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Language Learning Orthodoxy You Ignore | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6379 days ago 9753 posts - 15779 votes  4 sounds Speaks: Russian*, English, FinnishC1, Latin, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Danish, Romanian, Polish, Belarusian, Ukrainian, Croatian, Slovenian, Catalan, Czech, Galician, Dutch, Swedish | Message 97 of 116 08 December 2014 at 4:45pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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It's good for everyone not to assume that the person you're speaking to is cisgender, though.
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| ScottScheule Diglot Senior Member United States scheule.blogspot.com Joined 5010 days ago 645 posts - 1176 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Latin, Hungarian, Biblical Hebrew, Old English, Russian, Swedish, German, Italian, French | Message 98 of 116 08 December 2014 at 4:51pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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Ha, all right, fair enough.
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| dampingwire Bilingual Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4447 days ago 1185 posts - 1513 votes Speaks: English*, Italian*, French Studies: Japanese | Message 99 of 116 08 December 2014 at 4:59pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
I don't know where the cut-off would be, but if you go back far enough that the language of the time isn't "English" (say as far back as PIE, or more obviously absurdly, back to slightly before the Earth began to form) then it's not very helpful. At some point in time "facebook" was not a meaningful utterance in English, now it is, because the great majority would recognise it as such. "nice" has completely changed meaning since ~1300 or so. At some point today's usage would have been seen as a mistake or simply misunderstood. Today, the former meaning is entirely incorrect. Unless language remains completely backwards-compatible (i.e. new formations allowed, but old ones always accepted with the original meaning) then this sort of evolution will (presumably) always happen. So today "chomping at the bit" is acceptable but perhaps a few hundred years ago it wasn't. Today "toe the line" is correct and "tow the line" is not (afaik) but given the inexorable rise of the latter (according to google), maybe 50 years from now I'll be marked down as "archaic" in some test or other. So I think my point is that you are right, in some sense, that everything you say used to be an error at some previous point in time, but that shouldn't stop you at least inwardly groaning when you are forced to put up with something that is unambiguously an error today. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| ScottScheule Diglot Senior Member United States scheule.blogspot.com Joined 5010 days ago 645 posts - 1176 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Latin, Hungarian, Biblical Hebrew, Old English, Russian, Swedish, German, Italian, French | Message 100 of 116 08 December 2014 at 5:22pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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I'm not sure why it wouldn't be "helpful." It was certainly helpful to the point I was making!
Don't worry, I'm not going to stop groaning. In fact, the point of my post was that I can't help groaning! I just find it ironic that I'm so hesitant to accept the current evolution of the language (say from champ to chomp), but at the same time I eagerly accept all evolutions of the language that happened prior to my momentous arrival on the planet (for example, I care not a whit that "arRIVal" originally had something to do with RIVers). It needn't be that way, obviously. I could just accept that champ has become archaic, chomp has taken its place, and the phrase is now chomping. But I don't do so. I groan. Also, not sure if you're being droll or not, but for the record, Proto-World has nothing to do with the formation of the earth. It's the putative first language of humankind, which would place it somewhere between 100,000 and 200,000 years ago (not terribly long at all compared to the age of the world itself!) 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| Bao Diglot Senior Member Germany tinyurl.com/pe4kqe5 Joined 5548 days ago 2256 posts - 4046 votes Speaks: German*, English Studies: French, Spanish, Japanese, Mandarin | Message 101 of 116 08 December 2014 at 7:35pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
I don't remember the precise moment when I stopped groaning (most of the time) but I think it must've been either when I started using English for several hours every day, or when I picked up Japanese. I do remember a situation when somebody called me dogmatic for insisting on 'correct' usage of an expression. But since then my idea of what languages are has become much more fluid and context-dependent, and I find it easy to accept that expressions can have several forms that are appropriate in different contexts. So a, let's say, streamlined form of an idiomatic expression does not make me groan in a casual conversation, but it still does when a journalist inadvertently uses it in writing and it gets published. Edited by Bao on 10 December 2014 at 8:56pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| dampingwire Bilingual Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4447 days ago 1185 posts - 1513 votes Speaks: English*, Italian*, French Studies: Japanese | Message 102 of 116 08 December 2014 at 10:41pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
I suppose so, but it seemed to me that if you can go back arbitrarily far you might as well be saying that it's all wrong today and so there's no difference between your "wrong" (i.e. the accepted norm of today) and his "wrong" (the erroneous speech, by today's standard).
Good. Rage, rage against the dying of the light :-) It's when you stop noticing that all hope has gone!
"thou" has gone the way of the Dodo, and "champ" may be on its way out, but "champing at the bit" is, I would say, still perfectly acceptable. There are plenty of fossils lying around in English that live on only in a few set expressions.
Ah no. I wasn't that clever, sadly :-) I just went back to a point where I could reasonably guarantee that there was no language on Earth. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5212 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 103 of 116 10 December 2014 at 5:49am | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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There is perhaps a distinction to be made between language variations and true mistakes. If you look
at the sum of all usages in a society, you will certainly see differences that relate to age and reflect changing norms and rules of acceptability. Certain forms that historically could have been considered outright mistakes at a certain time now coexist and continue to evolve, perhaps leading to the disappearance of the earlier forms. So, for example, "champing" and "chomping" at the bit are today nearly interchangeable because both are widely used regardless of considerations of etymology and historical accuracy. I think we can assume that new usages, however incorrect relative to some contemporaneous standard, is generally associated with youth and innovation. As they are wont to do, older speakers die off and take with them the older linguistic forms. As the same time, we see efforts in the press and certainly in the movies of authors trying to be relevant and speak the language that is considered modern or contemporary. Otherwise they will appear old-fashioned and stuffy. That is exactly the danger of insisting on rigid respect of certain uses and rules. And a certain point one has to decide whether one wants to up-to-date or out-of- date. So while we may deplore certain changes because we think speakers are wrong, often we have to get on board with the changes if we don't want to be left behind and become archaic-sounding. At the same time, we can and do make real mistakes in our native languages and even more so in our foreign languages. Here it's not an issue of co-existing or competing usages but rather usages that are considered improper or unacceptable at a given moment. For example, confusing "their" and "there" is an egregious spelling mistake that I often mistake. These are not competing forms, at least for the time being. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| luke Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 6987 days ago 3133 posts - 4351 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Esperanto, French | Message 104 of 116 11 December 2014 at 12:36am | IP Logged | |||||||||||
All I need is 1904 "useful" votes on this post and I'll be set. 5 persons have voted this message useful |
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