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Natives mistakes in their own languages | ||
Tags: Error | Native Speakers | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| koba Heptaglot Senior Member AustriaRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5668 days ago 118 posts - 201 votes  Speaks: Portuguese*, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Hungarian, French | Message 1 of 65 20 April 2011 at 12:51am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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This seems to happen often, mostly by teenagers, but not exclusively. With the languages I have experience so far (Portuguese, English and German) I do see mistakes every once in a while, not from foreigners, but the natives themselves, from those above, being Portuguese the one it happens the most. (Not because it's my native language and I can see it more clearly, but it's just like that, unfortunately).
In English, for instance, I notice that sometimes people use "good" when they're supposed to use "well", or use an adjective when they're supposed to use an adverb, etc. in German there are also wrong prepositions/sentence constructions, and in Portuguese there's the Subjunctive confusion, the "Gerundismo" phenomenom and many others. I often wonder, are we supposed to keep ourselves more grammar-book-orientated or to stick to the forms people use in our surrondings? That's something I ask myself sometimes: Since the spoken language in every language tend to change from time to time and new languages/dialects were born from others' mistakes/changes, so I guess what's wrong today might be correct in the future if it become of common usage? This might also be the explanation of why some words, sentence constructions only remain common while written, whereas in spoken language they're rarely used. How often does this happen in your native language/in the language you're studying? Edited by koba on 20 April 2011 at 1:02am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Cainntear Pentaglot Senior Member Scotland linguafrankly.blogsp Joined 5811 days ago 4399 posts - 7687 votes Speaks: Lowland Scots, English*, French, Spanish, Scottish Gaelic Studies: Catalan, Italian, German, Irish, Welsh | Message 2 of 65 20 April 2011 at 2:22am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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There is a saying among linguists:
There's no such thing as a common error. Basically, the language is what people say. Language is the ultimate in democracy. The majority cannot be wrong. "good" instead of "well"? Nonsense. English speakers use "good" where we use "good". It just so happens that we use "good" where speakers of Latin and all the languages that come from it use "well". But English is not Latin, so that's not a problem. Adjectives vs adverbs...? Well, some of these are "adjectives" are historically attested forms, and the so-called "adverb" form is an attempt by some school-teacher to make the form fit a prescribed pattern, or to force one of two possible forms on his pupils. For example, while William Shakespeare mostly made a distinction between "quickly" as adverb and "quick" as adjective, here's a quote from Measure for Measure:
While looking for a something like the above, I came across something even better (from The Merry Wives of Windsor):
Here "set" is acting as a predicative verb, hence the adjectival form "quick". This actually explains "good" better than "quick".... Basically, English uses adjectives with predicative verbs. You can't use an adverb with a predicative verb. So it has to be "good", not "well". In fact, it's actually quite weird that the Romance languages mostly use adjectives with predicative verbs, but sometimes use adverbs. I mean you say "he is happy", not "*he is happily", and "the flower is pretty", not "*the flower is prettily", so why on Earth would you want to say "I am well" instead of "I am good"?!? 11 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Volte Tetraglot Senior Member Switzerland Joined 6239 days ago 4474 posts - 6726 votes Speaks: English*, Esperanto, German, Italian Studies: French, Finnish, Mandarin, Japanese | Message 3 of 65 20 April 2011 at 3:04am | IP Logged | ||||||||
Simple: because common use in some circles reflects that, English isn't entirely regular, and not everyone is equally happy using both forms. "I am good" makes me wince a bit - not for any philosophical reason, but simply because it doesn't match my internalized map of English. That my preferred form can be analyzed as a 'common error' or a hyper-correction doesn't negate that it's my preferred form. 4 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Mrs. Dalloway Triglot Groupie Italy Joined 4769 days ago 70 posts - 95 votes Speaks: Italian*, EnglishC2, Russian Studies: GermanA2, French, Danish | Message 4 of 65 20 April 2011 at 7:46am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Speaking as a native Italian speaker (that is to say that I live in a relatively little country where more than twenty dialects are spoken and interfere with normal Italian speech for those who speak them) I should say that I'm aware of many MANY grammatical mistakes and I'm not likely to "forgive" them.
I can accept a word, originally coming from a dialect, which expresses perfectly the concept which we're trying to give and is intelligible to anyone, but I can't stand variations in grammatical standard structures. There are also people who don't speak dialects and still make mistakes, expecially with verbs, expecially the consecutio temporum. This phenomenon is getting worse and worse with new generations. My sister's thirteen years old and sometimes she makes two or three grammatical unforgivable mistakes in the same sentence! I almost suffer physically, when it happens. To sum it all up, language changes, of course, and nothing we say will prevent it from happening. But there are some grammatical structures and "values" we should stick to, in my opinion. At least, for what concerns Italian. It seems to me that, if we discuss this topic referring to the English language, even my opinion may change, because of the different role each language plays in the international scenary, the different levels of difficulty found in their grammar rules and so on. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| etracher Triglot Groupie Italy Joined 5134 days ago 92 posts - 180 votes Speaks: English*, Italian, Spanish Studies: Modern Hebrew, Russian, Latvian | Message 5 of 65 20 April 2011 at 8:24am | IP Logged | ||||||||
I wanted to make a small note about the second quote from Shakespeare. In addition to what Cainntear mentioned it is important to note that the first quote is the adjectival form functioning as an adverb, while the second one could not possibly be substituted with 'quickly'. In the second quote, Shakespeare is using 'quick' with the meaning of 'alive'. So in the phrase Anne is saying that she would rather be buried alive than marry that fool Fenton. She is not saying, of course, that she would rather be buried in a lively or living manner, nor is she saying that she would rather be buried quickly. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Keilan Senior Member Canada Joined 4886 days ago 125 posts - 241 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German | Message 6 of 65 20 April 2011 at 8:24am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Ah, the endless battle surfaces once more. :) Namely, those who adhere to prescriptive grammar versus the unending waves of change. Every generation there are people who cringe at the "bad" language of the future generation and how it's getting worse and worse. The same people who feel a word isn't a word until it gets put in the dictionary.
Language is constantly changing, and the idea of forcing a correct form is somewhat silly, and more importantly impossible. If all the schools and dictionaries and writing rules currently existing in the English speaking world weren't enough to stop "good" from changing into an adverb, then I really doubt we'll learn how to stop that change anytime soon. In my opinion, the only way one can use "incorrect" English is a slip of the tongue. On the other hand, who am I to say that "We ain't got no pizza in no house" is bad English? It's just a case of forcing my set of grammar rules on people who have perfectly usable rules of their own. 5 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Alexander86 Tetraglot Senior Member United Kingdom alanguagediary.blogs Joined 4781 days ago 224 posts - 323 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, German, Catalan Studies: Swedish | Message 7 of 65 20 April 2011 at 9:04am | IP Logged | ||||||||
Indeed! If we had had a set structure for Latin we would not have had French, Italian, Spanish, Galician, Romanian, Catalan, Portuguese... Plus ca change! 5 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Rameau Triglot Senior Member Germany Joined 5907 days ago 149 posts - 258 votes 4 sounds Speaks: English*, GermanC1, Danish Studies: Swedish, French, Icelandic | Message 8 of 65 20 April 2011 at 10:24am | IP Logged | ||||||||
On the other hand, languages do have rules: that's what makes them work. The fact the we agree that A means this but B means this is precisely what allows us to communicate in the first place. Oh, of course the rules change over time, and there's no reason we shouldn't throw out the ones that nobody follows anymore or write down new ones which they do follow yet which haven't been listed. But to draw from this the conclusion that all variations are equally valid is going a bit too far. Case in point: this is the internet, so I have little doubt that everyone reading this has many times come across pieces of writing which had such impressively bad spelling and grammar that they are completely impossible to understand. Or which are possible to understand, but which seem to have hilarious, unintended double meanings. Or which just plain look and sound funny. No one calls these acceptable, legitimate variants of the language. Why? Because they impede understanding. The idea that all debate over rules and standard forms of languages can be reduced to armed skirmishes between two camps of mutually hostile camps of Prescriptivists and Descriptivists (between whom fraternization is explicitly forbidden on pain of death) is rather misguided, and probably the result of too many people having bad experiences with hyper-pedantic English (or other language) teachers who were convinced that passive voice, split infinitives, prepositions at the end of a sentence or various other bogeymen were the work of the devil. Yet standard forms of a language exist for a reason: to provide some sort of consistent version that speakers can understand over a wide area regardless of what sort of idiosyncrasies their respective local versions may have (an especially important thing in such a mobile world as our own). And what seems like a perfectly ordinary if non-standard turn of phrase to you and I might seem outright bizarre or even outright confusing for the Whos down in Whoville, and vice-versa. Which is why we have a codified standard form that we try teach everybody, with the goal that we have some sort of agreed upon set of "correct" forms which we regard as the official version which we use for official purposes, regardless of how we may talk to our immediate peers. Now, we'll update this over time if it starts seriously diverge from how people actually speak (remembering as we do that "how people actually speak" is by no means a monolithic thing, and that a rule which may seem obsolete in our neck of the woods may still be very much alive elsewhere), but that doesn't mean that the rules are completely imaginary. The fact is that people do learn them and hold to them--if they didn't, none of use would be able to even have this discussion in the first place, let alone be trying to decipher the rules of various other language systems, being instead forced to throw up our hands and admit there is no agreed upon set of rules, and we might as well all just crouch in the corner clutching our knees, rock back and forth and babble endlessly to ourselves in our own respective non-mutually intelligible idiolects. 11 persons have voted this message useful |
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