Heard on the Olympics broadcast

[Wilson Gray]

My vote goes to "a very high level of linguistic [and social]
naivete," such as that found among those who vote for "English Only"
with one hand while voting against using "our hard-earned taxes" to
fund TESOL with the other.

-Wilson

On Sun, Aug 10, 2008 at 4:17 PM,  <RonButters at aol.com> wrote:
> ---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       RonButters at AOL.COM
> Subject:      Heard on the Olympics broadcast
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> Well, yeah, if one has never studied a major European language (other than
> Modern English) of the past or present, one may find surprising the concept that
> agreement-in-grammatical-gender overrides agreement-in-sex. But every high
> school student who has ever studied German knows that a girl is neuter in that
> language. And many a high-school boy has surely chuckled about the information
> that in Spanish his hand takes a feminine adjective (despite the -o ending)
> and that the pope is described with the feminine form of the adjective. Even
> English has long been described prescriptively as a language in which one should
> write of a generic high-school English teacher "the teacher ... he" even
> though most such persons were women.
>
> The arbitrariness of the linguistic sign is one of the first things taugtht
> in Intro to Linguistics. Being horrified that Russian treats "chelovek" as
> masculine even if the person is a woman would require a very high level of
> linguistic naivete--or perhaps a very high level of slavophobia.
>
> In a message dated 8/10/08 3:57:19 PM, hwgray at GMAIL.COM writes:
>
>
>> What might be useful is a return the study of other languages as
>> primarily an intellectual exercise. The fuller story is that only
>> those students at the Language School who had not had any previous
>> experience of a language with (true) grammatical gender had their
>> minds blown by the fact that, in Russian, if a nominal has grammatical
>> gender G, then all adjectives modifying that nominal must exhibit that
>> same feature, even when the nominal is a Predicate Nominative of
>> gender G referring to a Subject Nominative of gender H.
>>
>
>
>
>
> **************
> Looking for a car that's sporty, fun and fits in your budget?
> Read reviews on AOL Autos.
>
> (http://autos.aol.com/cars-BMW-128-2008/expert-review?ncid=aolaut00050000000017 )
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------
> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
>



--
All say, "How hard it is that we have to die"---a strange complaint to
come from the mouths of people who have had to live.
-----
 -Sam'l Clemens

------------------------------------------------------------
The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org