subjunctive mood of to be

I suppose, I really should study 5 years German as flaja did so successfully ...

Did I have any say in what textbooks I was told to use or whom it was that were hired as teachers?

Neither could I find Kater in any online German dictionary.

flaja wrote:

Walter Hinteler wrote:

flaja wrote:

Diminutives were never explained to me in 5 years of high school German or 1 semester of college German, although some were used in class.

You mentioned German grammar. It's not my fault when you weren't taught properly.

From the two most common German-English dictionaties:

Not found in Unsere Freunde.

Therefore, it doesn't exist in German.

Therefore, flaja is right and you are wrong, Walter.

Which is not true at all and has nothing to do with your textbooks nor with your teachers or professors.

If we learned grammar as easily as you think we do- essentially by diffusion- grammar would never be taught in school because there would be no need to learn it in a formal academic setting.

Obviously, you need to build in some kind of rules, but what kind? Prescriptive rules? Imagine trying to build a talking machine by designing it to obey rules like "Don't split infinitives" or "Never begin a sentence with [because]." It would just sit there. In fact, we already have machines that don't split infinitives; they're called screwdrivers, bathtubs, cappuccino- makers, and so on.

Prescriptive rules are useless without the much more fundamental rules that create the sentences to begin with. These rules are never mentioned in style manuals or school grammars because the authors correctly assume that anyone capable of reading the manuals must already have the rules. No one, not even a valley girl, has to be told not to say [Apples the eat boy] or [Who did you meet John and?] or the vast, vast majority of the trillions of mathematically possible combinations of words.

So when a scientist considers all the high-tech mental machinery needed to arrange words into ordinary sentences, prescriptive rules are, at best, inconsequential little decorations. The very fact that they have to be drilled shows that they are alien to the natural workings of the language system. One can choose to obsess over prescriptive rules, but they have no more to do with human language than the criteria for judging cats at a cat show have to do with mammalian biology.

...

Most of the prescriptive rules of the language mavens [the ones that you were taught in school] make no sense on any level. They are bits of folklore that originated for screwball reasons several hundred years ago and have perpetuated themselves ever since. For as long as they have existed, speakers have flouted them, spawning identical plaints about the imminent decline of the language century after century. All the best writers in English have been among the flagrant flouters.

The rules conform neither to logic nor tradition, and if they were ever followed they would force writers into fuzzy, clumsy, wordy, ambiguous, incomprehensible prose, in which certain thoughts are not expressible at all. Indeed, most of the "ignorant errors" these rules are supposed to correct display an elegant logic and an acute sensitivity to the grammatical texture of the language, to which the mavens are oblivious.

http://pinker.wjh.harvard.edu/articles/media/1994_01_24_thenewrepublic.html

Quote:

JTT: I was not referring to writing, Mame. Writing is a skill that is separate and much different than actual spoken language and it must be learned for the rules that govern many types of writing are much different than those of speech.

Why? How is a written sentence any different than a spoken sentence? Apart from punctuation, how does the grammar differ between the two?

When Winston Churchill wrote a speech and then delivered it orally before the House of Commons, what changed?

[Who did you meet John and?]

flaja wrote:

Quote:

JTT: I was not referring to writing, Mame. Writing is a skill that is separate and much different than actual spoken language and it must be learned for the rules that govern many types of writing are much different than those of speech.

Why? How is a written sentence any different than a spoken sentence? Apart from punctuation, how does the grammar differ between the two?

When Winston Churchill wrote a speech and then delivered it orally before the House of Commons, what changed?

You've obviously never seen a transcription of speech, Flaja. I think that there is some of Nixon's WH tapes on the Net. I'll try to locate some.

JTT wrote:

[Who did you meet John and?]

[Who did you meet John and?]

First of all this passage is not a complete thought and thus doesn't qualify as a sentence either orally or in writing.

And shouldn't that be [i[whom[/i] considering you are talking about the object of the transitive verb meet?

Now if this little bit of this article is this bad, why would I wish to read the rest of it?

BTW: How are bathtubs machines, considering they have no moving parts (apart from the faucet- a separate thing) and they do no work?

flaja wrote:

JTT wrote:

[Who did you meet John and?]

[Who did you meet John and?]

First of all this passage is not a complete thought and thus doesn't qualify as a sentence either orally or in writing.

And shouldn't that be [i[whom[/i] considering you are talking about the object of the transitive verb meet?

Now if this little bit of this article is this bad, why would I wish to read the rest of it?

BTW: How are bathtubs machines, considering they have no moving parts (apart from the faucet- a separate thing) and they do no work?

Flaja,

You've taken this out of context. It has a connection to the other portions of the sentence.

"No one, not even a valley girl, has to be told not to say [Apples the eat boy] or [Who did you meet John and?] or the vast, vast majority of the trillions of mathematically possible combinations of words."

No, it doesn't have to be 'whom'. That is another silly prescription. I see that you did memorize some of your high school grammar.

Did you miss the pertinent sections, like where it stated that these prescriptive rules are, "at best, inconsequential little decorations".

The passage was obviously written by someone who cannot use English very well. The person cannot think well, thus he cannot speak well and as a consequence he cannot write well.

I thought it a thought-provoking article. I read the first half and will save the second for when I have more time.

Good points to be made, though, in what I did read.

~~~

Apart from the argument about language mavens, what say you, JTT, about the misuse of certain words? "Can" instead of "May", for example. You'd have to update the dictionary to allow that, wouldn't you?

I'm not 100% sure of the "misuse" to which you refer, Mame, but whatever it is, think about what you said in your last sentence.
There is no one that can create rules for language other than the users.

Dictionaries, in their "commercials", write about how theirs is "the first major update for dictionaries in over ten years". Language is generated by its users and dictionaries are mere chroniclers of the innovations.

And I suppose you could enlarge the field of pronouns to allow "him and me" as well as of "he and I".

When you get to the second half of the article, you'll find a discussion on this very topic. Read the particular paragraphs a number of times and really really think about what Prof Pinker has to say about coordinated pronoun sets.

And why not allow "drived" as well as "driven" or "drove"? We all know what is mean, do we not?

I can't see that as causing any problems for English whatsoever, Mame, if the verb were to become regularized. After all, that is the default rule for English, "add 'ed' to a verb to the plain form to get a past tense.

What problems do you see it causing?

There is no one that can create rules for language other than the users.

McTag wrote:

Eh, excuse me folks, may I have your attention please?

If you disagree with Walter or JTT, you're wrong.

And this is why?

Apart from the argument about language mavens, what say you, JTT, about the misuse of certain words? "Can" instead of "May", for example. You'd have to update the dictionary to allow that, wouldn't you?

I'm not 100% sure of the "misuse" to which you refer, Mame, ...

I don't see it causing any problems, actually... it sounds almost natural

However, when the definition of "can" is what it is, and "may" is what it is, you just have to modify the dictionary so nobody can be accused of using the wrong word.