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Native speakers’ feelings about the lang. | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| a3 Triglot Senior Member Bulgaria Joined 5257 days ago 273 posts - 370 votes  Speaks: Bulgarian*, English, Russian Studies: Portuguese, German, Italian, Spanish, Norwegian, Finnish | Message 9 of 34 03 February 2012 at 8:04pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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Some of my countrymates are so worried and concerned about the correct usage of the full&short definite articles even though the difference between them was brought in artificially and was never present in the spoken language. Most of them are probably not aware of this. Edited by a3 on 03 February 2012 at 8:05pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| vonPeterhof Tetraglot Senior Member Russian FederationRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4773 days ago 715 posts - 1527 votes Speaks: Russian*, EnglishC2, Japanese, German Studies: Kazakh, Korean, Norwegian, Turkish | Message 10 of 34 03 February 2012 at 8:16pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
In Russia the written formal language has traditionally been highly standardized and prescriptive, although there have been a few light relaxations recently. The most widely publicized recent change was the decision of the Ministry of Education to make the word кофе (coffee) both masculine and neuter. Native Russian words ending in -е tend to be neuter, but the word кофе is traditionally masculine, either because it is masculine in Dutch, French and German (the former being the language that we most likely borrowed it from, and the latter two being the prestige languages of the 19th century Russian upper class), or because it used to be spelled and pronounced кофей/кофий, which was definitely masculine. The word is indeclinable, but the usage of adjectives and pronouns is still different for masculine and neuter, so many old school prescriptivist teachers are not happy that they will now have to mark the neuter forms as equally correct. When it comes to spoken language most people tend to be much more relaxed - кофе is very likely to become neuter, and in some people's speech it even ceases to be indeclinable. However, among the intelligentsia it is considered important to speak "properly" at all times. Half of the women in my extended family are school teachers, so I was brought up in this tradition. So even though I am against prescriptivism in theory I don't really do anything to oppose it in practice - I don't correct other people's "mistakes" (this is largely considered to be rude and an example of intelligentsia elitism), but I always make sure that everything I say or write conforms to the standard. And no, кофе will never be neuter to me. Luckily, Russian lacks such grammatical hyper-corrective traps as "x and I" or the who/whom confusion in English. The biggest trap for people attempting to sound smarter than they really are would probably be malapropisms, and those can be easily avoided by steering clear from words whose meanings one isn't entirely sure of. However, there are some points where even highly educated people don't always agree, most often concerning word stress and loanwords. Anyone who has studied some Russian will know that Russian stress is unfixed, unpredictable, and often devoid of any clear etymological justification, while the treatment of loanwords that don't fit neatly into Russian grammar isn't always consistent. These are the only places where I can imagine educated Russian speakers becoming "insecure" about their own usage, but only for a very small number of words (I can't think of any examples at the moment). Edited by vonPeterhof on 03 February 2012 at 11:45pm 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| Saim Pentaglot Senior Member AustraliaRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5084 days ago 124 posts - 215 votes Speaks: Serbo-Croatian, English*, Catalan, Spanish, Polish Studies: Dutch, Portuguese, Italian, Occitan, Punjabi, Urdu, Arabic (Maghribi), French, Modern Hebrew, Ukrainian, Slovenian | Message 11 of 34 03 February 2012 at 11:38pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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IronFist, those are just differences of dialect and register. I used to be more like
you, but I've learned to live and let live when it comes to language. It's correct (in that dialect/register) of the native users of that speech variety, nothing more nothing less. It's also perfectly fine to end a sentence with a preposition, even in prescriptive English - the "don't end a sentence with a preposition rule" is actually an imposition of Latin grammar that you'll find many great writers of the English language ignoring. Though I do share your dislike of those last two hypercorrections; "whom is" is particularly absurd, especially since "who to?" is perfectly acceptable in middle registers of English. Actually, "whom did you give that report to" sounds kind of wrong to me. I would only say "who did you give that report to?" (lower register), and sometimes write "to whom did you give that report?" (higher register). 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| IronFist Senior Member United States Joined 6438 days ago 663 posts - 941 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Japanese, Korean | Message 12 of 34 04 February 2012 at 12:20am | IP Logged | |||||||||||
Every morning from 1st grade to 6th grade we had something at the very beginning of class called "D.O.L." (daily oral language) The teacher would write two sentences on the board with multiple errors. We had to write them on paper ourselves and make all the corrections. Then we would go over them as a class. For example, one sentence might say: "Me and bob wants to eat pizza." The correction would be: "Bob and I want to eat pizza." Students would raise their hands and the teacher would call on them and you could make one correction, like "'wants' should be changed to 'want'" or "'Bob' should be capitalized cuz it's a name" or whatever. If you got it right, the teacher would let you come up to the board and make the change. It's good positive reinforcement cuz kids like erasing and writing on the chalkboard :) Edited by IronFist on 04 February 2012 at 12:23am 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| LaughingChimp Senior Member Czech Republic Joined 4700 days ago 346 posts - 594 votes Speaks: Czech* | Message 13 of 34 04 February 2012 at 2:24am | IP Logged | |||||||||||
I'm not a native speaker, so feel free to correct me but isn't "should've" the past form of "should"?
Why do you think it's wrong?? 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| mrwarper Diglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member Spain forum_posts.asp?TID=Registered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5227 days ago 1493 posts - 2500 votes Speaks: Spanish*, EnglishC2 Studies: German, Russian, Japanese | Message 14 of 34 04 February 2012 at 2:55am | IP Logged | |||||||||||
Although "would" and "should" are actually the conditional forms of "will" and "shall" (future modal verbs), in practice they're always referred to and taught as independent 'modal verbs', which only set the mood of the main verb and do not change themselves in any way. In short: "should" or any other modal verbs have only one form. Anyway, Ironfist is talking about the perfect past tense, which is formed by "had" (past of "have") + the past participle of the main verb. In the example it would be "have gone". Adding a conditional to that is optional and unrelated to the "past perfect" thing, so the example would become: "I should have gone...",
Because subjects must be represented by subject pronouns (I, [s]he, we, they) and not object pronouns (me, him, her, us, them). The fact that object and subject forms are the same for "you" and "it" may make it less clear for some people, but the correct form is "I and Bob...". Also, it is commonly considered rude to say "I" first when there are multiple subjects, so you usually want to say "Bob and I". Finally, many people may not be happy when they hear "gonna go" instead of "going to go". Edited by mrwarper on 04 February 2012 at 2:59am 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| LaughingChimp Senior Member Czech Republic Joined 4700 days ago 346 posts - 594 votes Speaks: Czech* | Message 15 of 34 04 February 2012 at 3:09am | IP Logged | |||||||||||
There are several such things in Czech, probably the most annoying one is "bychom". Many people insist on using "bychom" istead of "bysme", but nobody speaks like that and "bychom" even breaks otherwise agglutinative past verb conjugation. Another annoying feature is that it's forbidden to use the instrumental case with some words, so the "correct" sentences often sound like from someone with brain damage. Then there are many completely arbitrary spelling exceptions, for example "jste" is spelled separately everywhere except "abyste". Most people are not aware that most of such arbitrary exceptions were made up in the 19. century. Transgressives even disappeared completly as a result of these changes, as nobody was able to use them "correctly". 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| LaughingChimp Senior Member Czech Republic Joined 4700 days ago 346 posts - 594 votes Speaks: Czech* | Message 16 of 34 04 February 2012 at 3:30am | IP Logged | |||||||||||
But should (would...) + have is past, not perfect.
Then "I" and "me" are obviously not subject/object pronouns. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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