[OT, grammar and punctuation] Use of commas in US and British style?

[Ranes]

I've been away for a couple of days but wanted to respond to this.

An apostrophe denotes possession or omission. In the word "can't", the apostrophe stands for the missing letters "no" in "cannot". In the same way, the apostrophe "s" after an initialisation can represent the omitted letters between the capital and the terminal "s". So in the case of "NPC's", the apostrophe can be a substitution for the missing letters in "Characters".

Of course an apostrophe can denote missing characters but you get into a mess when you apply that usage to abbreviations. Historically, abbreviations required full stops (periods, if you prefer). N.P.C. would once have been the correct way to write that abbreviation. Apostrophes would not have been used to denote missing characters (there was never a time when N'P'C's would have been correct). Now, even use of periods in such circumstances is generally considered archaic; even ie, eg and etc no longer demand their usage.

Abbreviated words like phone, for telephone, would have been given an apostrophe, thus: 'phone. We don't do it any more, thank goodness (in fact, such usage was always rare, even in formal, academic application). Outside their use in denoting possessives, apostrophes now only denote letters missed in concatonation, where two words are conjoined and certain letters omitted, as you illustrated with your own examples. Using them in abbreviations just muddies the waters. You said it yourself; you are forced to justify the existence of the apostrophe by context. Even then, the rule you're applying doesn't make much sense. An apostrophe can be used to denote characters missing from the last word of an abbreviated phrase? I don't think so and I would defy anyone to point to a house style guide in use anywhere that says otherwise. (Pointing me in the direction of semi-literate marketing materials doesn't count.)

 

[Aaron L]

N'P'C?

Sounds Klingon to me.

 

[Morrus]

I believe it's a strong English dialect spoken by some African-Americans and related in grammar to some-African-language-or-other.

Ah, OK. We don't have any African-Americans here in England (well, except for tourists). Sounds complicated.

 

[pensiv]

Are French, Italian, Spanish, Romanian, Portuguese, etc. "bad" Latin?

The English words captain, chief, and chef were each adopted from French in three different periods of the French language. The words each descend from the Latin word caput.

Captain has a hard 'c' and a sound that we write as 'p.' As time went on, French speaking habits changed in a way that many people have expressed here as being the wrong way to speak. The velar stop, represented in captain by the letter 'c' shifted pronunciation into a dental fricative, represented by the 'ch' in chief. Another metamorphosis undergone during that time was the shifting of the labial stop 'p' into the labio-dental fricative 'f.' Finally, the dental fricative represented by the 'ch' in chief softened into the alveolar-palatal fricative 'ch' of chef and the vowel 'ie' in chief relaxed into the 'e' of chef.

This sort of thing happens every day and is the natural drift of language. As people continue to mispronounce words, new languages start to form. If you want it any other way, you could always go back to simple pointing and grunting to communicate.

 

[tarchon]

Ah, OK. We don't have any African-Americans here in England (well, except for tourists). Sounds complicated.

Once I was channel surfing and ran into a speech on the evils of colonialism, in which I learned of the oppression of "African-Americans in Africa." It brought to mind the travails of a Chicago-born half-Copt friend of mine while trying to be recognized as an African-American for scholarship purposes.

 

[RangerWickett]

'Ebonics' is the term a few scholars came up with to refer to the common dialect of English used by a lot of black people in the United States. Aside from sparking a controversy over whether people should be allowed to officially claim it as a language, the goal of defining Ebonics was to help teachers better educate black students who were having trouble speaking standard English.

I went to a 90% black high school, so I was exposed to the dialect a lot, but sadly over the past few years since I graduated, my ability to recall what it sounds like has deteriorated. It mostly consists of changing the way verbs are conjugated, especially with helping verbs.

I'm probably getting this wrong, but some examples would be:

"You done pissed me off." Meaning, "You have pissed me off."

"I be going to the store." Meaning, "I am going to the store."

Also, sometimes words are just pronounced differently, like saying "I wanna aks you a question."

Overall it's not really hard to understand in its most basic forms, but when combined with a huge amount of slang, it can be somewhat hard to understand it being spoken.

 

[Pielorinho]

I believe it's a strong English dialect spoken by some African-Americans and related in grammar to some-African-language-or-other.

As I remember the story, the term was coined by a teacher at a primarily Black school in California, whose students were having real trouble in English classes. "Standard" English (what I like to call bourgeoinics) was so different from what her students heard at home and in everyday life that it was almost like studying a foreign language for them.

The teacher realized that there was a lot of money available for ESL (English as a Second Language) students, and so she applied for some of that money, claiming that her students' native tongue was Ebonics.

A word, and a controversy, was born from this little trick.

It's been about nine years or so since the controversy; my apologies if I'm misremembering some of the details.

Daniel

 

[Maerdwyn]

An intersting analysis of the 1996 Berkeley School Board Ebonics Resolution:

http://www.cal.org/ebonics/ebfillmo.html

 

[ichabod]

ichabod - no, not really. In fact language is one of those things that isn't particularly hard-wired at all. Hence the reason that a kid can be taught a second language quite easily while an adult will have a significantly harder time.

Yes, really. It has been shown (read Chomsky) that the amount of information a child recieves growing up is not sufficient to teach the child language. That means there must be something in the wiring of the brain that facilitates the learning of language. And the fact that adults have a harder time learning second languages is futher evidence. That is, there are changes in the brain as humans mature which remove some of the qualities that make language easy to learn.

Language doesn't change rapidly because there are forces to stop it changing rapidly. People correcting you when you misuse it for instance. If noone corrects you when you speak or spell improperly, you will continue to speak or spell improperly.

Language doesn't change rapidly because it wouldn't be useful if it did. But it does change, and you can't stop it. If it didn't change, we'd all be speaking Old English, or proto-Indo-European.

And how do you decide what is improper? What you understand, someone else may not, and vice versa. Which of you gets to decide what is right? Do we let some stuffy professors in an English university decide? Why?

The fact of the matter is, what is proper is what native speakers of english think is proper. And as it matters what the individual thinks, there will be variation.

From what I've read, the debate about ebonics is as follows:
1) Ebonics is a dialect
2) It is difficult for traditional english speakers, which far outnumber the users of ebonics, to understand.
3) It is widely considered "bad english"

Personally, given the aim of a common language, which is to communicate ideas, if 2) is true, then so is 3). If your variations on a language are sufficient that you cannot make yourself understandable, you are no longer speaking the language. If the majority of english speakers nowadays used ancient english, then modern english would be considered "bad english".

Just because it is widely considered bad english doesn't mean it is. Truth is not the same thing as public opinion. As I said, dialects are rarely called such for scientific reasons. People speaking Chinese "dialects" often have a harder time understanding each other than some people speaking different northern European "languages."

What you are advocating is a proscriptive approach to language. But language is not something some guy invented. It grew and evolved, and continues to evolve. A proscriptive approach is like deciding that heavier objects fall faster, and then when they don't, calling it "bad physics." You can say that ebonics is not the same as standard english, but to say it is bad is to apply a subjective, pejorative term to an objective reality. It's like saying people who have red hair have bad hair because most people don't have red hair.

 

[Tiefling]

It has been shown (read Chomsky) that the amount of information a child recieves growing up is not sufficient to teach the child language.

I'm not quite sure what this means. Could you explain/re-word/whatever?