LL-L "Grammar" 2005.12.03 (01) [E]
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L O W L A N D S - L * 03 December 2005 * Volume 01
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From: Jacqueline Bungenberg de Jong <Dutchmatters at comcast.net>
Subject: LL-L "Language varieties" 2005.11.30 (13) [E]
Gary Taylor said in response to my remarks about the use of "would of"
<Are you somehow equating education with the way one
<speaks??? And thereby implying that all educated
<people should speak a 'standardised' version of their
<language to show their level of education? Did you
<just drop out of 1800's?
<Sorry I don't usually get easily wound up, but these
<sort of comments are the ones which show ignorance and
<blatant snobbery.
Gary,
No I was not born in the 1800's, but both my parents were.
Also I do not mind you calling me a snob, if being a snob means that I
insist on proper language-use by my children. That is part and parcel of
"noblesse oblige", which covers a lot more than language-use alone.
I think we are talking about two entirely different things.
One is a rigorous use of the standard language as opposed to a slovenly one.
"Would of" is part of the latter usage. It does not per se say anything
about the educational level or intelligence of either parent or child. But I
would expect a parent who speaks the "standardized" language to his or her
children to call them on the use of "would of".
An entirely different matter is the use of a regional language. This is the
case of leading a double life. On the one hand you claim a birthright in
your local culture and speak the language of that culture as well as
possible. On the other hand, you'd better also identify with the country as
a whole and speak the standardized language to converse with people from
different parts of the country, especially since very often the regional
culture does not cover every thing you want to do with your life.
And that is one of the things that interest me in Lowland-L.
Met vriendelijke groeten, Jacqueline
----------
From: Gary Taylor <gary_taylor_98 at yahoo.com>
Subject: LL-L Grammar
Hi Heather
Sorry, me again.
You said
(me)>Who's to say there's not a variety of English
where
'could of' is correct and 'could have' is
ungrammatical? <
(you) "Now that part of your argument is not
sustainable - If you are trying
to
communicate a future perfect conditional , then it can
never be wrong
to
say "I would have done that"."
Ok agreed, but 'never' is too strong a word - there
may come a time when it is wrong - see my argument
about Romanian auxiliaries where the full verb 'a
avea' is now ungrammatical as an auxiliary.
"However it shows an aural/ visually
laziness
to say ' I would of done that' because the historical
line backwards
from
'of' leads first to ' 've' and then back to
'have'."
I'm saying that for some people, myself included the
auxiliary has become 'of'. Yes when I say 'I could
of/'ve done that', they are both identically
pronounced. However when I say 'yes I could of' as
affirmation of something then I use a stressed 'of'
with full 'o' vowel, where you no doubt would use a
stressed 'have'. This is a phenomenon that has picked
up amongst people under 40. It probably is the result
of laziness from a previous generation, but for me
it's what I've always heard and always said. There is
no way that I can equate the pronunciation 'ov' with
'have'. If I'm writing standard English, then I DO
write 'have', although to me that seems unnatural as
it is not what I say. So if newspapers are beginning
to accept the spelling 'of' instead of ''ve' then I'm
all for it - because this is the English I speak.
"If you want to change a language by being lazy -
fine"
This is the way language has always changed. It's why
we say 'fall' instead of Proto-German 'fallanan' -
because speakers are naturally lazy. It doesn't take
anything away from the meaning, and if it did then
speakers usually find ways round it. And as said above
it was a previous generation that was lazy and not me,
it's what I've always heard, so it has already become
grammatical for me.
" but please do not
propose that it has a historical correctness."
I never did, but language change unfortunately doesn't
usually fit into neat packages that always make sense
- which is what makes it so fascinating.
"And if the majority of people - because they are
poorly taught their
language ( and written/printed language has to be
taught; it won't come
naturally of itself) or they practise it so little as
to never gain a
mastery of it, then - yes - the next generation will
be brought up to
think
that it is 'correct' i.e. acceptable."
As said it's already happened to a large extent. We
can't reverse it.
"The siily-selig argument also is spurious because it
is a change in
meaning: the equaivalent argument would be to suddenly
start using an
adjective as a verb or a noun or as an auxiliary to a
tense formation."
Ok a few words : German 'Narbe' originally an
adjective meaning 'narrow', now a noun; 'till'
originating from an adverbial usage of a Germanic noun
'tilam' meaning 'a fixed point'; 'want' originally
only a noun now more commonly a verb, with the meaning
as a noun becoming gradually obsolete; 'to up' a
preposition/adverb becoming a verb; and with a bit
more research I could go on. Are these better
arguments?
"I accept entiely that languages move on - I would
just prefer that
developements were not based on half understood
structures."
I think the majority of people would, but then we have
to go back and look at the majority of our language
and see why it has changed - there's a heck of a lot
of ignorance involved. Folk etymologies - 'cockroach'
for example - are based on ignorance. Differences such
as 'to fall' - 'to fell', 'fill' - 'full', 'to sit' -
'to set' were originally logical alternations where
everyone understood the interrelation, I doubt many
people nowadays do. (Not sure about this one but I
think I've read it somewhere...) intransitive verbs in
English were originally formed with 'to be' in the
perfect tense (much the same as German), but were
ousted by 'to have' again probably through ignorance.
That the majority of nouns in English have the -s
plural and all other inflexions are lost is probably
due to ignorance. Again do I need to go on?
The auxiliary 'have' has actually now got nothing to
do with the full verb 'have'. To recognise this and
change it to 'of' could be thought of as a recognition
of the different functions - and could be thought of
as astute insight. I don't think anyone would make the
'mistake' of writing 'of' instead of the full verb
'have'. But then that probably is a silly (in the
non-blessed sense) argument ;)
There's the new trend amongst younsters to use a
general tag 'innit', regardless of the verb used
before. This could be construed as laziness or
ignorance. I personally would always use a tag based
on the previous verb. But looking at it, the tag
system in English is ridiculously complex, these
youngsters are just streamlining the language. I
should imagine that in 100 years this will be the only
tag, and that it came from 'ain't it' will probably
also have been forgotten. We really do have to accept
that changes are inevitable. No, we won't like them
all, but as said previously, we cannot do a thing
about them.
"(By the same argument I have always argued for the
removel of the
English
apostrophe to denote possession: not because most
people seem entirely
incapable of using it correctly, but because it is
used to denote the
absence of letters that were never there in the first
place BUT were
thought to have been there!)"
Well, we're in complete agreement here :)
And by the way, for someone who's vehemently against
the use of 'could of', you really should check your
spellings before sending your mails...
Gary
http://hometown.aol.com/taylor16471/myhomepage/index.html
----------
From: Sandy Fleming <sandy at scotstext.org>
Subject: LL-L "Language learning" 2005.12.01 (07) [E]
> From: heather rendall <HeatherRendall at compuserve.com>
> Subject: LL-L "Language learning" 2005.11.30 (01) [E]
>
> Message text written by INTERNET:lowlands-l at LOWLANDS-L.NET
>
>> I don't think it's as easy as all that to dismiss it as ignorance.<
>
> What else can it be?
>
> It should be 've short for have and then the tense being used makes
> sense.
>
> There is no possible meaning of 'of' or prior use of 'of' that could give
> it any historical authenticity or satisfactory meaning.
>
> It is used instead of a homonym when people write what they hear
> instead of
> what has meaning.
There are still important gaps in your argument. You now need to
demonstrate that a thing has to have historical authenticity in order to
be valid in modern discourse. I really doubt that this can be demonstrated!
You also need to explain what you mean by a thing "having meaning". In
spoken languages this would mean that there's an encoding (usually
arbitrary but recognisable to most speakers/writers) from the
spelling/pronunciation of a word to a meaning.
You then have to demonstrate that a spelling should only have one
encoding. But if you look up "jack" in the dictionary you'll find that a
spelling can have many encodings, and indeed an awful lot of words do in
large dictionaries. In a sufficiently large dictionary you could well
expect an entry under "of" explaining its meaning when used to mean
"have" in some dialects and in works by certain writers.
You ask: "What else can it be?" [other than ignorance]. As far as the
spoken language goes it's a phonological process just like any other.
Some people either insert an /O/ sound in the contraction or have
changed "would have" to /'wudOv/ (rough phonetics since I don't know
English English, but you see what I mean). There's a simple /a/ -> /O/
process after /d/. My description may not be perfectly accurate but
there's no doubt that it's an ordinary phonological process of some sort.
Now, a lot of people seem to want to express this particular
pronunciation in writing, can't argue with that, either (I hope the
"wrinkly nose" arguments have been banished?).
The question now is only how they go about representing the "-d've"
auxiliary with the inserted vowel. The obvious idea is to take a
phonemic approach and write it as "would ov".
There's one problem with this: while there aren't many spelling rules in
English that hold consistently for every word, one that does is that no
word may end with a "v". While this is just a rule and could be broken -
in fact it would probably make for an improved orthography if it were
broken consistently! - it's strict enough for it to look odd in writing
so it's subconsciously avoided here.
There are two choices: you can go the way of "have" and add a silent
"-e" (and write "would ove"), or you can turn to available resources and
borrow an irregular spelling. Although the spelling of "of" is
irregular, it's instantly recognisable to readers of English. Something
I've learned as a writer in Scots is that no matter how logical my
orthographic thinking, something that's recognisable to the readers is
more acceptable to them than my own inventions ever are.
So the choice of "of" for the "have" auxiliary makes perfect sense
through a combination of the usual processes of phonology, orthography
and word recognition. These processes are probably subconscious in most
writers.
I think where things go now is that we have an editor who has recognised
these perfectly normal processes and before long we'll have another
dictionary heading under "of" explaining its use as an auxiliary. At
first it will say that this causes wrinkly noses in some people, but
then that caveat will be dropped. Maybe the use of "-d've" will
eventually be labelled "archaic and localised"!
Sandy Fleming
http://scotstext.org/
----------
From: Sandy Fleming <sandy at scotstext.org>
Subject: LL-L "Grammar" 2005.12.01 (08) [E]
> From: heather rendall <HeatherRendall at compuserve.com>
> Subject: LL-L "Grammar" 2005.12.01 (02) [E]
>
> Here's one to set the argument spinning!
>
> What is the past tense of 'to light' .... a fire, for example
>
> And how do you pronounce it?
I say "lit" /lI?/ in English and "lichtit" /'lIxtI?/ in Scots.
Sandy Fleming
http://scotstext.org/
----------
From: Sandy Fleming <sandy at scotstext.org>
Subject: LL-L "Grammar" 2005.12.01 (12) [E]
> From: Paul Tatum <ptatum at blueyonder.co.uk>
> Subject: LL-L "Language varieties" 2005.11.29 (04) [A/E]
> And if you pursue the template analogy more, I think you end up
> with rules. After all the sentence template 'noun phrase followed
> by verb phrase' is not much different from the rule 'a sentence is
> composed of a noun phrase followed by a verb phrase'.
Yes, but "noun phrase followed by verb phrase" isn't what I mean by a
template in language production, it's a generative rule. Obviously it's
not going to be much different from something which is just the same
generative rule phrased differently.
By a template I mean a sentence (or phrase) that a person knows and
understands in common with other speakers of the language so that they
can vary it and expect other speakers to understand the variation. So
instead of the rule "noun phrase followed by verb phrase" we have the
template "Mary laughed", from which, having an understanding of this
between myself and another speaker, I can say "John cried" and pretty
much expect them to understand that too and moreover to take a keen
interest in the whole drama that's unfolding here :)
> but we can create/generate new sentences we have never heard before,
> that there isn't a template for.
We _can_ but normally we _don't_. A template is a sentence we've heard
someone else using. Templates can be nested, making it possible to
generate long complex sentences from a few short simple templates: we're
creating something new, but strictly from old template material. If we
create a genuinely new sentence, we've created a new template, because
any utterance can act as a template. However, there's always the danger
that the listener won't get it, or will get it wrong, so normally we
depend on common material (ie old templates) to make ourselves understood.
> Well, IMO you have found a new rule 'long time no NP'. Because language
> has rules, we can use it creatively by breaking the rules - we are not
> bound by them like some legal system, the rules merely describe how we
> use language. And for describing how we use language, transformational
> grammar (and its descendants like LFG and GPSG) have been very fruitful.
>
I don't think there's any evidence that people actually think
generatively when they use language, unless they've been trained to do
this and build sentences from words and rules in the way many people are
taught to speak (or fail to speak, more like!) a foreign language. You
might compare the performance of learners who learn to generate
sentences from rules and vocabulary with those who just learn phrases
and stuff until they find they can use them, and then decide whether
language in practice is generative or exemplary.
I'm not sure where this will go at the present time. People are starting
to think of languages in terms of neural nets these days. Neural nets,
whether biological or machine, tend to try out whatever comes at them
and just remember to use what gets the required results and forget what
doesn't. We can formulate rules to describe the emerging behaviour of a
neural net but the neural net itself isn't using these rules and - given
enough interaction - will keep on coming up with unexpected stuff so
that we can never complete our system of rules.
There are obvious problems with generative grammars. One is that they're
static. By the time a grammarian has written a grammar of the language,
the language is likely to have moved on a bit. That's a bonus for him,
he can write edition 2 of his book with all the new stuff, but it's not
so good for people who have spent years of schooling on it only to come
blinking into the sunlight and find themselves alarmed by roaming
WouldOf monsters. Or you've learned school French form books written in
1956 based on a grammar written in 1933 (but updated in 1972 and
completely revised in 2004 with all the new educational theories) and
find they don't speak it in Paris. This happens because new grammar
research is difficult, using old grammars is easy.
But with the template (or if you like, "exemplary") approach you don't
have to wait for grammar books to be updated. The teacher provides
exemplary language - a lot of it, which is OK because they know a lot -
and the students learn to speak the whole language from it.
I would agree that learners find generative grammars useful in
accelerating their learning by short-cutting some of their problems but
too much dependence on genrative rules leads to failure in language
learning and I think this is an indication that it's not really a good
description of how languages _work_, just a record of the more
predictable aspects of a language at some point in time.
Sandy Fleming
http://scotstext.org/
----------
From: heather rendall <HeatherRendall at compuserve.com>
Subject: LL-L "Grammar" 2005.12.01 (02) [E]
Message text written by INTERNET:lowlands-l at LOWLANDS-L.NET
>I actually think it should be written that way ;-) Forgive me for
I know not what I do.<
and 'gimme' and 'wassa?'
You are happy for the next generation to use these as standard forms?
No-one is saying that in informal writing personal phonics shouldn't be
used
- it is arguing that they should become standard i.e. correct / acceptable
forms just because many people use them, that sticks in the throat.
If they do become accepted, it isn't because they are of themselves right
/correct but that the majority of people don't know any better... and/or
can't be bothered to do anything else than take the line of least
resistance.
Heather
who isactually a modern foreign languages teacher not an English teacher
----------
From: heather rendall <HeatherRendall at compuserve.com>
Subject: LL-L "Language learning" 2005.12.01 (11) [E]
Dear Ron/Reinhard
I don't know whether you want to put this up on the forum but it does seem
very apposite!
Cheap 'degrees' and awful English.
Is this the way we want to go..... people writing as they speak????
Will quite understand if you want to bin it instead.
But on another tack have you explores the OED website???? Brilliant
quizzes!
Heather
-------------Forwarded Message-----------------
From: "Lilly Goldberg", INTERNET:UFLOFS at hotmail.com
To: , heatherrendall
CC: , laurencejacobs
, mccrorie
, edrock
Date: 03/12/2005 04:17 PM
RE: schooling very cheap
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Tell my sister and cousin Joey they better hurry up and call that # i gave
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here are the deg,rees they offer, B/A, B,S,C, M/A M,S.C, M.B.A, P,h,D
and the # to c,all again 1-(2,0,6,)-984-4134 tell them to leave brief
message of the de,gree they want, and they will call back ASAP.
Anyways, much love and tell the rest of the family I said hello :)
love your son,Irving
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