comma/more superior

When I'm in doubt, I always check with Mr. Language Person.

I'm sure that you would come across the odd thing that Fowler got right, McTag, probability being what it is. But that doesn't mean that Fowler should be looked at as some sort of authority on language.

As was mentioned, it's so damn out of date that it is pretty much useless. So useless in fact that language scientists only refer to it to point out just how silly some folks were when it came to describing the workings of language.

No dialect of English can accurately be described as transient. As regards AmE, I read more than once where an author suggests that AmE is more conservative with regard to structure than is BrE.

Now, why were those three examples ungrammatical?

fit, fitter, fittest
fit, more fit, most fit.

Your examples are tautological, or whatever a language scientist might call them.

Language scientist? That's daft, too.

Okay, you've explained that you think they are redundant. That doesn't explain why they are ungrammatical.



It's daft to actually study things? It's better instead to just make up silly notions based on opinions?

Being a professional engineer yourself, and a man of great thought, I'm pretty sure that you are just pulling our collective leg.

This F space intentionally B left blank M

"Language Science", the term itself and the ideas behind it, reminds me of the remark made about attempting to explain a joke.
It's like a dissecting a frog.
Nobody laughs, and the frog dies.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computational_linguistics

Some of it looks real science-y to me. ^^

Yes but how is any of that going to help JTT understand the real meaning of words and their use?



It looks to me like a wheeze to get grant money out of the educational authorities. How many fairies can dance on the head of a pin?

Any dodge to get grant money (by now, a hoary old tradition . . . or is that a traditional old whore?) is much more betterer.

Is anything likely to?



I'm not a linguist, but I often proofread journal submissions for my colleagues who are. It's pretty damned science-y. I could dig up something I've proofread recently, if you're interested. It's 18 pages long, but a choice excerpt or two might show you what I mean. I couldn't understand the majority of it. I just looked for comma splices, subject-verb agreement errors, etc.

It was about 1796 that some goofy Englishman claimed that he had identified the Indo-European root language. Linguists have been attempting to drape themselves in the mantle to science ever since. I remain unconvinced. However, it is a respectable academic discipline which applies a respectable methodology. Sciences have tended to confirm linguistic conclusions. Linguistics really blossomed in the 19th century, and identified commonalities of linguistic derivation which have since been upheld by archaeology. For example, the Koreans and the Japanese speak Altaic languages, cousins of Turkish, rather than having any linguistic affinity with Chinese. That is not to say that they have not been profoundly influenced by China, just that they come from somewhere else. The Japanese are now clearly shown by archaeology to be the first people on the planet to invent pottery--more than 2500 years before pottery appears in China in the archaeological record. Archaeology has found evidence of pottery making in the valley of the Amur River (today the border region between Russia and China) dating from about the same period as the appearance of pottery in Japan. The Amur River valley would be a natural "highway" for migration from the Altai Mountains to the Korean peninsula and Japan.

This thread is far more funnier than many. I salute youse all. I've enjoyed it.

I am getting confused by the replies which seem to be so different from each other.

Yeah, I studied most of that in History of English (except the pottery stuff), and learned about the Altaic roots of Korean after I got here. I should've specified phonology, a sub-field of linguistics, when I said it sure looks science-y. In phonological research, I'm sure you know, they use a lot more gadgets and are a lot more empirical, like real scientists.

From now on, we should make a rule that all replies should be the same, so as to avoid such confusion.

Yes, sorry about that. It must be confusing.

What the...are you one of my students?

Um, why would you think that?

But no. Here, have an apple anyway

Koreans can't distinguish between gerunds and infinitives, since they don't exist in the Korean language (not exactly, anyway), so I hear things like, 'Are you boring?' and 'I'm so confusing!' It keeps life interesting.

Edit: I just re-read your post. You didn't say...**** it. Never mind. It's 1:00 a.m. and I'm babbling. Thanks for the apple, anyway.