Age and grammar

[bankside]

Depends where you are in Canada. Or is that "Depends ware you are?"

They sound the same. (and ought to )

ON the other hand, "iss" becomes "ish" in most Canadian speech I've heard; to say otherwise sounds like an affectation.

 

[Yooper]

Two brief cents.

I do think the problem is partly generational, and also partly poor education (and it is related).

Back in the day, when dinosaurs roamed the earth (as when I was in school), grammar and spelling was beaten into our heads starting in the first grade. Nowadays, it is rare for the entire class to be ready for first grade, and teachers are forced to deal with stupid skills the kids should already have, such as colors and numbers instead of reading and writing. Later on, these same kids learn how to take tests (especially multiple guess ones that are easily scored by computer) but can't actually think.

The other part is related to the computers and internet. I work with many University students in my job and I see many, many that appear to have decent grammar and spelling skills when they use the computer; but when the computer is not used (or spell check doesn't catch errors), it is a completely different story. Schedule becomes Schedual; Petite becomes Petit; Housewares becomes Housewears (these three comes courtesy of an employee of mine who is a Graduate Student in Linguistics) .

 

[Kulindahr]

^ for that matter, we were doing basic sentence diagramming in fourth grade.

I never expected to run into it again when translating ancient Greek and Hebrew texts, though!

 

[Yooper]

^ for that matter, we were doing basic sentence diagramming in fourth grade.

Don't remind me! I hated that and have desperately tried to forget it.

How many folks under 25 even know what Sentence Diagramming is?

 

[teadrinker]

With regard to Frankfrank's post above, homophones are also of course a matter of local or regional accent. In Australia, "weather" and "whether", would be pronounced the same; an Australian who pronounced "whether" as "WHether", would be seen as affected.

-T.

 

[Kulindahr]

Don't remind me! I hated that and have desperately tried to forget it.

How many folks under 25 even know what Sentence Diagramming is?

Their loss.

I was amazed at how useful it was for working with ancient texts. As a word gets identified, it you hang them on a sentence diagram where you think they belong. When you look at pieces of a sentence that way, you can guess other pieces that you can't make out, and it becomes easier to figure out the whole sentence. It was easier with Greek, because Greek words have case built in, so just by having the whole word you know how it's functioning in the sentence.

I miss the precise orderliness of ancient Greek . . .

 

[Críostóir]

I might have taken part in the poll, had any of the checkboxes not been bullshit.

Note my correct use of the subjunctive.

There's a distinction to be made between "correct" grammar and useless elitist pedantry. The Latinate impositions (prohibiting sentence-final "prepositions" (which mostly aren't even technically prepositions), telling people not to split infinitives) and other silly "logical" rules (the horror of the singular use of 'they' is the most laughable example) need to be discarded. Teaching kids to be able to speak like adults benefits them and society.

How about "they", which can now mean third person plural, but also third person singular -- in other words, when the word it head, it might be meaning "he", "she", "it", or "they"?

Actually that use of 'they' (which is called third-person singular indefinite) dates back to the 17th century in English. The ship has sailed, and like it or not it's not turning back.

I like it fine, myself. As society becomes less sexist, it becomes less appropriate to use 'he' when you're not sure of someone's gender, and the artificial alternatives are awkward at best; 's/he' only works in writing, and 'hir' (which I've used myself) just looks like a typo.

What about words which **ARE NOT** homophones, but which are now treated as though they are?QUESTION: What is WEATHER [WHETHER]?

THOSE WORDS ARE **NOT** HOMOPHONES!!!!

No more of a homophone than WHICH and WITCH are...

Why (or is it wye?) has the "WH" disappeared from our spoken language? I still use it, and I always will. WHISTLE is not pronounced "wissel."

A guess that a Canadian might think that the missing "h" sound (from WHETHER) migrated to words like TISSUE and ISSUE - which, in Canada, are pronounced as they appear, but in the USA they're pronounced "tishew" and "ishew."

The problem is yours. You believe your dialect is superior to the dialects spoken by others. This really IS a kind of elitism. There may be advantages to one dialect over another (for example, my dialect lacks a distinct second-person plural, so I've borrowed "y'all" when it matters), but they really all balance out.

Isn't it odd that in the Wheat Thins commercial of life, you find yourself being Stewie?

ETA: One particularly annoying bit of elitist pedantry is the use of the word 'homonym' for BOTH homophones AND homographs! Is there ANYONE who can't see how that confuses children?

For that matter, I don't see why we have to make grade-school kids learn the Greek terms at all. Why not call them 'sound-alike words' and 'look-alike words' respectively? They'd get it right away, and not get the two mixed up, as so often happens.

Just try explaining 'read' (present), 'read' (past), 'reed', and 'red' (and don't forget that 'rede', while somewhat archaic, is still a correct English word) to a 9-year-old using only the word 'homonym' to describe what's going on. Go ahead, I'll watch. Then try 'lead' (verb), 'lead' (metal), 'led', 'Leeds', and 'lede' (which last is specialized vocabulary, but they still might see it).

Spelling phonemically (which is what people mean when they say "phonetically" - real phonetic spelling is a nightmare) would make this worse, not better. And don't even get me STARTED on K/S alternation.

 

[rotary]

20 or 30 years ago there wasn't Facebook, emails, texts and internet forums to display poor spelling and sentence structure en masse. People are typing to communicate more than ever before, so it just may be a case of our society putting the same deficiencies in grammar on display that were always there, but not seen.

There's a reason the readability of newspapers has ranged from fifth grade up to a college level for decades.

 

[Kulindahr]

Actually that use of 'they' (which is called third-person singular indefinite) dates back to the 17th century in English. The ship has sailed, and like it or not it's not turning back.

I like it fine, myself. As society becomes less sexist, it becomes less appropriate to use 'he' when you're not sure of someone's gender, and the artificial alternatives are awkward at best; 's/he' only works in writing, and 'hir' (which I've used myself) just looks like a typo.

I liked what a sci-fi novel, by David Brin IIRC, did: "hin" could be used in place of "he", "she", or "it" (fun in the novel came when they found an alien race with three genders, and had to do something about human grammar).

I just find myself sad because males never got their own pronoun -- females got their own but we had to share ours.

ETA: One particularly annoying bit of elitist pedantry is the use of the word 'homonym' for BOTH homophones AND homographs! Is there ANYONE who can't see how that confuses children?

For that matter, I don't see why we have to make grade-school kids learn the Greek terms at all. Why not call them 'sound-alike words' and 'look-alike words' respectively? They'd get it right away, and not get the two mixed up, as so often happens.

Or just teach them all Greek -- it would do wonders for science education.

Spelling phonemically (which is what people mean when they say "phonetically" - real phonetic spelling is a nightmare) would make this worse, not better. And don't even get me STARTED on K/S alternation.

Isaac Asimov weighted in on this and proposed a simple system where everything would be 'phonetic' but with some cute tricks I don't remember for these oddballs -- initial silent letters being retained was one. He had an alphabet of something like forty letters, some appearing to make long and short vowels into different letters.

 

[frankfrank]

Isn't it odd that in the Wheat Thins commercial of life, you find yourself being Stewie?

No more odd than me thinking "Hey, that's me!" when I listened to the commercial for the first time (and then, a few weeks later, you actually mention the same thing), haha...

I still find it strange that Jeopardy! would choose that as an example of a homophone, though, because it's not 100% universal - I actually know other people who would say "WHeat Thins" (or WHether) so I'm far from the only one. There are hundreds of other homophones which are universal, that they could have chosen (right/write, stationary/stationery, band/banned, etc.)...next they'll say that mere/mirror are homophones.

 

[Kulindahr]

That commercial seems stupid here. No one understands why anyone would find it odd to pronounce the "H". In fact, when I mentioned the other day that the "H" should really go on the front, because that's where it's pronounced, I got general agreement. Whet, when, whether, which, and the rest all get their "H" honored. The oddball is "why", which only seems to use its "H" when in emphatic mode.

 

[blackbeltninja]

I might have taken part in the poll, had any of the checkboxes not been bullshit.

Note my correct use of the subjunctive.

There's a distinction to be made between "correct" grammar and useless elitist pedantry. The Latinate impositions (prohibiting sentence-final "prepositions" (which mostly aren't even technically prepositions), telling people not to split infinitives) and other silly "logical" rules (the horror of the singular use of 'they' is the most laughable example) need to be discarded. Teaching kids to be able to speak like adults benefits them and society.



Actually that use of 'they' (which is called third-person singular indefinite) dates back to the 17th century in English. The ship has sailed, and like it or not it's not turning back.

I like it fine, myself. As society becomes less sexist, it becomes less appropriate to use 'he' when you're not sure of someone's gender, and the artificial alternatives are awkward at best; 's/he' only works in writing, and 'hir' (which I've used myself) just looks like a typo.



The problem is yours. You believe your dialect is superior to the dialects spoken by others. This really IS a kind of elitism. There may be advantages to one dialect over another (for example, my dialect lacks a distinct second-person plural, so I've borrowed "y'all" when it matters), but they really all balance out.

Isn't it odd that in the Wheat Thins commercial of life, you find yourself being Stewie?

ETA: One particularly annoying bit of elitist pedantry is the use of the word 'homonym' for BOTH homophones AND homographs! Is there ANYONE who can't see how that confuses children?

For that matter, I don't see why we have to make grade-school kids learn the Greek terms at all. Why not call them 'sound-alike words' and 'look-alike words' respectively? They'd get it right away, and not get the two mixed up, as so often happens.

Just try explaining 'read' (present), 'read' (past), 'reed', and 'red' (and don't forget that 'rede', while somewhat archaic, is still a correct English word) to a 9-year-old using only the word 'homonym' to describe what's going on. Go ahead, I'll watch. Then try 'lead' (verb), 'lead' (metal), 'led', 'Leeds', and 'lede' (which last is specialized vocabulary, but they still might see it).

Spelling phonemically (which is what people mean when they say "phonetically" - real phonetic spelling is a nightmare) would make this worse, not better. And don't even get me STARTED on K/S alternation.

Nerd alert!


















What?

-d-

 

[DonQuixote]

BBN,
Our good Criostoir appears to be an English expert, based on other threads and long time dialogues.

 

[Críostóir]

Nerd alert!

You say that like it's a BAD thing.

BBN,
Our good Criostoir appears to be an English expert, based on other threads and long time dialogues.

I'm a writer of many years; writing has been part of my job for decades; I write recreationally and hang out with writers and editors in person and online.

I also have a degree in linguistics. It's only a BA, and it's kind of aged, but some things don't change.

 

[herry1]

Mine lived to be 88 and 43

I'm 50 and mine is crap I can't grammartise a post to save my life.

 

[DonQuixote]

Hard-Up1
You have to admit to a "bit" of a lack of seriousness in the options presented as causations for the problem.

 

[Kulindahr]

I didn't answer the poll, either -- I thought it sounded too silly.

 

[bankside]

Not learning to write English properly does not make anyone into a freedom fighter. It is a pointless rebellion. We have rules of grammar; use them. Learn them.