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 Language Learning Forum : Philological Room |  | |
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6704 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes  Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map | Message 17 of 28 06 July 2012 at 11:59am | IP Logged | |||||
I knew that before Linguistics 101 was born. And I also know that any living and dead language can be defined as a pile of old errors which just became too common to stamp out - even though there always have been people lamenting the changes and tried to keep the status quo. But a large language community like the Anglophone one isn't uniform, and in the case of "they" used as a singular genderneutral pronoun I have long ago decided that I don't like that construction, and I won't adopt it. In other respects I'm not very prescriptivist. For instance I boldly go where the split infinitives head to, whether or not it is seen as correct by the purists. Edited by Iversen on 06 July 2012 at 12:05pm 6 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Chung Diglot Senior Member Joined 7157 days ago 4228 posts - 8259 votes 20 sounds Speaks: English*, French Studies: Polish, Slovak, Uzbek, Turkish, Korean, Finnish | Message 18 of 28 06 July 2012 at 4:17pm | IP Logged | |||||
It is harsh, but by no means should it be construed that language documentation is always such a futile or downbeat experience. I brought it up though because Culver's experience did make me re-think and his was the first commentary that I had seen where language documentation isn't always so uplifting as I had observed it previously through shows on PBS about American linguists documenting certain Amerindian languages. sacha, in case you're interested, take a look also at DoBeS (Dokumentation Bedrohter Sprachen / Documentation of Endangered Languages) for information and links to fieldwork that it sponsors worldwide. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| sacha Triglot Newbie United States Joined 4528 days ago 22 posts - 60 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Quechua | Message 19 of 28 06 July 2012 at 7:31pm | IP Logged | |||||
Hi, freakyaye, always glad to meet another linguistics major! But computer linguistics (as a field) is not about computer assisted language learning. Computer linguistics is about trying to teach computers to use natural language, or seem to. Like in computer translations, like Babelfish. It's proven impossible to teach computers to use natural language beyond the specific instructions they are given (like specific dictionary words) but the more people try, the more they learn about what is really going on in our human heads when we create a sentence. For example, if you say, "Lucy said she was going to the store, and she did. Where did Lucy go?" to a three-year-old English speaker, they (wink) can tell you "To the store" and even produce the full sentence "She went to the store." A computer cannot, unless you give it specific instructions for this specific transformation, and doing that proves to be nothing simple at all! It is incredibly complex. But the work put into computer linguistics has shed light on what amazingly complex cognitive operations that that three-year-old is performing, and without any instructions about how to do it. This dramatically comfirms Noam Chomsky's theory that language is an inborn instinct in humans -- our brains simply await the specifics. No one tells a baby whether adjectives precede or follow nouns in their native language. But it takes very few exposures to examples for the baby to acquire "native speaker intuition" about whether it sounds right to put an adjective before or after a noun. But a computer has no such capability. But trying to get computers to simulate natural language seems like a fun field, and it has practical applications not just for computers but for understanding cognitive processes of humans. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| sacha Triglot Newbie United States Joined 4528 days ago 22 posts - 60 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Quechua | Message 20 of 28 06 July 2012 at 7:44pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Chung, thank you for the links and the interesting stories. Trying to save an endangered language is not the only reason for doing field linguistics -- in fact, that wasn't the intention when it was first being done, the motivation was mainly to gather data on languages before they disappeared. But if your motivation is to help save an endangered language, of course it will be necessary for the people themselves to be motivated to save it. It will be an uphill battle even then. It shouldn't be surprising, though, that people on the brink of language extinction would be demoralized about it, especially considering that their native language probably has no economic value, and the poorest and most powerless people are probably those who are monolingual in the native language, while the most prosperous among their people are those who learn the dominant language, and their language is probably stigmatized, the dominant groups probably make fun of their accent, etc... it shouldn't be a surprise to find peoples who are apathetic about saving their language. The motivation to save the language really has to grow out of a larger movement to save and revitalize ethnic identity -- as with North American Indians, Hawaiians, etc.
In highland Ecuador, Quechua is now called "Runa Shimi" or people's language by native speakers, but until a few years ago it was known as "Yanga Shimi" -- useless or worthless language. Edited by sacha on 06 July 2012 at 8:21pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| sacha Triglot Newbie United States Joined 4528 days ago 22 posts - 60 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Quechua | Message 21 of 28 06 July 2012 at 8:02pm | IP Logged | |||||
That is a legitimate reason not to adopt it! To your native speaker intuition, it sounds wrong, and therefore it is wrong grammar in your personal language, or idiolect. (Right and wrong grammar, in linguistics, is defined by ]i]what sounds right or wrong to a native speaker of the language. Obviously, there can be differences among dialects and idiolects, -- but linguistics does not take sides, native speakers are always right!) We all have (and maybe even need) our pet peeves. One of mine is "feel badly." If you feel badly, that must mean you have neurological damage. "Feel" is a linking verb (or "copula" in linguistic terminology, obviously an attempt to attract more people to the field by making it sound sexier) and so the complement should be "bad." But you can't do more than not adopting it yourself.
Nobody seriously prescribes avoiding split infinitives in English anymore. That is the classic example of a mismatch between prescriptivist grammar and the real grammar of a language. The idea of avoiding split infinitives came about because some people observed that in Latin (the standard for proper real grammar) and French (used at one time by all higher-class people in Britain) infinitives are one word and cannot be split. So English should treat its two-word infinitives ("to see") like one word. That rule is a legacy of a time when English was a low-prestige language, and following the Latin and French models was considered a way to improve it. Prescriptivist grammar is a mark of social class. A person who properly uses the word "whom" demonstrates that they are a member of the educated class, while a person who says "I have went" demonstrates that they are a member of the uneducated class. But from a linguistics point of view, both native speakers are correct, because the grammar used by a native speaker is correct by definition. Edited by sacha on 06 July 2012 at 8:04pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| montmorency Diglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4829 days ago 2371 posts - 3676 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Danish, Welsh | Message 22 of 28 07 July 2012 at 1:17am | IP Logged | |||||
Why don't you like the gender-neutral "they", Iversen? It may not be all that elegant, but it's hardly worse than "he or she". It has saved my English bacon on more than one occasion. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| lingoleng Senior Member Germany Joined 5299 days ago 605 posts - 1290 votes | Message 23 of 28 07 July 2012 at 1:51pm | IP Logged | |||||
It could be worse because it introduces an unnecessary ambiguity. A competent reader will try to make sense of the shift from singular to plural and think about what languages the linguists as a community speak, but this is not what the questions wants to ask. Or is it? I hope the minor feminist triumph (certainly a prescriptive one, btw) is worth the vague and misleading style ... 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
 emk Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5533 days ago 2615 posts - 8806 votes Speaks: English*, FrenchB2 Studies: Spanish, Ancient Egyptian Personal Language Map | Message 24 of 28 07 July 2012 at 2:39pm | IP Logged | |||||
Singular "they" is not exactly new—I think it's attested back to 1500 or so, with examples in Shakespeare and many other skilled writers over the centuries. In the US, lots of people spent about 10 years writing "he or she" (which is really awkward), but this has since been overtaken by singular "they". Basically, a lesser-used feature of English became rapidly more prominent under the stress of avoiding "he or she". The grammar rules for singular "they" are tricky, and vary from speaker to speaker. Here are some examples, adapted from a discussion I read somewhere (probably something by Pullman). They range from the most-widely-used forms of singular "they" to the least:
(1) and (2) have long been common. (3) is slightly more controversial, but it's rapidly becoming the norm. (4) is interesting—we know that "a student" must be female here—but many Americans under the age of 40 will find nothing odd about this sentence. (5) is grammatically incorrect and will make any native speaker wince. You're perfectly welcome to avoid singular "they". But for tens of millions of native speakers, it's now completely acceptable in formal prose, and it does not feel strained or odd in any way. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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