medieval scribes did have the concept of correctness: in any particular monastery a set of rules would have been applied and a script which inadvertently broke the rules would have been deemed incorrect -- the clerk would have made mistakes. But the scope of the rules would have been more limited, both in geography and in coverage. There may have been several acceptable spellings for a wide range of words (as is still the case but for a much smaller set), and the rules would have applied to that monastery only and would not have claimed to be the single standard of correctness for all monasteries. What the prescriptive grammars and dictionaries of the 18th century onwards 1 did was introduce the idea of a single idealised version of English; the actual Englishes as spoken and written by a wide variety of people thus became seen as stigmatised. I think it's this idea of idealised and inferior versions of English which Goofy and I dispute. English is what it is; it exists in a wide variety of shapes and sizes, and the rules which define any one variant are complex and poorly documented. We've seen that last point magnificently illustrated on the APS and here: almost any "simple" rule which someone expresses turns out to have a complex set of exceptions and variabilities. "An apostrophe is used to indicate missing letters" we say, but then have to explain all the times when that isn't actually true. Photo's is not a contracted form of photographs, for example; St is a contracted form of Street. Against such a mass of overlapping "standards", not one of which is completely defined in the way that a computer language is completely defined, it's surely impossible to say what does and does not conform to which standard. We can say that different to is not what we might say, that most grammar books deprecate it, and that it's not logical -- but if we admit that quite a lot of people do actually say it, then we can't claim that it's wrong. The people who say it are clearly following a benchmark for English which allows it. That's why I didn't (often) correct my children when they glottal-stopped butter. It's not how I say it, and in some ways I'd regard it as "wrong" (in that it doesn't follow the rules for pronunciation which I follow) but in the world in which my children lived -- school and so on -- it might well be the correct pronunciation for them. The standard they are obeying is the standard of the playground, where bu'er is the correct pronunciation, and deviants may be severely punished. So for them it is the right way to say it. This what we mean by "appropriate". But having said all that, some things can be described as wrong or incorrect. These are things produced by mistake -- things that are not what the speaker or writer meant to say. When Charlotte Green (BBC announcer) spoke of problems with a "cross-flannel cherry" instead of a "cross-channel ferry" she was wrong; her speech was incorrect (in that she had pronounced the scripted words wrongly), she had made a mistake (and very amusingly). This version of correctness has always been with us: it is not an 18th century invention. 1Actually, it may have been earlier than this. Caxton (1472) seems to have been drawing on a standardised form of English as used by clerks in Chancery for some time. It would surprise me if the language of the Royal courts, of the law courts, and of business and commerce was not seen as "better" and more desirable than the language of the peasants. I'd bet that an inexperienced and aspiring lawyer might, even then, have inadvertently used language that his peers would have mocked as incorrect.
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Post by SusanB on Jun 28, 2008 17:19:55 GMT
I guess the "cross-flannel cherry" was a slip of the tongue (though I would have thought it to more likely be "cross-fannel cherry"). One of my favourites: "I never really knew what all this gransformational grammar was for".
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Post by Pete on Jun 28, 2008 17:30:26 GMT
There was a radio comedy show many years ago, which was described as being "brought to you by the British Broadcorping Castoration."
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Post by Pete on Jun 28, 2008 17:31:50 GMT
And then we could have an entire thread on the sayings of The Reverend Dr Spooner and his imitators.
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Post by Paul Doherty on Jun 28, 2008 17:43:44 GMT
God bless the queer old Dean.
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Post by Pete on Jun 28, 2008 18:12:12 GMT
You have tasted two worms, please leave by the town drain.
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