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Common English Mistakes | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages |  | |
| Declan1991 Tetraglot Senior Member Ireland Joined 6440 days ago 233 posts - 359 votes  Speaks: English*, German, Irish, French | Message 25 of 61 07 May 2010 at 8:53pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Innit will never be grammatically correct for me, ever, nor will "like", the local equivalent. But it might be for my children, or grandchildren maybe. I don't whence, thence etc., and they were used up until relatively recently, that would probably be ungrammatical 100 years ago.
My problem is learning to speak a different style of language as an idiolect. I use whom naturally, I don't want others who don't naturally, to learn to use it. Equally, I don't have to use any slang I don't use naturally, I don't think I have any right to degrade or complain about anyone else's usage. Don't forget either, there is a list of gradual changes going back almost a 1000 years, over which period, English has changed so dramatically that it's no longer a trivial task to read Old English. You could equally ask the question, when did any of those changes become "grammatical", in a way, it's a nonsensical question, because it has no answer, it depends on what time-period you are talking about. Edited by Declan1991 on 07 May 2010 at 9:02pm 5 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| egill Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5697 days ago 418 posts - 791 votes Speaks: Mandarin, English* Studies: German, Spanish, Dutch | Message 26 of 61 07 May 2010 at 11:06pm | IP Logged | |||||
Try almost 300 years! "Happily..they intended Neptune, or I know not what Devill [sic]." [1614, Purchas, cited in OED] source
Thank you for your response, but could you be a little more specific. I'd like to know if words like: certainly, assuredly, indubitably, clearly, etc. are kosher for you. To me they make as much as sense as hopefully. In case you misunderstand where I'm coming from, I'm not saying we should throw all caution to the wind and let the unwashed masses dictate our writing standards. In the absence of a central guiding authority, that role has always fallen to its eminent writers creating a tacit standard via example. However I do have two points to make. Firstly, these rules should be consistent. Writers for many years have used sentential adverbs, and to disallow hopefully on those grounds is arbitrary. I find that when I do encounter these objections it is almost only with hopefully and not with any others sentential adverbs. This is simply not consistent! For some inexplicable reason, people seem to have latched on to knowledge of this supposed correct usage as a shibboleth for erudition or lack thereof. Secondly, the original complaint talked about spoken language. If a particular community wants to have some arbitrary writing standards that don't reflect common usage, fine. But the original comment was about spoken language, and to insist that a speaker adhere to these precepts in speech is overreaching. But more importantly it impedes fluent communicative speech by removing a very useful construction from the linguistic repertoire and causing speakers to fight against their own (supposedly baser, I'd say natural) instincts. I hope my tone isn't too aggressive, this isn't directed at any one person so much as everyone who tries to explain arbitrary prohibitions with syntax. In this specific example, not only is it inconsistent, its usage is not even prohibited by most major dictionaries (which are the closest thing we have to gatekeepers of the language) and are simply taught for their own sake. Again I do not mean to offend anyone, but it just so happens that language peevers are my personal language peeve! 7 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Silvance5 Groupie United States Joined 5495 days ago 86 posts - 118 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Spanish, French | Message 27 of 61 08 May 2010 at 1:13am | IP Logged | |||||
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Clearly, frankly, assuredly, and indubitably are equally wrong in my opinion, but as I hear them far less, they don't really bother me as much. And as far as I know, it actually is a grammatical thing and not a lexicon, unless we've assigned these words new meanings and revoked their adverb status in this particular usage.
1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| furrykef Senior Member United States furrykef.com/ Joined 6473 days ago 681 posts - 862 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish, Japanese, Latin, Italian | Message 28 of 61 08 May 2010 at 11:00am | IP Logged | |||||
Your definition of "obvious" seems to be different from mine. A rule that's clear to you seems silly and arbitrary to me. I understand the rule, I just completely and utterly reject it. Think about it: if there hadn't been some grammarian to tell you that a hanging "hopefully" is wrong, you'd never have noticed a problem, would you? 4 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Silvance5 Groupie United States Joined 5495 days ago 86 posts - 118 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Spanish, French | Message 29 of 61 08 May 2010 at 2:13pm | IP Logged | |||||
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If there hadn't been some grammarian to tell you that "he are" is wrong, there's a possibility that you'd be saying it. The rule makes perfect sense, I mean, it is an adverb that's modifying nothing, but as I stated before, it's a little bit archaic. I suspect that we'll see the rule changed sometime in the future, or it'll just fade away along with the use of whom(which is unfortunate, btw.) Edited by Silvance5 on 08 May 2010 at 2:17pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Declan1991 Tetraglot Senior Member Ireland Joined 6440 days ago 233 posts - 359 votes Speaks: English*, German, Irish, French | Message 30 of 61 08 May 2010 at 7:07pm | IP Logged | |||||
5 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| furrykef Senior Member United States furrykef.com/ Joined 6473 days ago 681 posts - 862 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish, Japanese, Latin, Italian | Message 31 of 61 08 May 2010 at 9:26pm | IP Logged | |||||
Well, stranger things have happened. It only took maybe a millennium and a half at most for the Latin word "habeō" ("I have") to be reduced from five phonemes to just one in most Romance languages ("he" in Spanish and "ho" in Italian -- the 'h' is silent in both). But that's a process that probably would have happened with or without grammarians. (The Romans had grammarians too!) Given enough time, "irregardless" will probably become a word, the past tense of "lead" will be spelled "lead", and so on... languages change; it's just a fact of life. Currently I fight tenaciously against both "irregardless" and the misspelling of "led", but if it were to get to the point that nobody says "regardless" or spells it "led" anymore, who would I be to argue? I'll also point out that "he are" is not inherently inferior to "he is", and in fact many languages (e.g. Chinese and Japanese) don't inflect verbs for person at all and they get along fine. "He are" only sounds absurd because we've gone all our lives saying "he is". The only bad thing about "he is" becoming "he are" would be that such a change would likely not be universal; a series of similar changes would result in the proliferation of dialects and eventually mutual unintelligibility (cf. Latin becoming Romance languages).
I wouldn't say "nothing"; it makes sense to me that it modifies the entire sentence. And if you want to argue that adverbs can't modify an entire sentence, my response would be, "Well, they can now!" ;) Edited by furrykef on 08 May 2010 at 9:28pm 5 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| linguamaniac Triglot Newbie United States Joined 5326 days ago 10 posts - 10 votes Speaks: English*, German, Spanish Studies: Italian, French, Latin, Portuguese | Message 32 of 61 09 May 2010 at 5:37am | IP Logged | |||||
Actually in English, the verb "to be" is considered a linking verb, meaning it describes something, and takes an adjective as an object, not an adverb. For example, you would say, "I am happy", not "I am happily". When you say "I am well", you are using "well" in an adjective form, meaning "not sick". A similar mistake that annoys me is when people say "I feel bad", and someone corrects them, telling them to say "I feel badly". This is wrong! "To feel" is also a linking verb! If you say "I feel badly", you are saying that you are feeling in a bad way; that your sense of feeling is somehow working poorly. Saying that you feel bad is describing yourself using "to feel" as a linking verb, in other words, you are sad or regretful. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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