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UK Teens: Active vocabularly of 800 words | ||
Tags: Teenagers | Vocabulary learning | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| Gusutafu Senior Member Sweden Joined 5525 days ago 655 posts - 1039 votes  Speaks: Swedish* | Message 17 of 94 12 January 2010 at 10:14am | IP Logged | |||||
Well, for one thing, if a majority of speakers agree that something is bad, then even by your laissez-faire standards of subjectivism it is bad, right? Secondly, If a speaker says "where your friends" instead of "where are your friends", for the simple reason that he hasn't learnt the proper way to say it yet, then of course it is bad from a linguistic point of view, it's a mistake stemming from ignorance. You seem to confuse language change with individual people making mistakes. IF the copula disappears in two hundred years, you can say that "it's not worse than having a copula", but as long as it's there in normal, well-formed speech by natives, then of course it's "bad" when someone leaves it out. In this case, I think it is more a case of "where are" sounding like "where" in fast speech. Edited by Gusutafu on 12 January 2010 at 12:14pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Ari Heptaglot Senior Member Norway Joined 6586 days ago 2314 posts - 5695 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Mandarin, Cantonese Studies: Czech, Latin, German | Message 18 of 94 12 January 2010 at 11:20am | IP Logged | |||||
Not by MY laissez-faire standards of subjectivism. The problem with this view is that someone must decide on who is a speaker and who is not. Someone must decide on what is and what is not a language. A language is an arbitrary category of the speech of several people. You take a certain group and say "a majority of this group thinks it's bad", but I might take a different group and say "a majority of THIS group thinks it's good". Language is a continuum without fixed boundaries. In reality, we're all speaking slightly differently. No two people speak exactly alike. If I speak this way, then it's good, because a majority of me thinks so. However, what's REALLY important is, of course, whether the person I'm speaking TO thinks it's good or not. That's the person we should ask, not some majority who has nothing to do with our conversation. If I tell someone "Dang dat some sweet-ass wheels, dogg" and he replies "Yea, I'm a gettin me some mad respect!" we're having a conversation and communicating perfectly in this particular Swedish mangling of ebonics. The logic of applying some exterior majority to judge our conversation escapes me. The majority has nothing to do with our conversation. The idea that language can be "good" or "bad" in an absolute sense, i.e. devoid of context, is incomprehensible to me. 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| hcholm Heptaglot Groupie Norway Joined 6065 days ago 43 posts - 65 votes Speaks: Norwegian*, English, Swedish, Danish, German, French, Polish Studies: Czech | Message 19 of 94 12 January 2010 at 11:54am | IP Logged | |||||
Are there any contemporary examples of language change that aren't regarded as mistakes by someone? I can't think of any. Where do you draw the line? What is your current judgement of Swedish expressions like "bättre än mig" – do you still consider it a mistake, or is it an example of language change? 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Splog Diglot Senior Member Czech Republic anthonylauder.c Joined 5673 days ago 1062 posts - 3263 votes Speaks: English*, Czech Studies: Mandarin | Message 20 of 94 12 January 2010 at 12:11pm | IP Logged | |||||
Sure, we can be all fluffy and abstract, but the original article did gave it a context. It said that these kids were close to unemployable because of their lack of language ability. Telling them "everything is subjective" will not help them when they leave school and try to find fulfilling careers. 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Gusutafu Senior Member Sweden Joined 5525 days ago 655 posts - 1039 votes Speaks: Swedish* | Message 21 of 94 12 January 2010 at 12:14pm | IP Logged | |||||
Until the mistakes become pervasive enough, they remain mistakes. In these days, where there is a strong prescriptive force (the "standard language"), it's even easier to condemn certain form, although the prescriptivism distorts the issue. Many people still frown upon "bättre än mig", including me. Apart from it being a new construction, one can argue from a linguistic standpoint that "än" is not a preposition, so it shouln't affect the case of the following word. In this case it is clear that "bättre än mig" stems from a misinterpretation of "än" as a preposition, which is why I am very reluctant to accept this construction. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Ari Heptaglot Senior Member Norway Joined 6586 days ago 2314 posts - 5695 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Mandarin, Cantonese Studies: Czech, Latin, German | Message 22 of 94 12 January 2010 at 4:02pm | IP Logged | |||||
In that case it's certainly a case of the person they're talking to not thinking it's good language, which results in bad communication. So it's bad language in that situation. I'm afraid I didn't read the article. Perhaps I ought to, before commenting in the thread. I only reacted to Gustavus' post saying that "if a majority of speakers agree that something is bad, then [...] it is bad, right?". This I cannot agree with and wanted to respond to. If I have contributed to bringing the thread off-topic, I apologise. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| tommus Senior Member CanadaRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5870 days ago 979 posts - 1688 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Dutch, French, Esperanto, German, Spanish | Message 23 of 94 12 January 2010 at 5:24pm | IP Logged | |||||
An analogy would be antisocial behaviour by a group in a society. Amongst that group, it is not bad. But to the majority of that society, it is bad, and could well result in a deterioration of that society if not corrected. Acceptance and tolerance of obviously poor-quality, grammatically-incorrect limited-vocabulary language can result in a deterioration of that language from its current level. That could well render the language level less capable of supporting impressive literature, or other cultural or scientific thought. If this happens in a localised region or even a country, it places that segment of society at a disadvantage with respect to those who maintained higher standards. Tolerance and acceptance of what the majority considers to be substandard, undesirable or lower quality often leads to regret, sometimes after the point of no return. That is a very good reason for encouraging Forum members, especially those writing in their native languages, to maintain a good quality of composition, spelling, grammar and punctuation. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| vb Octoglot Senior Member Afghanistan Joined 6426 days ago 112 posts - 135 votes Speaks: English, Romanian, French, Polish, Dutch, German, Italian, Spanish Studies: Russian, Swedish | Message 24 of 94 12 January 2010 at 6:18pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Given that linguistic ability correlates positively with intelligence (for instance, an individual's utterances will tend towards that limit afforded by their working memory capacity), it would be reasonable to expect people to advertise their intelligence accordingly - for social dominance, mates etc.
It is in the interests of the less intelligent to thwart the more intelligent by hindering linguistic display. The less intelligent may also be aided and abetted in their aims by the declining language skills amongst the teaching corps and the anti-intellectual trends within pedagogy (which themselves are also intended to 'level the playing field'!). Without countervailing, convincing, respectable models of fluent, complex language use, students see no reason to push themselves. It would be interesting to see to what use the extra brain power of those who would otherwise be highly fluent is put - displays of wit; body language? As for certain words comprising a certain proportion of all words used, surely the comparative frequency of vocabulary items follows the same statistical rule regardless of the number of items in play? (Zipf's law?) There is a reason to be cheerful, however: teenagers soon twig that teh internet message board flame wars tend to be won by the most eloquent. 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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