Messages

1

English & Linguistics / This might be the hardest thing I have ever done

« on: January 20, 2005, 08:54:41 PM »

Is that a "that could never happen because I love you so" laugh or a "it's funny you should mention that" laugh?

Or perhaps a "that could never happen because our relationship exists only in your imagination" sort of thing?

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English & Linguistics / I don't know what to believe anymore

« on: January 18, 2005, 11:02:00 PM »

The funny thing is that I know how to spell it, but I usually just leave it as "grammer" if it comes out that way.  I'll almost always correct "teh", though.

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English & Linguistics / I don't know what to believe anymore

« on: January 17, 2005, 01:41:29 PM »

No it isn't.  You're just being snippy.

But I'm glad to hear that this isn't really your life's work or anything like that.  The way you appealed to your credentials as a way of ending the argument just made it look that way.

All I'm really saying is that I can understand Brinestone's loss of faith in the ideal of a fixed and logically consistent grammer.  Or rather, I'm saying that I laud it, really...anyway, just throwing in my vote on the side of those that don't want to be bothered with grammer.

Clearly, I shouldn't have allowed it to become an argument over whether or not the study of grammer actually has any value, but I really didn't know that anyone here was that invested in grammer for its own sake.  I was just expressing the position I hold on the language, that English is not highly systematic and therefore it cannot be fully described by the rules of its grammer.  And I really am sorry that it caused such a fuss, I just thought it would be best if I explained exactly what I was saying.

Of course, since no one here seems capable of understanding English...  I'm kidding, of course.

What I mean is that since nobody here seems willing to understand what I'm saying, and since Brinestone has appealled to be readmitted into the faith, I don't have anything more to say on the grand philosophical subject.

On lesser subjects, I still think that "more important" serves as a shorthand for "which is more important" or something similar.  But that argument would go into a more etymological type area of tracing the history of a phrase's morphology and usage.  On a similar note, I don't think that "feel" was a copula yet back when "I feel bad" came into currency.  Or rather, you can use any verb as a copula, it just sounds wrong until people get used to the usage.  But that's getting back to larger questions that we don't feel like discussing.

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English & Linguistics / I don't know what to believe anymore

« on: January 16, 2005, 09:48:18 PM »

If the usage of "more important" is under the same system as "obviously" or "unfortunately", then why is it not "more importantly"?

Because it isn't a systematic rule.

And "feel" may take the usages of a copula in certain cases, but it isn't always permitted to serve as one.  Besides, "I feel bad" doesn't quite mean "I am bad/unwell", or even "I sense I am bad/unwell".  It means "I feel bad"...that is, it is an expression with a unique and highly variable implication (not quite as unique and highly variable as some phrases, but certainly not something for which one could easily find an exact equivalent).  Consider related uses, like the injunction "Don't feel bad."

All that, I'm going to apologize for what I'm about to say, in clarification of what I've been saying.

The field in which you are an expert is complete bullshit.

I didn't know that I was insulting your life's work by saying this, so I'm apologizing for it now.  And certainly, while my opinion may be less biased, yours is more "informed" (and yes, that brings up the relative value of which opinions count as being "informed").  That said, I'll go on being an unbeliever, and you can go on preaching your religion to whoever wants to hear it.  Since this is your board and I don't really feel that the preaching of grammer counts as the most pressing evil in the world today, I'll consent to avoid pressing the issue further, other than to point out that in the end all your arguments are appeals to self appointed authorities...including yourself.

Again, sorry.

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English & Linguistics / I don't know what to believe anymore

« on: January 14, 2005, 08:49:39 PM »

Grammar always refers to the rules of the language, not the way the language is actually used by anyone.  Look it up.

English has a very large number of "accepted usages" that do not follow any "rules" other than being accepted by most English speakers.

For instance, "more important" is a fragment that stands for "it is more important that", or "which is more important" depending on where it is used.  But there is simply no rule in English grammer that permits this modification.  It is a matter of convention.  Like the fact that "let's" is always assumed to be an inclusive form of "let us" while the uncontracted form tends to be more open to being exclusive.

These are not established by the rules, they are exceptions to the rules.  Or to put it more precisely, these usages are not established systematically, they are varient instances.

My point is that when people get picky about grammer, they aren't talking about the language that anyone speaks or writes.  You're talking about "style" and "accepted usage" in most of these questions.  That is a fundamentally different concept from systematic rules of how the language is spoken.

Like, "I feel bad."  What does "bad" mean here?  Is it the noun meaning "wickedness" or is it the adjective?  Because the sense of the phrase ("I feel wickedness") if you take it to be the noun is really different from what people ususally mean when they say this.  But obviously it is grammatically incorrect to use the adjective as a direct object...except in this case, since it is an accepted usage to use a number of adjectives as direct objects of "feel".

Except that the exception itself is not a matter of grammer, it is not systematic, it is an arbitrary convention derived from the chaotic individual choices of thousands of people using the language without much attention to the underlying structure.

It is possible to use a very simple English grammer to say everything you need to say, and avoid contradicting any rules.  You'll sound silly, but you can do it if you want.  It isn't necessary to break the basic rules, but we all do it and there isn't any apparent reason to get too worked up over it.

But I think it's silly to enshrine all the "accepted usages" as being part of the grammer.  They're not, and that's that.  Even if it is accepted usage to use the term "grammer" to mean "accepted usage", that is merely a recursion.  Calling "the way everyone does things" a "system" doesn't actually make it a system, it merely means that you lose the concept of "system".

English has pretty much lost the concept of "grammer" because of people that insist they never say or write anything that is ungrammatical.  It's all a bunch of BS.

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English & Linguistics / I don't know what to believe anymore

« on: January 13, 2005, 04:30:20 PM »

Whomever.  Because it sounds better.  If you want to get so picky, then avoid the ambigious case altogether by saying "The person/actor/entity".  But in a more general sense, the entire construction "Whomever we appoint" is the subject, since "whoever" acting as the subject by itself would have an entirely different meaning.  "Whomever we appoint" as a phrase does not take a separate objective and subjective case, nor does it need to since it is a fairly precise noun.

"What this country needs..." has no reason to be phrased that way, and matches a plural to a singular.  "This country needs..." would be more concise and more correct.

"More important/importantly" is also incorrect, no matter which you use.

"Let's" is a contraction of "let us", and renders the "you and I/me" redundent and ungrammatical.

"The" is not a noun.

A better way to phrase 8 (and one which clears things up a bit) would be, "I didn't see him, even if he was there."  True, it is the "even" which takes the syntactic burden of clearing things up, but the order of "I didn't see him" and "he was there" matters in communicating which is more important.

The terms "will" and "shall" have slightly different meanings, but in a purely grammatical sense neither is correct or incorrect as used here.  Using "shall" merely allows that it is only intended that something happen, whereas "will" indicates that it is certain to occur.  If I say, "you will die..." it means something quite different from, "you shall die...".

Likewise, "I feel bad" and "I feel badly" would mean entirely different things, if either were correct at all.  One happens to be an accepted usage, the other is not, but neither is really correct, and syntactically they wouldn't mean the same thing anyway.

The problem with the majority of these sample questions is that the sentence is already so badly broken from a grammatical point of view that it is impossble for either choice to render the sentence meaningful outside of being an accepted usage.

But simply being an accepted usage doesn't render a construction grammatical, it just means that most people will exempt that usage from the rules of grammer.

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English & Linguistics / Linguistically Complete

« on: January 09, 2005, 08:07:24 PM »

It's you.

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English & Linguistics / Linguistically Complete

« on: January 08, 2005, 09:25:59 PM »

Okay, consider "to cleave", which can mean "to split apart" or "to stick together".  How many languages have a word that means both?  But that doesn't imply that those languages lack ways to express such basic concepts as splitting or not splitting, just because the language lacks any particular word that means both.

I think that it is perfectly plausible that you could have a language without any strict distinctions between verbs and nouns and adjectives.  If you look at a lot of "primitive" English words, that distinction isn't present in the word itself.  Other languages like Korean use modifiers to dictate what part of speech a word is being used as in a particular sentence, so most nouns can be turned into verbs or vice versa.

Noting that there is no precise equivalent for any given word from one language in some unrelated language is therefore not very significant.  For a verb like "to be", which has many different meanings depending on how it is used (many of those meanings being purely grammatical, such as meaning that the following adjective is being used as a verb), it is so unlikely that another language would have some word with all the exact same uses that it would be far more relevent to point out another language that did have an exact equivalent.

"to become" means "to come into existence", and can probably be modified using tense to express existence.  Here we run into the reverse side of the coin I mention above, refusing to translate a term from another language in context and insisting that there is a precise equivalent in English to any particular word from another language.  Very often, a given word in another language could be justifiably translated as any one of several English words (or terms), depending on its usage.  If we take the stance that "because this word can't always be translated as X, it should never be translated as X" then translation becomes very difficult, particularly for the core vocabularies of languages that aren't closely related.

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English & Linguistics / Linguistically Complete

« on: January 08, 2005, 02:24:00 AM »

Well, I don't see why anyone would even blink at the lack of a word for "to be" except that it implies that the language lacks a word meaning "to exist".

After all, "to exist" is the only substantive meaning of "to be" used as a verb by itself.  All the other meanings of "to be" are actually supplied by other words, in those cases "to be" is mainly serving as an odd grammatical stop-gap so that we can say that something is described by some adjective or that the action was performed on the grammatical subject rather than by it, or that it took place at some prior point in time, or so forth.

Saying that another language has no equivalent to "to be" in these senses is about a meaningful as saying that it has no exact equivalent to "second", a word that both means the instance coming immediately after the first and means a period of time sufficient for an object to fall 16 feet after being dropped from a position of rest.  In some languages, you have a word that carries both these meanings, but in many, you don't.

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English & Linguistics / Linguistically Complete

« on: January 06, 2005, 07:18:48 PM »

But isn't that all that lacking a verb for "to be" means?  If it means that there is no verb for "to exist", then how could the language possibly be "complete" in any meaningful sense?

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English & Linguistics / Soda vs. Pop map

« on: December 25, 2004, 09:00:33 PM »

Do they list "soda-pop" as an alternate term anywhere?  What about people that use "soda" and "pop" to mean different things?  For example, those that regard soda as being carbonated drinks which are more transparent  and with lighter flavoring than pop, which is brightly colored and heavily flavored.  Or those that use the term "soda" to refer to cans whereas bottles are usually contain "pop".  To what extent do the terms overlap?  When I refer to buying "a bottle of soda", I mean that it contains minimally flavored carbonated water.  When I say a can contains "pop", I mean that it tastes like some flavor of pop rocks.

Also, what of specific flavors that are never used to refer to carbonated drinks in general, such as root beer, cola, or red pop?  Are these terms to be lumped together and disposed of as all meaning the same thing, along with "punch", "soft drink", and all other terms indicating some type of beverage?

I can't imagine the linguistic poverty of only using "soda" or "pop", let along having neither in my vocabulary.  When I meet people that really don't know the differences between those various terms, it puzzles and saddens me.  Particularly since I often know for a fact that they have more practical experience with the subject of carbonated drinks in gerneral, but aren't able to articulate or understand that experience because they lack the vocabulary.

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English & Linguistics / Learning new words

« on: December 18, 2004, 06:24:54 PM »

Does it have to start with a 'p' or does it just have to mean something like "sketch"?

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English & Linguistics / Learning new words

« on: December 16, 2004, 11:05:13 PM »

How can you not have known what a pastiche is, Trish?  You were much more oriented towards artsy kinds of things than I was.

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English & Linguistics / Learning new words

« on: December 15, 2004, 01:09:59 PM »

Of course, the ever popular nasal 'i'.

I'll admit to having used all of those words quite comfortably in my writing, but usually not with musical associations.  I really have no idea what distinguishes a "pastiche" from a "collage", but I think I like musical collages better than pastiches and sculptural pastiches about the same.  I've placed wooden beams and such so that they abut one another, I suppose that someone could do the same thing with musical themes or something.  I don't even use "timbre" much in association with music, I think of it as what you test by knocking something with a mallet and listening to the noise it makes.

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English & Linguistics / Another survey

« on: December 09, 2004, 03:49:57 PM »

I seem to recall that creating a form page was simple enough under FrontPage Express...to bad you can't find that around anywhere.  But there should be some other programs that do the same thing.  Yahoo has a sitebuilder program that allows you to create forms.

I think that such programs are something of a hassle, but I suppose that coding it in the HTML could be a hassle as well.  There is also the issue of what action the form takes on submission...having it post the submitted form by email is simplest, but isn't popular for various reasons.

But that may or may not be helpful.  I was just wondering, and I also was under the past impression that administrators could create forms using this BB package.

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English & Linguistics / Accents

« on: December 09, 2004, 03:26:41 PM »

The prevalence of the mass media in transmitting and even defining our modern language shouldn't be discounted.  It is simply much rarer in this day and age for people raised in this country to have a "natural" accent, since virtually everyone has been exposed to the same programming from a very early age.

This tends to reduce the level of tolerance that most members of the mass culture will show to someone that has an accent, people that genuinely don't share that mass culture either because they grew up somewhere that national network TV wasn't a factor or because they come from another country are probably outnumbered by "posers"--people that deliberately cultivate an accent for some reason (usually to express distain for the popular culture).

But of course, the popular concept of regional accents persists far more than the reality of these accents.  Which is why often people (particularly those raised before the national programming began) will express surprise at the lack of an accent in someone from another part of the country.  On the other hand, people raised within the mass culture will naturally have the expectation that only the very old and obvious immigrants should have accents.

English and French accents are particularly seen as being the province of posers.  It used to be possible to allay that reaction by revealing that you really were from said country, but in today's post Warsaw Pact climate, it is better to avoid the question altogether.

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English & Linguistics / the panel recommends

« on: December 08, 2004, 05:03:12 PM »

I second Trisha.

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English & Linguistics / RE: Reexamine

« on: December 08, 2004, 05:00:29 PM »

That would be the trademark office, wouldn't it?

And what is this wonderful product?  It sounds like a drug to increase your kinglyness or something.

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English & Linguistics / Another survey

« on: December 08, 2004, 04:58:11 PM »

Why don't you just do your own form page somewhere on Galactic Cactus?

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English & Linguistics / Verdigris

« on: December 05, 2004, 02:29:15 PM »

With the rise of the internet, that figure has risen to about 99%.

At the same time, I think that the figure I gave above tends to vary depending on how you define "read", "book", "bought", "people", and so on.

What I really meant is that most new books these days are designed to sell at least some copies to people that don't actually read books.  Modern books are mainly for decoration, like in The Great Gatsby only with less class.

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English & Linguistics / Verdigris

« on: December 04, 2004, 03:39:56 PM »

It's a bit like the publishing industry that way, eh?  90% of new books are bought by people who have never read an entire book in their lives, therefore 90% of new books being published are aimed at the non-reading public.

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English & Linguistics / Verdigris

« on: December 03, 2004, 06:09:39 PM »

No, "protonium" would not be a very dense substance, I'm afraid.  If you try to condense it, it tends to explode.

The actual animal fat contained in food tends to contribute heavily towards a feeling of satiety in European peoples.  I've never in my life been able to finish a whole bag of potato chips on my own unless it was the 4 oz. snack sized variety.  American's tend to eat large quantities of food that are relatively low in fat, then go on diets.  If you go on a starvation diet a few times, your satiation impulses are permanently affected because your body assumes that it could be subjected to another starvation period at any time.  So then you just get fatter and fatter because your body is always trying to prepare for what you'll do next time.

And then you get gastric bypass surgery.  If you survive, your body desperately attempts to re-enlarge your stomach to the proportions needed to digest the quantities of food it thinks it needs to survive these assaults on primary survival basics like food and not having knives chopping up vital organs.  Then you need another gastric bypass and this time your body gives up and you die on the table for sure.

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English & Linguistics / Verdigris

« on: December 02, 2004, 07:38:08 PM »

Actually, for a time, they kinda did.  Or at least, they were the world leader in deep fat frying technology when potatoes were being introduced to Europe.

And even putting that aside, I think that France is still the world leader in really fatty foods.  I'm sure that the Inuit/Aleut and some other more or less purely carnivorous peoples can beat them on individual dishes, and we're number one for inventing foods that make you fat no matter what the advertising says, but the French really do have an edge when it comes to inventing ways to put real, honest to goodness, animal derived fat[/b] in food.

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English & Linguistics / A linguistic survey

« on: November 23, 2004, 05:25:33 PM »

I'm going to nullify what FLR said.

The meaning is "Not all of them were", unless you remove the contraction to make it read "All of them were not".  "Not all of them were" would equate to "some of them were not" and "All of them were not" would equate to "None of them were".

Using the contraction removes any particular emphasis on the "not" clause and it becomes the less strong "not".  This is generally true for contractions, and if you avoid using a common contraction then it automatically emphasizes the meaning.  "Not" is a particularly good example of this, if you look at it in contraction and out.  The "to be" words are also good examples.

By the way, I nullify FLR because we grew up in the same households (more so than my other sibs, even).