different to and from

[Loren A. Billings]

On 12/13/07 3:41 AM, "Martin Votruba" <votruba+ at PITT.EDU> wrote:

> Perhaps not, Loren, but the difference between British and American
> English is still striking, meaning the instances that you quote (a
> valid caveat) cannot be more than 3.9% if all of the British
> occurrences were only of that type, which is not likely -- it is
> quite improbable that saying _but they're different to me_ would be
> dramatically more common in the US than in the UK.

Sorry, Martin, but I'm a bit confused. The only "3.9" I found in the
statistics that Alina cites is for _different than_ (spoken UK).

Nor do I doubt these stats. I'm just curious about exactly what they say.
Are they are raw co-occurrences (say, what you get when you type in these
two words in the second row of Google's advanced-search page) or is _to_
part of the complement of _different_?

More generally, I was quite impressed with the Columbia excerpt (about the
choice between _different from_ and _different than_). If I were a Slav
wanting to get the lowdown on what is considered acceptable in English (in
this instance, specifically American) speech or writing, I think it would be
useful to know that one combination (namely, _different from_) is
diachronically receding and the other is emerging. If, on the other hand,
the original request is just to have a single answer for each thing, then we
may wish to educate that person in the way that languages change.

I also think that one should not rely on a single source for any issue.
Recently, I've been co-editing a book; our publisher favors the Chicago
Manual of Style. I've found it to be very useful with lots of situations:
(ranging from whether to punctuate _mid_ followed by space or a hyphen to
things like _different than_). Still, the other things such as journalistic
products (e.g., by the Associated Press) or the old stand-bys (Strunk &
White comes to mind) are useful, if only to see the array of sentiment.

In this connection, moving to Slavic data, Horace Lunt, professor emeritus
of the Harvard Slavic Dept., gave a keynote talk at a conference at the
University of Oregon ten years ago. He railed against the use of _do_  'to'
(plus genitive case) in Russian time expressions if the duration extends
until the very end of that period. For example, _do avgusta_ 'to august'
should not be used, Prof. Lunt, contended, if the duration extends until the
end of that month, not just some point within that 31-day period. In such
contexts, he argued, _po_ 'through' (plus accusative case _avgust_) should
be used. I too prefer the use _po_ in such situations. It think it's more
effective, in that it says more about the end of the duration. However, I
think it also useful to know that people no longer use it much. Thus, I
probably wouldn't use _po_ (+ ACC) in time expressions in spoken, less
formal situations. I would have preferred it if Prof. Lunt had mentioned the
issue of _po_ with a more disintrested, scientific stance. Still, his candor
(and like sentiments one often hears from mother-tongue speakers of Slavic
languages) can allow the rest of us to take mental notes hypothesize about
how the language(s) may be changing.

Regarding how prescriptive Slavs can be, and whether it's even worth doing
descriptive linguistics in those languages, I recommend the following:

Comrie, Bernard. 1997. "Formal approaches to Slavic languages: Achievements
and limitations." In Wayles Browne, et al. (eds.), _Annual Workshop on
Formal Approaches to Slavic Linguistics: The Cornell meeting 1995_ (Michigan
Slavic Materials, 39). Ann Arbor: Michigan Slavic Publications, 165-182.

My two cents worth, --Loren

-- 

Loren A. Billings, Ph.D.
Associate professor of linguistics
Department of Foreign Languages and Literature
National Chi Nan University
Puli, Nantou County 545 Taiwan

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