One of the things that bugs me is that people are using an apostrophe as a marker for the plural. So, it's one boy, two boy's. What bugs me is that I can't see a reason for it. Most language change in English represents a streamlining of the syntax (Thaes cyninges becomes of the king. Trust me, it's a streamlining) or vocabulary (taxicabriolet becomes either taxi or cab). If we look at some dialects of English, we can see this in operation. In one dialect, you can say "The boys," but "The two boy," leaving off the "s" altogether, since it's redundant. With such a streamlining, I'll predict that nouns will become regular in form, so that eventually we would have one sheep and two sheeps. It's already that way for cow. We no longer speak much of cattle, but of cows. The same is true for non-count nouns (nouns that are usually not pluralized). When we speak of coffee, for instance, we get the awkward, "cup of coffee," designation, since coffee is not regularly pluralized in the sense of "a brewed beverage." But that's changing, isn't it. We say, "Two coffees," meaning "two cups of coffee."
Purists, of course, grind their tooths at this. They're the ones who think that contact has no place as a verb and that we're getting sloppy and losing our ability to think and dropping several dozen IQ points.
Not so, of course. Except for boy's as a plural. I can't buy that.
Friday, August 29, 2008
Monday, August 25, 2008
The Gnomes in the Dictionary Place
Ever wonder who makes the rules of grammar? They are not absolute, you know, even if Miss Fidditch, your fifth-grade English teacher, made it seem that way. They do change. So, who does the changing? The dictionary weasels out of any responsibility by putting the onus for change on 'the best writers." Okay, but who are they and who decides that they are the 'best?" If it's popularity, then Star Trek beats Rigoletto hands down.
It seems to be the case that the people who decide who the best writers are are also the people who decide what words to use and also seem to be (strangely enough) the same best writers that were selected by, can you guess it, themselves.
I remember a quote from way back. I wish I could remember the source. It goes: "There are two kinds of people: the righteous and the unrighteous. The classifying is done by the righteous."
It's a self-feeding autocracy, folks, and I'm not part of it
For instance, not too long ago, as glaciers go, the Government Printing Office Style Manual (didn't know there was such a thing, did you?) made some changes in the way we do things. They eliminated the periods from a lot of abbreviations. The abbreviation for foot is now ft, without the period. So, who made the change and why wasn't I asked about it?
It seems to be the case that the people who decide who the best writers are are also the people who decide what words to use and also seem to be (strangely enough) the same best writers that were selected by, can you guess it, themselves.
I remember a quote from way back. I wish I could remember the source. It goes: "There are two kinds of people: the righteous and the unrighteous. The classifying is done by the righteous."
It's a self-feeding autocracy, folks, and I'm not part of it
For instance, not too long ago, as glaciers go, the Government Printing Office Style Manual (didn't know there was such a thing, did you?) made some changes in the way we do things. They eliminated the periods from a lot of abbreviations. The abbreviation for foot is now ft, without the period. So, who made the change and why wasn't I asked about it?
Friday, August 22, 2008
Speeling
A very close friend sent me a link to an article on spelling. Seems that several misspellings are becoming legitimate. One, so my friend said, was "seperate" (the real spelling is separate). I assume this will upset a great many people, who see such changes in spelling as moving from "correct" (please note the quotation marks) to "illiterate."
What such folks (and I sympathize with them in a couple of cases) don't realize is that this is not random. There are powerful linguistic forces driving these changes. There is a strong drive toward regularity, for instance. That's why we no longer say, "I boke a loaf of bread," or "Hang up your hosen." Also, there is a strong drive toward spellings that make sense, no easy task in a language like English, which is a 1500-year-old patchwork quilt. So, when people write seperate instead of separate, they do so because it makes sense. I applaud the move to make alright an acceptable alternative to all right. In two generations, alright will be favored and in five all right will be available only as "all okay."
This thing has been going on for centuries. People have been misspelling words and the misspellings have become standard. A napron became an apron. Hros became horse.
So, whose fault is it that we have so many words hard to spell? I blame three cultures: Rome, Greece, and France. Rome because it gave us so many odd plurals (the plural of stadium is still sometimes stadia). Ditto Greece (phenomenon, phenomena). French, you might say, is an outgrowth of Latin, so why put them by themselves? Two reasons. First, French is not descended from classical Latin, but from the bastard Latin spoken by illiterate, coarse, Roman soldiers. Second, a sizable chunk of our vocabulary came from France with his highness William, cognomen Bastardus, the Conqueror. And of course, no French word is spelled anywhere near the way it sounds, so there you have it.
What the people who misspell words are doing is kind of straightening out some historical bumps in the road. More power to them. Let's go to work on calendar, supersede, and all those annoying -ance/-ence and -ent/-ant words.
What such folks (and I sympathize with them in a couple of cases) don't realize is that this is not random. There are powerful linguistic forces driving these changes. There is a strong drive toward regularity, for instance. That's why we no longer say, "I boke a loaf of bread," or "Hang up your hosen." Also, there is a strong drive toward spellings that make sense, no easy task in a language like English, which is a 1500-year-old patchwork quilt. So, when people write seperate instead of separate, they do so because it makes sense. I applaud the move to make alright an acceptable alternative to all right. In two generations, alright will be favored and in five all right will be available only as "all okay."
This thing has been going on for centuries. People have been misspelling words and the misspellings have become standard. A napron became an apron. Hros became horse.
So, whose fault is it that we have so many words hard to spell? I blame three cultures: Rome, Greece, and France. Rome because it gave us so many odd plurals (the plural of stadium is still sometimes stadia). Ditto Greece (phenomenon, phenomena). French, you might say, is an outgrowth of Latin, so why put them by themselves? Two reasons. First, French is not descended from classical Latin, but from the bastard Latin spoken by illiterate, coarse, Roman soldiers. Second, a sizable chunk of our vocabulary came from France with his highness William, cognomen Bastardus, the Conqueror. And of course, no French word is spelled anywhere near the way it sounds, so there you have it.
What the people who misspell words are doing is kind of straightening out some historical bumps in the road. More power to them. Let's go to work on calendar, supersede, and all those annoying -ance/-ence and -ent/-ant words.
Thursday, August 21, 2008
Things Changing
Most of the obvious change in language is in the form of vocabulary. Words come in, words hang around for a couple of centuries, words go out (more slowly, 'cause the dictionaries keep them alive). But there are other changes taking place more slowly, but taking place nevertheless.
Syntax, or the study of sentence structures, is thought to be fairly stable. And it certainly is more stable than vocabulary. There have been some major syntactic changes in the past, though. For on thing, we've gone from being a language like German, which signals parts of speech with changes (Der Mann for a subject, Den Mann for a direct object) to a language which uses word order to establish meaning (Man bites dog and Dog bites man don't mean the same thing in English, but Der Mann beisst den Hund and Den Hund beisst der Mann do).
One of the interesting facets of this word order thing is that it sets up expectations in the minds of the readers/hearers. English is an SVO language. That is, we have a Subject, a Verb, and some sort of Object (Doesn't matter what kind, forget all that direct, indirect, objective complement, subjective complement stuff).
So, here's a short quiz. One of the following sentence forms is gradually disappearing. Which one?
A. I gave the book to Alice.
B. I gave Alice the book.
I have no hard data on this, naturally, but I'll bet the second one is the goner. Why? It's got the form S, V, IO, O (Indirect Object), which frustrates our expectations.
On the other hand, archaic forms are remarkably resistant to being killed, so it may well stay on for a while. Like ox, oxen (but not shoe, shoon)
Syntax, or the study of sentence structures, is thought to be fairly stable. And it certainly is more stable than vocabulary. There have been some major syntactic changes in the past, though. For on thing, we've gone from being a language like German, which signals parts of speech with changes (Der Mann for a subject, Den Mann for a direct object) to a language which uses word order to establish meaning (Man bites dog and Dog bites man don't mean the same thing in English, but Der Mann beisst den Hund and Den Hund beisst der Mann do).
One of the interesting facets of this word order thing is that it sets up expectations in the minds of the readers/hearers. English is an SVO language. That is, we have a Subject, a Verb, and some sort of Object (Doesn't matter what kind, forget all that direct, indirect, objective complement, subjective complement stuff).
So, here's a short quiz. One of the following sentence forms is gradually disappearing. Which one?
A. I gave the book to Alice.
B. I gave Alice the book.
I have no hard data on this, naturally, but I'll bet the second one is the goner. Why? It's got the form S, V, IO, O (Indirect Object), which frustrates our expectations.
On the other hand, archaic forms are remarkably resistant to being killed, so it may well stay on for a while. Like ox, oxen (but not shoe, shoon)
Wednesday, August 20, 2008
How many words are there in English?
I read recently that sometime in September English will acquire its one millionth word. I also read somewhere sometime ago that English had more than one million words already. So, who's right? And, how do we know?
See, the problem is that we really don't know how to count whether a word, say, "time," is one word or many. Last time I looked, the word time had six different categories and 41 definitions within those categories. Some were very close, and could be said to be shades of meaning, some were different meanings, and some were different words that happened to be spelled the same.
English has clearly the largest vocabulary of any language that we know of (The exact size of Klingon not being known). But it's actually much smaller than one million words, for a number of reasons.
First, as I've noted above, numerous words, such as time, run, face, hand, may or may not be different words, depending on how we look at them and how well we argue our points.
Second, there are words which are still on the books but are so archaic that we use them only in crosswords and Scrabble. Words like grot (grotto) and arew (arrow) fall in this category,
Third, there are words so specialized in their meaning that they are used by about one half of one tenth of one fifth of one percent of the population. Words like epiclesis (invocation).
Fourth, there are slang words, with often have the life expectancy of a mayfly, flitting in and out of the lexicon, living and dying in an instant. Words like george, zoot, bad, rad, have all at one time meant good.
So, if you don't know a million words, don't worry. You can make do with the 50,000 words that you recognize (If not know how to use).
See, the problem is that we really don't know how to count whether a word, say, "time," is one word or many. Last time I looked, the word time had six different categories and 41 definitions within those categories. Some were very close, and could be said to be shades of meaning, some were different meanings, and some were different words that happened to be spelled the same.
English has clearly the largest vocabulary of any language that we know of (The exact size of Klingon not being known). But it's actually much smaller than one million words, for a number of reasons.
First, as I've noted above, numerous words, such as time, run, face, hand, may or may not be different words, depending on how we look at them and how well we argue our points.
Second, there are words which are still on the books but are so archaic that we use them only in crosswords and Scrabble. Words like grot (grotto) and arew (arrow) fall in this category,
Third, there are words so specialized in their meaning that they are used by about one half of one tenth of one fifth of one percent of the population. Words like epiclesis (invocation).
Fourth, there are slang words, with often have the life expectancy of a mayfly, flitting in and out of the lexicon, living and dying in an instant. Words like george, zoot, bad, rad, have all at one time meant good.
So, if you don't know a million words, don't worry. You can make do with the 50,000 words that you recognize (If not know how to use).
Monday, August 18, 2008
Language perfection
One of the hardest things for people (me included) to accept is that there is no one true and perfect form of any language. We are all grammar snobs to a certain extent, convinced that the way we were taught English was the way English is. The idea that the language flexes, warps, moves underfoot, and responds to whims of political and economic power is a hard one to get one's mind around.
Nonetheless, it's true. Here's how it works. Let's say that, oh, 1500 years ago or so you have a developing country. Let's call it England. In this land are a number of different versions of the language. They are all pretty much equal in status, and serve more to differentiate people geographically than any other way. Sort of, "I tell by your speech that you come from north of the Humber." Let's call these different versions dialects. As is inevitable, the geographic sections of the country kind of align themselves in an economic and social stack, with the more powerful, wealthy, and populated sections gaining prestige. As the parts of the country gain prestige, so do their dialects. Generally, one dialect will emerge as king of the hill and will assume the status of language, with all other dialects socially subservient to it.
Gradually also, the other dialects will come to be seen as imperfect forms of the standard language. Thus cockney, which is a perfectly good linguistic structure, comes to be seen as a depraved form of "English." And its speakers are looked down on as unschooled and possibly stupid.
Nonetheless, it's true. Here's how it works. Let's say that, oh, 1500 years ago or so you have a developing country. Let's call it England. In this land are a number of different versions of the language. They are all pretty much equal in status, and serve more to differentiate people geographically than any other way. Sort of, "I tell by your speech that you come from north of the Humber." Let's call these different versions dialects. As is inevitable, the geographic sections of the country kind of align themselves in an economic and social stack, with the more powerful, wealthy, and populated sections gaining prestige. As the parts of the country gain prestige, so do their dialects. Generally, one dialect will emerge as king of the hill and will assume the status of language, with all other dialects socially subservient to it.
Gradually also, the other dialects will come to be seen as imperfect forms of the standard language. Thus cockney, which is a perfectly good linguistic structure, comes to be seen as a depraved form of "English." And its speakers are looked down on as unschooled and possibly stupid.
Tuesday, August 12, 2008
The two rules of language
There are two crucial rules about language that everyone, especially highschool English teachers, ought to know. The two rules are
Rule one: Language changes
Rule two: You can't do anything about rule number one
There are some interesting corollaries to these rules. For one thing, language change does not come from the upper crusts of society, who have invested lots of time and energy into being able to differentiate who from whom. Language change comes from the streets -- always has. Scholars point to all the new words coined by Shakespeare, but that's just a drop in the bucket (so to speak). It's the masses, man, who change the syntax and drive the acquisition of new vocabulary.
How has language changed? Well, if we look at it long-term, it's easy to see. Compare Beowulf, which is in English, or Chaucer, who wrote in English, or Shakespeare, who wrote in English, or Jane Austen, who wrote in English, with what goes on today.
Wait a minute? Jane Austen? She writes just like we do. If you think that, you haven't been paying attention. For one thing Janey adheres to a rule we haven't had for quite some time now: the I shall/I will rule. Do you know it? I thought not. It goes like this:
"I shall" means "I intend to"
"I will" means "I am determined to"
"You will" means "You intend to"
"You shall" means "You are obligated to"
Note how the sense of obligation versus simple futurity changes? That's probably why the rule is dead. It seems to be the case that if a rule is more trouble than it's worth, or if it's not really necessary, it's scrapped. For instance, take the rule (please) that differentiates between "fewer" and "less." "Fewer" is used with things that one counts, such as beans or chairs. "Less" is used with things that one doesn't count, such as air or animosity.
Only no one pays any attentions to it. Go through the quick line at the local supermarket and you'll see, "Ten items or less," instead of "fewer," and somehow everyone gets it right.
What happens to people who don't know the rule is that they make some pretty strange judgements on writing based on what they learned in the fifth grade. I remember a man who wouldn't pay any attention to any document that had the word "hopefully" used wrong. "Hopefully," he would lecture us, "means full of hope." It does not mean "It is to be hoped."
Well excuse me, but you have your head in the sand (at least). At one time it may have been the case that "hopefully" had that one meaning, but the times they are a changin'. By this geezer's logic a marshal is still the guy who cares for the horses and "silly" means innocent.
Still, many people believe that they are preserving the "purity of the language" when they try to hold back the tide of change. The real irony of this is that the language never was pure in the first place.
Rule one: Language changes
Rule two: You can't do anything about rule number one
There are some interesting corollaries to these rules. For one thing, language change does not come from the upper crusts of society, who have invested lots of time and energy into being able to differentiate who from whom. Language change comes from the streets -- always has. Scholars point to all the new words coined by Shakespeare, but that's just a drop in the bucket (so to speak). It's the masses, man, who change the syntax and drive the acquisition of new vocabulary.
How has language changed? Well, if we look at it long-term, it's easy to see. Compare Beowulf, which is in English, or Chaucer, who wrote in English, or Shakespeare, who wrote in English, or Jane Austen, who wrote in English, with what goes on today.
Wait a minute? Jane Austen? She writes just like we do. If you think that, you haven't been paying attention. For one thing Janey adheres to a rule we haven't had for quite some time now: the I shall/I will rule. Do you know it? I thought not. It goes like this:
"I shall" means "I intend to"
"I will" means "I am determined to"
"You will" means "You intend to"
"You shall" means "You are obligated to"
Note how the sense of obligation versus simple futurity changes? That's probably why the rule is dead. It seems to be the case that if a rule is more trouble than it's worth, or if it's not really necessary, it's scrapped. For instance, take the rule (please) that differentiates between "fewer" and "less." "Fewer" is used with things that one counts, such as beans or chairs. "Less" is used with things that one doesn't count, such as air or animosity.
Only no one pays any attentions to it. Go through the quick line at the local supermarket and you'll see, "Ten items or less," instead of "fewer," and somehow everyone gets it right.
What happens to people who don't know the rule is that they make some pretty strange judgements on writing based on what they learned in the fifth grade. I remember a man who wouldn't pay any attention to any document that had the word "hopefully" used wrong. "Hopefully," he would lecture us, "means full of hope." It does not mean "It is to be hoped."
Well excuse me, but you have your head in the sand (at least). At one time it may have been the case that "hopefully" had that one meaning, but the times they are a changin'. By this geezer's logic a marshal is still the guy who cares for the horses and "silly" means innocent.
Still, many people believe that they are preserving the "purity of the language" when they try to hold back the tide of change. The real irony of this is that the language never was pure in the first place.
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