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

[Morrus]

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.

I think the problem here is that everybody is looking at it as a binary issue. They are either on the "Language should be standard" side of the fence or on the "Language evolves" side of the fence, neither of which really represents reality.

Language does evolve; we are not talking in 12th century English (or in Latin, for that matter - or the grunts of a caveman). However, that doesn't mean that there is no such thing as bad English.

The reality is that language does have standards, but that those standards are what changes or evolves. You can imagine the standards as two markers on a long line which represents the language as a whole. At any point in time, you can place two markers on that line and say that any language between those markers is OK, and any outside them is bad.

Of course, each of us will place the markers in different places. We'll all agree that a certain area of the line is definitely within the markers, but some will say that those markers are a little further apart than others. As time goes on, those markers both move together along the line - eventually what was indisputably right in the middle of the markers is on the edge of the space defined; and for some people, who place the markers a little closer together, it's now outside them.

So both are true. Yes, language evolves. But also yes, there is such a thing as bad English. There's a grey area - not two polar opposites of evolution and static standards.

 

[Caedrel]

Re: Chinese

I hadn't realised that Chinese language pictorgrams contained cues (albeit slight) as to the pronunciation of thew word - I had thought that it was more of a clue about the meaning of the word, as there were a number of basic signs that often appeared as components of other, related signs.

Do the verbal cues apply to other dialects of Chinese? It sounds like the 10/90 case is applicable to Mandarin, but my understanding is that while Mandarin has 4 inflections for a given sound, Cantonese has 8 - would the utility of the cues drop to more like 5/95 in that case?

I like Morrus' point, but perhaps "bad" is too provocative a word - still, I don't really see how "poorly constructed" English is much better.

Pielorinho, colon critique accepted - I wasn't too happy with the first example either, but at least it wasn't ambiguous and communicated exactly my intent How about dashes? I tend to use them a lot, at least when I can get a decent en-dash or em-dash instead of the wussy hyphen

Woo hoo! Page 4 on language - can we reach page 5?

 

[tarchon]

Re: Re: Chinese

I hadn't realised that Chinese language pictorgrams contained cues (albeit slight) as to the pronunciation of thew word - I had thought that it was more of a clue about the meaning of the word, as there were a number of basic signs that often appeared as components of other, related signs.

Do the verbal cues apply to other dialects of Chinese? It sounds like the 10/90 case is applicable to Mandarin, but my understanding is that while Mandarin has 4 inflections for a given sound, Cantonese has 8 - would the utility of the cues drop to more like 5/95 in that case?

They actually didn't originate in Mandarin but in much earlier forms of Chinese. Thing is, all the Chinese languages ("dialects") share a common origin and thus show regular consonant transformations between their roots. Therefore the sound correspondences have tended to persist, except when a wholly different root gets assigned to a character, which does happen sometimes. In the early phases of the writing system, phonetic similarity was a dominant principle for associating characters with words, as is usually the case in logographic systems, but time has eroded the regularity of the principle.
I don't know much Cantonese, but I wouldn't be surprised if the phonetic correspondences are even more consistent in it, since it tends to be more phonetically conservative than Mandarin.

 

[Pielorinho]

The reality is that language does have standards, but that those standards are what changes or evolves. You can imagine the standards as two markers on a long line which represents the language as a whole. At any point in time, you can place two markers on that line and say that any language between those markers is OK, and any outside them is bad.

I sort of agree with you here. THere is such a thing as bad English. When I worked as a writing tutor, one fellow who fancied himself a poet would write sentences like, "My ear was provoked by the sounds which were made like whispers over and over by the depraved river." That's a poor example -- his sentences were really much worse than that.

After he described a river as "depraved," I asked him if he knew what the word meant. He laughed scornfully at me ("silly tutor-man!") and said of course he knew. I made him look it up in a dictionary. When he saw that he was describing the river as "wickedly perverse," he realized that no, in fact, he didn't know what the word meant.

That, I say, is bad English. It's inefficient: I have to read a sentence several times to realize what it's saying ("I heard the constant whispers of the polluted river.") It's unbeautiful. It's clunky. It's bad.

On the other hand, if I say, "Irregardless of his bad writing, he was a very nice fellow," you'll know exactly what I mean, even if it makes you cringe. You don't have to read the sentence several times. It's efficient (though it may be, to your eyes, unbeautiful). I don't think it's necessarily bad English.

I do realize it's not standard English. If I'm writing a $15,000 grant to equip our animal shelter with surgical equipment, you can bet your bananas I'm not going to use "irregardless" in the grant application. I also won't use "OTOH," "y'all," or "clunky."

But in terms of using the language for its primary purpose -- communication -- I think words like "irregardless" are peachy-keen.

Daniel

 

[alsih2o]

yeah, nothing draws in the posters like discussions of morality and proper punctuation

 

[ichabod]

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

There is a certain ammount of information you need to learn a language. You need the declensions of verbs, the structure of grammar, case endings, vocuabulary, and so on. Chomsky showed that children growing up in an environment where a language was spoken do not recieve enough such information to account for how well they spoke the language. This strongly implies that there is something in the wiring of the brain that facilitates the learning of language.

 

[Tiefling]

You're saying that they don't pick that stuff up by listening to others?

 

[Heathen72]

For all you lovers of language out there

World Wide Words

Lots of great words can be found here (particularly in the weird word section, such as:

petrichor
Etaoin Shrdlu
palimpsest
floccinaucinihiliplification
will- o'-the-wisp
petard

Its a great resource for writers, and a wonderful source of ideas for for GMs, too.
Check it out

 

[ichabod]

You're saying that they don't pick that stuff up by listening to others?

Some, but not enough to account for how much of the language they learn.

 

[Marius Delphus]

Along the Chomsky vein is the book "The Language Instinct" by Steven Pinker. Pinker (as Chomsky before him) claims the ability to learn language structure may be intrinsic to humans in early childhood (we lose most of this ability before entering puberty, goes the theory; one reason children are much more capable of picking up second languages than adults).

There is another thread of language philosophy/linguistics that holds Chomsky and company (including Pinker) are blowing a lot of hot air and have no empirical data to back up their claims. The book "Educating Eve" by Geoffrey Sampson is cited as an explication of this point of view.

Just a friendly research reminder. (Also, make use of those bibliographies!)