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Natives mistakes in their own languages | ||
Tags: Error | Native Speakers | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| 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 57 of 65 26 April 2011 at 6:59pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
Yes, but perhaps not the one you think I was making. The point is that I say "me and him" pretty much invariably. If I was a prescriptivist, it's likely that I would take what I say and declare that it is "correct", which is what I did above. As far as I can see, the loss of case marking is still in process. People can explain why we logically "should" use the nominative and/or accusative pronouns in compound objects and subjects, but simple observation tells us that people don't do that. And that's native speakers who are perfectly capable of distinguishing their Is and their mes, too! It appears to me that the average English speaker only uses case-specific pronouns when they are the only element in the noun phrase. Whether that's us plebs* who use the object pronouns, or the would-be-posh who hypercorrect and use the subject pronouns invariably, it doesn't matter. The basic point is that the native-speaking brain does not make that distinction, so it takes effort to do so. It makes the standard language a truly foreign language. It makes the standard language difficult. Language should never be difficult. (* For the record, I would also use "us plebs" as a subject. Us plebs do it all the time.) Edited by Cainntear on 26 April 2011 at 8:21pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| Keilan Senior Member Canada Joined 4886 days ago 125 posts - 241 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German | Message 58 of 65 26 April 2011 at 10:16pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
Touche. :P However I think my point was clear. I'll edit my post for future readers. And to Cainntear above, well said. Language shouldn't be difficult, and where it is, the native speakers will tend to ignore the difficult bit and just do it some other way. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6503 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 59 of 65 27 April 2011 at 10:49am | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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In this long thread I have missed two points, namely that at least advanced language learners sometimes can spot 'errors' and 'mistakes' in their target languages as spoken by native speakers. But we are not supposed to criticize native speakers. One reason is that we cannot always know whether the offending passage actually is allowed in some subdialect or sociolect, another is that we would like a similar degree of latitude for our own transgressions of some accepted usage. And yes, I'll boldly go ahead splitting infinitives in English and being well or good as the wind blows (in my opinion they don't mean the same).
The other point is that some languages or even institutions/companies actually have an official language police (or at last a policy). The French have their Académie Française, and in Denmark we have Sprognævnet, which however is fairly permissive compared to the French counterpart. Where I work we have a rule about writing "Venlig hilsen", which makes me cringe because I see it as a gross error. The correct form according to me is "Med venlig hilsen" (hyperliterally "with friendly greeting"). This is a good example of a case where I stick to my own linguistic intuition, but have to accept that somebody else - who also are native speakers - apparently belong to another segment of native speakers of Danish. Edited by Iversen on 27 April 2011 at 10:57am 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| Camundonguinho Triglot Senior Member Brazil Joined 4549 days ago 273 posts - 500 votes Speaks: Portuguese*, English, Spanish Studies: Swedish | Message 60 of 65 02 December 2011 at 4:45am | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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Native speakers use these:
Me and Jane went to the store. (Jane and I...) It's me and Jane. (It is Jane and I) Who did you see? -Jane. (Whom) I didn't do that. -Me neither (Neither did I). Everyone must respect their parents. (His/her) There's many things (there are...) English is not really puristic, that's why professors of English don't correct students' ''It's me''. This can't be said of Brazilian professors of Portuguese who consider the Brazilian usage wrong and force us to write in the way people in Lisbon speak (but not the way we speak''): we say VI ELE (saw he) and never VI-O (saw him) for ''I saw him''. If you have a huge gap between the idealized written language and the modern spoken usage, you get a diglossia: Swiss German, Brazilian Portuguese, Belgian Dutch and Czech are some of the examples (we don't even have to go to Asia to experience the diglossia). Edited by Camundonguinho on 02 December 2011 at 4:54am 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| Solfrid Cristin Heptaglot Winner TAC 2011 & 2012 Senior Member Norway Joined 5134 days ago 4143 posts - 8864 votes Speaks: Norwegian*, Spanish, Swedish, French, English, German, Italian Studies: Russian | Message 61 of 65 02 December 2011 at 11:07am | IP Logged | |||||||||||
It is? Please elaborate. I am afraid I am firmly in the normative camp, but since I am almost half a century old, and was raised by people who were half a century old, I still use forms which are actually obsolete, and are incorrect because of that. Not that I hesitate an instant in using language which was banned before the second world war, though. If people can walk around using what I consider really bad language, I see no reason why I should adapt to modern usage. Otherwise I would be interrested in knowing how the descriptivists feel about errors made by a fairly large part of the population, but almost exclusively by children, uneducated teen agers, and foreigners. Is this still not considered wrong? The main example of this from Norwegian is the sound at the end of the German word "ich" when used initially. This is a sound that most Norwegian children struggle with, most foreigners, and even some teen agers and the occasional young adult. I do not know the percentage, but including everyone who uses the wrong form, down to 1 year olds, there may be a 15% of the population who would use "sh" like in "share" instead. The "ich" sound would most commonly be spelled with "Kj", and is used a lot in common words like kjole (dress) kylling, (Chicken) kjøtt (meat) kjede (chain), kjære (dear). Almost all children struggle to say that sound. They have usually learned it by the age of 10. Predictably, foreigners also struggle with that sound, and since most people hesitate to correct children that are not their own, and we have entire schools in Oslo with perhaps 5-10 children who have Norwegian spoken at home, this is spreading. There are those who say that it will just disappear, so what, but since there are some words which mean different things when pronounced with a "kj" or a "sh" that will make our language poorer. And that makes me sad. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| Ari Heptaglot Senior Member Norway Joined 6382 days ago 2314 posts - 5695 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Mandarin, Cantonese Studies: Czech, Latin, German | Message 62 of 65 02 December 2011 at 2:23pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
Well, dunno about other descriptivists, but my view is that if they want to pronounce it in one way, but fail, then it's a mistake ("wrong" just doesn't apply here). If they are themselves comfortable with the pronunciation they use, I see no problem, except that a large number of people will try to convince them their language is substandard, making them feel bad and lose confidence in themselves. To this people will reply "But what if it's so nonstandard that people can't understand what you're saying?", to which I retort "If you want to understand what I'm saying and I don't care whether you do or not, that's your problem, not mine. If I'm trying to communicate to you and I can't make myself understood, then we get into the above 'try and fail' territory, and my definition still holds". Expecting me to speak a "standard variety" just so you are able to understand me is equivalent to expecting a Russian to speak English just because you can't understand Russian. And anyway, language is self-correcting. We couldn't wreak it if we tried.
How will this make your language poorer? Since when are homonyms a sign of a poor language? Poetry and jokes both make heavy use of homonyms and I think they make the language richer. Here are some examples: My favorite English-language poem goes like this: "The spring in her step has turned to fall" (omitting line breaks). This marvelous sentence wouldn't be at all possible if it weren't for the homonyms "spring" and "fall". Or the wonderful jokes I grew up with in Swedish, like "Vilket djur har bäst syn? Zebran" and "Vilket djur haltar alltid? Gorillan". These jokes wouldn't work if Swedish better differentiated between 'z' and 's' (zebra - se bra) or 'o' and 'å' (gorilla - går illa). 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| Solfrid Cristin Heptaglot Winner TAC 2011 & 2012 Senior Member Norway Joined 5134 days ago 4143 posts - 8864 votes Speaks: Norwegian*, Spanish, Swedish, French, English, German, Italian Studies: Russian | Message 63 of 65 02 December 2011 at 10:46pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
In the first part of your reasoning you lost me. I do not understand what you mean. On the second part, I should have been clearer, and said "more confusing" rather than poorer. To give you an example of how this can work out I'll give you the story of a friend of a friend who was after a particular brand of canned food, and went to a major chain of supermarkets and asked for it. She got the answer that they didn't want to take that particular product into the chain. Pronounced by an uneducated 20 year old, the word chain, as in chain of stores, instead of "kjede" came out as "skjede" which means vagina. No of course if I try to follow your reasoning, anybody can pronounce anything anyway they like, and if it is confusing to others, that is their problem. Not sure I would have been quite happy with that as an employer though. Edited by Solfrid Cristin on 02 December 2011 at 10:47pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| fomalhaut Groupie United States Joined 4703 days ago 80 posts - 101 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German | Message 64 of 65 02 December 2011 at 11:38pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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Germans alltags use of Weil, and the 'true' use of Weil. Yes it's a NS, but i mean...
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