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Post by TfS on Jun 28, 2008 18:15:18 GMT
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". This is very true and I experienced it when, after having lived in Sweden for 17 years, I was posted to London with my family and my daughter aged 15 was placed into the local school. From the time she started to understand I have spoken English to her and this is still our common language but this was to have a negative affect upon her integration into English school life. After a month or so, my wife and I were requested to meet with the headmistress at the school as there was a problem with Tanja. "Oh, Lord" we thought, "what's happened?" and so, fearing the worst, we went to the meeting. The problem, explained the head, was with Tanja's English. "What's wrong with it?", I bristled knowing well that she spoke and wrote excellent English. "Ah, yes", was the reply, "Tanja's English is perfect but she is having social problems because of it. She is not being accepted by the other pupils since she does not use slang and modern idiom and is considered to be snobbish by the way she speaks." Wow, how does one handle something like that? But I could see where the difficulty was. Here was a young girl of 15 with all the emotional problems which that can bring, in a foreign country, at a strange school and without (as yet) any friends and then being, I won't say "mobbed" but certainly "shunned" and "mocked", because she was speaking perfectly grammatical “English”. On top of it she was also not "in" regarding the personalities of the latest television programmes. What a dilemma and what a very stressful time for the kid, who didn’t want to be there in the first place! As Paul states, “The standard they are obeying is the standard of the playground, where bu'er is the correct pronunciation, and deviants may be severely punished.” As a parent, this is a very tough situation and frustrating to boot. Tanja rode out the storm much to her credit and we returned to Sweden after a couple of years but with the memory of a rather sad occasion caused by the correct use of language. TfS
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Post by Paul Doherty on Jun 28, 2008 18:21:20 GMT
What a difficult situation, TfS. It just shows how important other people are to us, and what an important factor language is in how we interact with them.
May I ask how you dealt with it?
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Post by Bertie on Jun 28, 2008 19:24:38 GMT
A little-known spoonerism was expressed by an announcer on my local tv station many years ago. I have always remembered it because it could easily be missed as it sounded so natural. He referred to an up-coming series of "comic classidies".
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Post by Tone on Jun 28, 2008 21:07:38 GMT
>To me, "grammar" is the rules that describe how speakers produce and comprehend utterances.<
Mayhap, then, you are in the wrong place. Perhaps an "investigative linguist" forum might be better for someone who calls them "utterances"?
Tone
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Post by TfS on Jun 29, 2008 10:44:06 GMT
What a difficult situation, TfS. It just shows how important other people are to us, and what an important factor language is in how we interact with them. May I ask how you dealt with it? There really wasn't much one could do and it resolved itself through a child's resilience in that Tanja quickly started to pick up the slang and local vernacular and slowly began to integrate. Lots of tears and unhappiness which no one could have foreseen but, as usual, it all worked out in the end. I think, though, (no, I know) that she was glad to get back to Sweden and to familiar surroundings. Odd thing also was that she had a British passport but had no affinity to the UK whatsoever and that country was, for her, no different from any other foreign land; it was just where her grandmother and uncle lived but that was it. An episode in her life that may have been useful but was traumatic at the time. TfS
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Post by goofy on Jun 30, 2008 2:35:38 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. Yes, and I was trying to be careful, but maybe not careful enough. I've already quoted this passage that explains my point. Since I can't link directly to it, here it is again: "In the earlier part of the Early Modern English period, concern about the English language focused primarily on the most obvious and intuitive unit of language, the word - its origin, its spelling, and its codification in dictionaries. Later in the period, language-watchers extended their attention to grammar, and especially to "proper" and "improper" usage. This is not to say that no one had previously noticed that different people and groups used different construction or that grammatical usage was not one of the many shibboleths distinguishing classes. However, such variation had been pretty much taken for granted, and few scholars had stood back, looked at the grammar of the language as a whole, and found it sadly wanting. Nor had there been a great demand for putting rules of grammar into print and making them accessible to all. A number of factors, most of them arising outside the world of letters, converged after the mid-eighteenth century to make this an era of anguishing over usage and of attempting to improve it." C.M. Millward's "A Biography of the English Language", 1989
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Post by Dave M on Jun 30, 2008 10:00:05 GMT
Pete, goofy
Perhaps the "there is" example is one likely to polarise opinion. I suggest "aren't I" as an example which is clearly "wrong" against formal standards of verb conjugation, yet very much accepted by almost everyone, as something normally said:
I'm also invited, aren't I? I'm the winner, aren't I? Aren't I entitled to do that, too?
A few carefully formal speakers might say "am I not?", but the day-to-day standard is the quite "impossible" reverse formation of the non-existent "I are"!
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Post by Dave M on Jun 30, 2008 10:03:21 GMT
Well done to Tanja, TfS!
I was six when my family moved to Yorkshire, and in the first couple of days I came home from school very upset and shamed. Someone had said that they'd had "torse" for breakfast, and I'd said I'd never heard, or had any, of that. From all around, I was mocked - for the pathetic poverty of my family, not being able to afford what I later found out to be toast.
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Post by Paul Doherty on Jun 30, 2008 10:59:02 GMT
Goofy, yes. My point is simply that "incorrect" can also refer to simple mistakes -- typically which the speaker/writer would accept and correct when he/she notices them -- and mistakes like that have always been with us.
I think the descriptivists tend to overdo the idea that before the 18th century all speech and writing was equally acceptable. I very much doubt that it was. It may have been OK for a peasant to speak like a peasant, but I bet it wasn't OK for a clerk to write like one.
Maybe it's just that the 18th century saw a more judgemental approach -- that the working classes should be ashamed of their poor diction, rather than "well, it's the way they are". I'm no social historian, but I suspect that would tie in with other social changes at the time, notably the industrial revolution, which would have required the factory workers to have a basic level of literacy.
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Post by Paul Doherty on Jun 30, 2008 11:01:08 GMT
Yes indeed. Tanja must have been through a tough time (as I suspect did her parents in supporting her, although TfS is too modest to say so).
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Post by goofy on Jun 30, 2008 12:54:13 GMT
I think the descriptivists tend to overdo the idea that before the 18th century all speech and writing was equally acceptable. I very much doubt that it was. It may have been OK for a peasant to speak like a peasant, but I bet it wasn't OK for a clerk to write like one. You could very well be right. I'd like to see some more evidence. A few carefully formal speakers might say "am I not?", but the day-to-day standard is the quite "impossible" reverse formation of the non-existent "I are"! I'd say that aren't I is correct in speech. It actually seems to be derived from amn't I, which changed to an't I, then aren't I in British drama and fiction early in the 20th century. You're right that it is not found in formal writing.
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