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L O W L A N D S - L - 22 March 2014 - Volume 01<br><a href="mailto:lowlands.list@gmail.com" target="_blank">lowlands.list@gmail.com</a> - <a href="http://lowlands-l.net/" target="_blank">http://lowlands-l.net/</a><br>Posting: <a href="mailto:lowlands-l@listserv.linguistlist.org" target="_blank">lowlands-l@listserv.linguistlist.org</a><br>
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<font color="#000000" face="arial, helvetica, sans-serif"><br></font></div><div style="font-family:arial,sans-serif;font-size:12px;margin:0in 0in 0pt"><div style="font-size:12.727272033691406px">From: <span name="Mustafa Umut Sarac" class="" style="font-size:12.727272033691406px">Mustafa Umut Sarac</span><span style="white-space:nowrap"> </span><span class="" style="white-space:nowrap"><a href="mailto:mustafaumutsarac@gmail.com">mustafaumutsarac@gmail.com</a></span><br>
Subject: <span style="white-space:nowrap">LL-L "Grammar" 2014.03.21 (02) [EN]</span></div><div style="font-size:12.727272033691406px"><span style="white-space:nowrap"><br></span><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0in 0in 0.0001pt;font-size:12pt;font-family:'Times New Roman',serif">
<span style="font-family:arial,sans-serif;font-size:12.727272033691406px">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.</span><br>
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<span style="color:rgb(136,136,136);font-family:arial,sans-serif;font-size:12.727272033691406px">Umut</span><span style="font-family:arial,sans-serif;font-size:12.727272033691406px"><br></span></p></div><div style="font-size:12.727272033691406px">
<br></div><div style="font-size:12.727272033691406px">----------</div><div style="font-size:12.727272033691406px"><br></div><div style="font-size:12.727272033691406px">From: <span name="Sandy Fleming" class="" style="font-size:12.727272033691406px">Sandy Fleming</span><span style="white-space:nowrap"> </span><span class="" style="white-space:nowrap"><a href="mailto:sandy@scotstext.org">sandy@scotstext.org</a></span><br>
Subject: <span style="white-space:nowrap">LL-L "Grammar" 2014.03.21 (02) [EN]</span></div><div style="font-size:12.727272033691406px"><br></div><div style="font-size:12.727272033691406px">> From: R. F. Hahn <<a href="mailto:sassisch@yahoo.com" target="_blank">sassisch@yahoo.com</a>><br>
> Subject: Grammar<br>><br>> Dear Lowlanders,<br>><br>> Some of you may be interested in an article published in The<br>> Telegraph<<a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/" target="_blank">http://www.telegraph.co.uk/</a>>today:<br>
><br>> "Are Grammar Nazis Ruining the English<br>> Language?"<<a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/10692897/Are-grammar-Nazis" target="_blank">http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/10692897/Are-grammar-Nazis</a><br>
> -ruining-the-English-language.html><br>><br>> "Guardians" or "Nazis"? What are *your* opinions?<br><br>I wouldn't emphasise so much the difference between 'formal' and 'informal' English, as the difference between 'spoken' and 'written' English.<br>
<br>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.<br><br>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.<br>
<br>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.<br>
<br>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:<br><br> o We get less flour now for the same amount of money.<br>
<br> o We get fewer vegetables now for the same amount of money.<br><br> o We get more flour now for the same amount of money.<br><br> o We get more vegetables now for the same amount of money.<br><br>These examples can only be regularised by using 'less' instead of 'fewer'... unless we invent more words for 'more'!<br>
<br>I'd say grammar Nazis just pick the arguments that suit their purpose, as any hypocrite will do.<br><br>Having said all that, I certainly learned something from that article. I didn't know this:<br><br>'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.'<br>
<br>What else don't I know? :\<br></div><div style="font-size:12.727272033691406px"><br></div><div style="font-size:12.727272033691406px"><span style="color:rgb(136,136,136)">Sandy Fleming</span><br></div></div><div style="font-family:arial,sans-serif;font-size:12px">
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</font></p><p style="text-align:left;font-family:arial,sans-serif;font-size:12px;margin:0in 0in 0pt"><span style="font-size:12.727272033691406px">From: </span><span name="Pat Barrett" class="" style="font-size:12.727272033691406px">Pat Barrett</span><span style="font-size:12.727272033691406px;white-space:nowrap"> </span><span class="" style="font-size:12.727272033691406px;white-space:nowrap"><a href="mailto:pbarrett@cox.net">pbarrett@cox.net</a></span><br style="font-size:12.727272033691406px">
<span style="font-size:12.727272033691406px">Subject: </span><span style="font-size:12.727272033691406px;white-space:nowrap">LL-L "Grammar" 2014.03.21 (01) [EN]</span><font color="#000000" face="arial, helvetica, sans-serif"><br>
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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.</div>
<div style="font-family:Calibri;font-size:16.363636016845703px">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?</div>
<div style="font-family:Calibri;font-size:16.363636016845703px">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.</div>
<div style="font-family:Calibri;font-size:16.363636016845703px"> </div><div style="font-family:Calibri;font-size:16.363636016845703px"><font face="Times New Roman">An article from an on-line blog, About.Com Grammar & Composition discussed the David Foster Wallace article (see below) and asked the following:</font></div>
<div style="font-family:Calibri;font-size:16.363636016845703px"><font face="Times New Roman">“But how do <i>you</i> define your interest in language? Are you a fan of Lynne Truss's <i>Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation</i> (2004), or do you feel more at home with David Crystal's <i>The Fight for English: How Language Pundits Ate, Shot, and Left</i> (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?”</font></div>
<div style="font-family:Calibri;font-size:16.363636016845703px"><font face="Times New Roman"></font> </div><div style="font-family:Calibri;font-size:16.363636016845703px"><font face="Times New Roman">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:</font></div>
<div style="font-family:Calibri;font-size:16.363636016845703px"><font face="Times New Roman"></font> </div><div style="font-family:Calibri;font-size:16.363636016845703px"><a title="http://harpers.org/wp-content/uploads/HarpersMagazine-2001-04-0070913.pdf" href="http://harpers.org/wp-content/uploads/HarpersMagazine-2001-04-0070913.pdf" target="_blank">http://harpers.org/wp-content/uploads/HarpersMagazine-2001-04-0070913.pdf</a></div>
<div style="font-family:Calibri;font-size:16.363636016845703px"> </div><div style="font-family:Calibri;font-size:16.363636016845703px">Should you have trouble with that, it is accessible from the Harper’s Magazine site:</div>
<div style="font-family:Calibri;font-size:16.363636016845703px"> </div><div style="font-family:Calibri;font-size:16.363636016845703px"><a title="http://harpers.org/blog/2008/09/david-foster-wallace/" href="http://harpers.org/blog/2008/09/david-foster-wallace/" target="_blank">http://harpers.org/blog/2008/09/david-foster-wallace/</a></div>
<div style="font-family:Calibri;font-size:16.363636016845703px"> </div><div style="font-family:Calibri;font-size:16.363636016845703px">I would urge anyone who believes there must be rules to read this; it will both comfort and challenge you.</div>
<div style="font-family:Calibri;font-size:16.363636016845703px">Pat Barrett</div><p style="text-align:center;font-family:arial,sans-serif;font-size:12px;margin:0in 0in 0pt"><font color="#000000" face="arial, helvetica, sans-serif"><br>
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