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Prescriptivism contest | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Links & Internet Resources |  | |
| Ari Heptaglot Senior Member Norway Joined 6580 days ago 2314 posts - 5695 votes  Speaks: Swedish*, English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Mandarin, Cantonese Studies: Czech, Latin, German | Message 1 of 12 05 October 2012 at 7:03am | IP Logged | ||||||||
There's a great contest on the Chronicle here about making up fake prescriptivist rules. It's pretty funny and has had many fantastic responses already. I hope some of them catch on! Some of my favorites, all by the brilliant user "makkapakka":
6 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6701 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 2 of 12 05 October 2012 at 8:37am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Even non native users of the English language should be able to see that the 'advice' quoted by Ari is fundamentally rotten, but it still leaves the question: can a language (and in particular an orthography) stay somewhat predictable and learnable if everything is equally axcceptable? Or in other words: can it remain one language if nobody is suppressed?
The people who drive the evolution forwards will inevitable be accused of making errors, but if they become numerous enough their variant suddenly becomes an alternative to the current status of the language in question, and suddenly that variant becomes the rule and the original rule may be reduced to an anachronism or simply an error. The problem with the false prescriptivists is that they claim their variant is correct long after everybody has moved away from it, or even worse: they invent a rule based on etymology or schewed logic without any concern for the current usage. So Ari's examples are funny, but they have also ominous consequences when their perpetrators become teachers or write grammar or become academy members. And for language learners they indicate that not everything coming from an authority on their target language(s) should be taken at face value. Do a Google check if you smell something fishy. Edited by Iversen on 05 October 2012 at 8:37am 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Ari Heptaglot Senior Member Norway Joined 6580 days ago 2314 posts - 5695 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Mandarin, Cantonese Studies: Czech, Latin, German | Message 3 of 12 05 October 2012 at 9:32am | IP Logged | ||||||||
Please note that the author of those examples (and the others on the site) is well aware that their rules are nonsensical ("opera" is not the plural of "opus"). That's the point of the contest: to invent rules that are as silly as the ones actually touted by anglophone nincompoops all around the world, and that have about as much claim to legitimacy. The claim that "a lot of students" is singular is just as logical as the claim that "me and John" can't be a subject, and just as silly. Of course, what one might fear is that some of these rules may escape the confines of the competition in question and start to be taken seriously by the self-appointed watchdogs of civilization, but then the smug descriptivist could then point to the competition as the origin of the "rule" and have a good laugh at the expense of the perpetrator. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| vonPeterhof Tetraglot Senior Member Russian FederationRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4770 days ago 715 posts - 1527 votes Speaks: Russian*, EnglishC2, Japanese, German Studies: Kazakh, Korean, Norwegian, Turkish | Message 4 of 12 05 October 2012 at 10:04am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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It's a fun little game, but I can't help but wonder if anyone out there is, um, persuadable enough to take those "rules" at face value and start using them in real life. I know of at least one case in Russian where what might have originally been a ludicrous parody of prescriptivism ended up being accepted as an actual rule by many people. A popular "witty" retort to someone saying a phrase with the word опять (again) with exasperation (for instance, "Did you just gamble away your paycheck again?!") is the phrase "не опять, а снова" (not опять, but снова, the latter merely being a synonym of the former). There are several theories about the origins of this retort. One that I find particularly interesting is that it originated from educational institutions for working-class youths, many of whom used neither of the two aforementioned synonyms as their preferred word for "again", but instead used обратно, whose meaning in the standard language is closer to "back" or "reverse" (can't think of an exact English equivalent, but it seems to correspond very neatly to the Scandinavian "tillbaka/tilbage/tilbake"). The teachers would correct their usage by saying "не обратно, а опять", which made little sense to the students. Then the students started using the phrase "не опять, а снова", either to parody the pedantic teachers or to make fun of their fellow students who accepted the teachers' correction.
Over the years the phrase became so ubiquitous that many people actually started believing that снова was the proper word and that опять was somehow less "literary" (and I have to admit, I was one of these people until very recently). Whenever someone on a forum or a Q&A website asks about the origins of the retort there will nearly always be people insisting that there is an actual prescriptive rule behind it. Some even come up with explanations for it. One that seems to be popular is as follows: since the word снова is etymologically related to the word новый (new), it implies that the event is being repeated with some changes (e.g. yes, I did gamble away most of my paycheck again, but at least this time I refrained from betting my watch and wedding ring), while опять means that all the circumstances stayed exactly the same. A somewhat more believable one is that since опять tends to be used in expressions of exasperation more frequently than снова, the use of the latter is intended to put things in a more positive light. At least the dictionaries still treat the two words as synonyms, but I'm not ruling out the possibility that the distinction may get enshrined in them one day. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6701 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 5 of 12 05 October 2012 at 10:28am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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I was aware that this was a contest with invented examples, but I have read many complaints in blogs, personal homepages and elsewhere from authors whose works have been through a proof-reader who actually introduced errors and clumsy formulations (and here I'm not only speaking of those proofreaders who systematically change British English into American English and vice versa - which is OK if and only if the editorial policy on dialects was clearly stated before the work was handed in). It is also wellknown that some Anglophones go berserk in the face of hanging prepositions, adjectives boldly inserted where some think they don't belong, etc. etc.
Actually the examples with "a lot of ..." with a presumed illegal plural belong in this category - they are not just invented for the purpose. One quirk in this discussion is the fact that there are constructions which I personally recognize as commonly used and therefore legal, but which I wouldn't dream of using myself - like singular "they" in order to escape the choice between "he" and "she". We all have our style, and this construction is just not part of my English. So the invented examples are disturbingly close to the reality. And as the Russian examples show this is not limited to English. Actually the conflict is worse in languages where the some divine academy (well, in one case given by His servant Richelieu) has been allotted the task of issuing binding rules about good language. And that can lead to a situation where the official rules are venerated and to a large extent honored in writing, but when common people speak they use a totally different grammar and vocabulary. Edited by Iversen on 05 October 2012 at 11:27am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Hampie Diglot Senior Member Sweden Joined 6657 days ago 625 posts - 1009 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English Studies: Latin, German, Mandarin | Message 6 of 12 05 October 2012 at 12:25pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
But it is, it is! Opus is a third declension noun, just like Venus and vulnus. In old latin the ending was just -a, added to the stem, thus *opusa, but VsV became r due to a process called rhotacism and the unstressed u became an e- sound. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Ari Heptaglot Senior Member Norway Joined 6580 days ago 2314 posts - 5695 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Mandarin, Cantonese Studies: Czech, Latin, German | Message 7 of 12 05 October 2012 at 1:09pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
If you say so. But the author of the fake rule I quoted said:
Maybe I formulated myself badly and you're both right? Maybe a Latin "opera" is the plural of "opus", but the English "opera" is a loan from Italian "opera", which is a singular. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| lingoleng Senior Member Germany Joined 5296 days ago 605 posts - 1290 votes | Message 8 of 12 05 October 2012 at 4:39pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
Mozart's "Magic Flute" is an opera, one only, the word is an Italian import. "Ulysses" can be considered the magnum opus of James Joyce, that is one very important major work. There are not many opera like the "Ulysses", that's for sure. The plural of the Latin word opus, opera, is rather rare in English, and if you don't know how to use it: Don't use it. (Or even better: Learn how to use it instead of blaming the evil prescriptivists.) Opussy magnuses or something like that instead of magna opera should be avoided, Octopussy is the 13th film in the James Bond series. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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