LL-L "Grammar" 2014.03.22 (01) [EN]

Sat Mar 22 17:50:06 UTC 2014

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L O W L A N D S - L - 22 March 2014 - Volume 01
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From: Mustafa Umut Sarac mustafaumutsarac at gmail.com
Subject: LL-L "Grammar" 2014.03.21 (02) [EN]

If anyone is not happy with my English level , I invite them to learn
Turkish , people would recognize them as a foreigner after 30 years of
training. Even Turkish professors at Europe cant cope with Turkish.

Umut

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From: Sandy Fleming sandy at scotstext.org
Subject: LL-L "Grammar" 2014.03.21 (02) [EN]

> From: R. F. Hahn <sassisch at yahoo.com>
> Subject: Grammar
>
> Dear Lowlanders,
>
> Some of you may be interested in an article published in The
> Telegraph<http://www.telegraph.co.uk/>today:
>
> "Are Grammar Nazis Ruining the English
> Language?"<
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/10692897/Are-grammar-Nazis
> -ruining-the-English-language.html>
>
> "Guardians" or "Nazis"? What are *your* opinions?

I wouldn't emphasise so much the difference between 'formal' and 'informal'
English, as the difference between 'spoken' and 'written' English.

When it comes to spoken English, I find that I'm pretty much aware of my
audience, and I know what sort of speech they may not be familiar with, and
adapt accordingly.

One thing about the less/fewer pogrom (just how far can we carry the
terminology?) currently running is that the word 'fewer' doesn't exist in
my dialect of English and I'm not willing to borrow words that aren't
needed and train myself to use them when everybody knows what it means. In
my written English I'm thinking of a more universal audience and have more
time to think, so I'm happier to use 'fewer' for countable nouns and 'less'
for uncountable nouns. But if someone in a conversation tells me that I
need to adjust my language when talking to them personally despite knowing
exactly what I mean, well, this is why the term 'Nazi' gets used: people
who are prepared to extinguish other people's language and culture for the
sake of a few ideologies that they belief in very strongly for no reason
other than that's what they were told.

When faced with a less/fewer argument, GNs often resort to the idea that
using 'less' for countable nouns is illogical. This argument is
supportable, but the assumption that language should be logical isn't.

Another way of looking at the less/fewer argument is that using 'less' for
countable nouns is actually more logical, because it's more regular:

  o  We get less flour now for the same amount of money.

  o  We get fewer vegetables now for the same amount of money.

  o  We get more flour now for the same amount of money.

  o  We get more vegetables now for the same amount of money.

These examples can only be regularised by using 'less' instead of
'fewer'... unless we invent more words for 'more'!

I'd say grammar Nazis just pick the arguments that suit their purpose, as
any hypocrite will do.

Having said all that, I certainly learned something from that article. I
didn't know this:

'For instance, there is a rule to how you order adjectives before a noun.
In English, adjectives describing size and shape generally come before
those describing age, which come before those describing colour, and then
place of origin, and so on. It would be very unusual to say "the old little
pot", instead of "the little old pot", unless there are two little pots and
you wanted to distinguish between the old one and the new one.'

What else don't I know? :\

Sandy Fleming

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From: Pat Barrett pbarrett at cox.net
Subject: LL-L "Grammar" 2014.03.21 (01) [EN]

I prefer Steven Pinker’s coinage, grammar mavens. Somonee illustrated the
problem nicely when I used it on a listserv by pointing out that a maven is
Yiddish for an expert. Precisely; and the humor of it is typically Yiddish.
It should sound: “And these are the mavens??????” with rising intonation on
‘these’. I have a list of books on prescriptive grammar and will be happy
to forward it to the list.
What surprised me about this thread on this list is the level of
sophistication I see in the understanding of language. On several listservs
for foreign language teachers I am on, only a few members out of thousands
have this level of understanding, as Steven Hanson so well relates it. If
we don’t like language change, why don’t we go back to using the preterite
plural forms the same way we do with was/were?
I have to admit, Ted, your notion that language tends to flow downhill and
spreads out, etc., is unclear to me. If you mean that a speech community
loses coherence if people do not follow grammar rules, you have to specify
what sort of rules you mean; if the grammar maven rules, such a thing has
never happened. If you mean the rules that underlie our unconscious use of
language, then the channeling would occur by interaction within the speech
community, e.g here in Arizona, U.S., the dialects spoken by settlers from
back East smoothed off their edges for mutual communication, an entirely
unconscious process. Conversely, as speech communities drift away from each
other, natural changes do not occur In the same way and the speech diverges
into dialects. An example would be the Englishes Roger Lass writes about,
forms of English that differ enough from each other to be noted but still
mutually intelligible, South African English and New Zealand English, for
example. How do we channel them? Good question.

An article from an on-line blog, About.Com Grammar & Composition discussed
the David Foster Wallace article (see below) and asked the following:
“But how do *you* define your interest in language? Are you a fan of Lynne
Truss's *Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to
Punctuation* (2004),
or do you feel more at home with David Crystal's *The Fight for English:
How Language Pundits Ate, Shot, and Left* (2007)? Are you inclined to fuss
at a child who uses "ain't," or are you more interested in finding out that
until the 19th century in both England and America "ain't" was an
acceptable usage?”

The only grammar maven who has written well about this is the late
acclaimed author, David Foster Wallace, who says his family played the game
of finding other people’s usage errors and called themselves “snoots” for
doing so. The most excellent article, quite long, is here in pdf:

http://harpers.org/wp-content/uploads/HarpersMagazine-2001-04-0070913.pdf

Should you have trouble with that, it is accessible from the Harper’s
Magazine site:

http://harpers.org/blog/2008/09/david-foster-wallace/

I would urge anyone who believes there must be rules to read this; it will
both comfort and challenge you.
Pat Barrett

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