Snow

Tue Mar 3 23:37:32 UTC 2009

Herb,
The same thing happened with the -ing vs. the -in ending on
participles.  In Britain, anyway, true upper-class varieties retained
-in  (assuming it's the descendant of -inde/-ende) until the 20c.
(Edward VII is reported to ask some sloppy-looking associate of his,
"Yolu goin' rattin'?"), though the upper-middle-class used the
spelling pronunciation/merger with the gerund ending, known from ME
on) with -ing.  At one conference I attended in the '80s, Bill Labov
showed us that we all use -in more frequently in the old participial
uses than gerundive or derived noun uses, so technically, even with
StdE speakers today, it's still a "near-merger" with overlap.

Paul Johnston

On Mar 3, 2009, at 6:15 PM, Herb Stahlke wrote:

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> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Herb Stahlke <hfwstahlke at GMAIL.COM>
> Subject:      Re: Snow
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
> ---------
>
> Just a couple of quibbles with Jonathan's eminently sensible and
> well-argued posting.
>
> The split infinitive was not one of those 18th c. Latinate
> prohibitions.  David Mulroy notes in his The War against Grammar
> (Boynton/Cook 2003) that the first reference to a prohibition on split
> infinitives is in the 1860s, not as recent as PAP, but still not too
> old.  Wrong-headed, yes.
>
> The other is on the status of ain't.  That was, Jonathan suggests, an
> 18th c. prescriptivist screed.  Those grammars and self-help books
> were aimed at people trying to climb up into the middle class and
> higher, and the authors, who often didn't know themselves how the
> nobility and upper classes spoke, did pretty much what prescriptivists
> do today, made it up as they went along.  However, as late as the
> 1930s, Dorothy Sayers has her noble characters using ain't freely.
> It's no longer common among the upper classes but that was a 20th c.
> change.  The nobility never bothered to read the self-help books and
> so never got the advice against using ain't.
>
> Herb
>
> On Tue, Mar 3, 2009 at 5:39 PM, Jonathan Lighter
> <wuxxmupp2000 at gmail.com> wrote:
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>> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
>> Poster:       Jonathan Lighter <wuxxmupp2000 at GMAIL.COM>
>> Subject:      Re: Snow
>> ---------------------------------------------------------------------
>> ----------
>>
>> There are crucial differences between most kinds of linguistic study
>> and mathematics or the physical sciences.
>>
>> Mathematics and physical science demand objective proofs (or at least
>> falsifiable results). This necessity has led to methodological
>> standards
>> that must be rigorously adhered to if the results are to be accepted.
>>
>> Language, as I tell my introductory linguistics students, isn't
>> like math or
>> science. In fact, it isn't much like *anything* else.  As I said
>> before,
>> it's psychological rather than purely logical.
>>
>> Even the question of "standards" is misleadingly simple, partly
>> because
>> generations of many generations of schoolteachers misinformed
>> their pupils
>> about the nature of language in general and of English in
>> particular. At
>> first they insisted that English be made to conform as much as
>> possible to
>> Classical Latin. Why? Because Latin was more complicated (and
>> "therefore"
>> more "precise") and because it was a much older language (and
>> "therefore" had undergone less "decay" from some Edenic ideal).
>> To be
>> entirely consistent, they should have insisted that English model
>> itself
>> on Hebrew, but with so few English pedagogues who were fluent in
>> Hebrew,
>> Latin was accepted as a solid compromise. (They did have to be
>> practical.)
>>
>> Some people are still terrified of splitting an infinitive.  Why
>> were they
>> instructed not to? Because Roman writers did not split Latin
>> infinitives.
>> The reason they didn't, however, is that Latin infinitives are
>> composed of a
>> single word and it's impossible to split them.  This is not the
>> sort of rule
>> that has anything to do with the internal logic of English, which
>> often
>> encourages you to split infinitives for the sake of clarity or
>> emphasis.
>>
>> The obsession with English as a debased form of Latin eventually
>> passed, but
>> its soul kept marching on. That soul was the belief that English
>> could be
>> "improved" through the observance of innumerable subtle principles
>> that
>> often seemed "logical" in the abstract but whose "logic" was not
>> always
>> sufficiently obvious to be adopted by the millions of native
>> speakers of
>> English. Take "ain't."  From the pedagogical point of view,
>> "ain't" had
>> several strikes against it.  Unlike "don't" and "isn't," it was not
>> transparently a contraction of anything (and well into the nineteenth
>> century all contractions were rather frowned upon). Furthermore,
>> since it
>> can be used with any person (I, you, etc. ain't) it "obscured
>> grammatical
>> distinctions," something that was supposed to be ruinous for your
>> mind as
>> well as for your language. People who like to judge such things
>> sometimes said it had an "ugly" sound. Strike four was the perception
>> (correct or not - it's impossible to say) that the vast majority
>> of people
>> who used "ain't" were ignorant, illiterate rustics; dangerous,
>> illiterate
>> slum dwellers; and social climbers stupid enough to give away their
>> hereditary boorishness by saying "ain't."  In other words, lunkheads.
>>
>> Now consider this. The war against "ain't" has been going for well
>> over 200
>> years. With interesting results.  On the one hand, the absolute
>> number of
>> "ain't"-sayers in the world has undoubtedly exploded from what it
>> was in,
>> say, 1790, when the population of the U.S. was under three
>> million. On the
>> other, the taboo against using "ain't" in formal writing has been
>> so thoroughly accepted that in twenty-odd years of teaching I
>> don't think I
>> saw a single freshman, no matter how benighted otherwise, use it
>> seriously
>> in a theme. And I never told them not to, because they already knew.
>>
>> Let me make my major point and go away. There are many different
>> "standards"
>> applicable to a language. Possibly the most obvious is the
>> distinction
>> between what's "acceptable" in speech and what's "acceptable" in
>> writing. In
>> speech, any locution seems to be functionally acceptable to the
>> world at
>> large if it is perfectly understandable and if it does not incite
>> violence.
>> In writing, it is acceptable to the university-educated community
>> of readers
>> and writers if it is perfectly understandable. not obviously
>> illogical, not
>> ridiculously or distractingly novel, and not associated with
>> lunkheads.  If
>> you believe I'm belaboring this "lunkhead" idea, think about it.
>> Writing
>> that seems to have originated with a stranger whose command of
>> spelling (not
>> an issue in speech), vocabulary, punctuation (not an issue in
>> speech),
>> syntax, etc., is much less than perfect in the eyes of his
>> audience is
>> likely to be utterly unpersuasive. That stranger appears to be too
>> feckless
>> to have learned how to "write" like an educated person.
>>
>> In speech there are regional standards, social expectations, and
>> on and on.
>> Why do Northerners sing pop songs with fake Southern accents and
>> nobody
>> seems to notice? Because it's become a "standard" feature.  It can be
>> explained historically but not justified logically.  As we've
>> discussed here
>> recently, if "decimare" in Latin meant "to execute every tenth
>> one" (one of
>> those unsplittable infinitives) must to "decimate" in English be
>> confined to
>> an identical meaning?  And if so, how can we enforce our
>> decision?  Or any
>> decision like it that the public doesn't feel like honoring?
>>
>> An astronomer who thinks "Jupiter" is really called "Venus" will
>> not keep
>> his position long because other astronomers won't stand for it.  If
>> people talk of Marines as soldiers, who can stop them? (I agree
>> that a
>> professional journalist should be held to a higher standard, but
>> most people
>> are not journalists.)
>>
>> So what is "right" and what is "wrong" in English usage?  Usage
>> ultimately
>> decides; that's how we got from Beowulf's English to here.  One
>> may prod and
>> protest, but common usage always wins out.
>>
>> One more word. The popular belief about English in general being
>> at risk of
>> "decay" in any meaningful sense of  the word is nonsense.  People
>> have
>> always made blunders that don't stick; the ones that do stick and
>> spread
>> become "normal" and the system adjusts elsewhere to retain
>> clarity. By the
>> principle of "decay," Shakespeare and Chaucer were much poorer
>> writers than
>> Bede because Will and Geoff didn't use his presumably "purer" Old
>> English.
>> If English hasn't produced a later writer as great as Shakespeare
>> (and
>> "greatness" cannot be measured mathematically), blame
>> Shakespeare's genius,
>> not the supposed "decay" of English.
>>
>> JL
>>
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