"There was two Mini Cooper parked in front of my house", or "there WERE two mini coopers"?

@fresco,

Quote:

...or alas, that you are a product of second rate educational system.[/quote

That actually illustrates much more ignorance than what you are suggesting, Fresco. People don't learn their language in school. Such a notion is preposterous. How is it that this "first rate" educational system has been perpetuating lies about language for hundreds of years?

[quote]But there is no need to use terms like "bad grammar," "fractured syntax," and "incorrect usage" when referring to rural and Black dialects. ... using terms like "bad grammar" for "nonstandard" is both insulting and scientifically inaccurate.

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

1 Reply

@Region Philbis,

Quote:

"was" indicates that there is only one...

Do you think for a moment, Region, that any native speaker of English on the planet would garner from the example with 'was' that there was only one Mini Cooper?

1 Reply

@JTT,

i stand by my post.

there is one car.
there are two cars.

there was one car.
there were two cars.

i've never heard anyone say, nor have i ever read a sentence that contained the phrase "there was two cars"...

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@Region Philbis,

I'm sure that you agree that repetition doesn't constitute any measure of proof, Region.

Quote:

i've never heard anyone say, nor have i ever read a sentence that contained the phrase "there was two cars"...

That's a fine validation of The Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English's caveat:

"However, native speakers rarely have accurate perceptions of these differences: ..."

Google

There's two
About 2,890,000,000 results

There are two
About 10,450,000,000 results

There was two
About 10,450,000,000 results

There were two
About 3,970,000,000 results

Odd, that the results for There are two and There was two have the same number of hits. I'll try another search method.

But the point is, Region, that these examples abound.

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@Aesop,

Quote:

It depends on the subjunctive mood

I don't see any subjunctive mood in this example, Aesop.

Quote:

Both sentences are valid depending on the context.

I think you are right here. Certainly there's + plural delayed subject is a more common feature of the English language, at least for some dialects, than there are + plural delayed subject .

I think it is more than reasonable to expect this to carry over into the past tense.

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Google hits with

- "there was two cars": 4 120 000
- "there were two cars": 32 600 000

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@JTT,

Correct. I am 100% aware I am making a politically conservative observation and retract not one word of it. The trend in the UK is to try to teach "appropriateness" rather than "correctness". That means to attempt to modify idiolects so that speech habits are more "marketable". This is equivalent to teaching the awareness of "dress code" Unfortunately many schools these days fail to "get through" peer group influences, texting habits, "student rights", and popular culture and turn out ill prepared job-seekers. Prospective employers concur.

Aesop's conjecture is of course pure nonsense from both a traditional grammatical point of view, and an "appropriateness" angle.

I suggest successful consumers of the education system like Pinker get out of their academic ivory towers and try earn a living like a kid whom the system has failed, rather than witter about "science" and "offense".

1 Reply

@timur,

Quote:

Google hits with

- "there was two cars": 4 120 000
- "there were two cars": 32 600 000

I got

There was two cars
About 4,140,000 results

There were two cars
About 32,700,000 results

but there's no need to quibble over such minor differences.

What's your point, Timur?

1 Reply

@Region Philbis,

Region Philbis wrote:

there were two mini coopers.

I'd prefer two Mini Coopers.

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@Region Philbis,

Quote:

i stand by my post.

But you failed to answer my question.

Do you think for a moment, Region, that any native speaker of English on the planet would garner from the example with 'was' that there was only one Mini Cooper?

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Hitchcock got a lot of mileage out of:

The Birds is coming!

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@JTT,

JTT wrote:

There was two
About 10,450,000,000 results

There were two
About 3,970,000,000 results

I've no point to make, just surprised by your first results, which you have corrected by now.

1 Reply

@fresco,

Quote:

Correct.

Correct to,

That actually illustrates much more ignorance than what you are suggesting, Fresco.

Quote:

I am 100% aware I am making a politically conservative observation and retract not one word of it.

You are aware that you are spreading a conservative [not just C] fallacy but you want to persist with it. Ooooookay.

Quote:

The trend in the UK is to try to teach "appropriateness" rather than "correctness".

Odd, isn't it, that the trend should move in the direction of reality. How bloody foolish!

I suggest going back to the last few hundred years of "correctness", given the bang up job that the prescriptivists did thru that time.

Quote:

Unfortunately many schools these days fail to "get through" peer group influences, texting habits, "student rights", and popular culture and turn out ill prepared job-seekers. Prospective employers concur.

And you put the blame squarely on how people talk in their everyday lives.

Get a grip, Fresco!

Quote:

I suggest successful consumers of the education system like Pinker get out of their academic ivory towers and try earn a living like a kid whom the system has failed, rather than witter about "science" and "offense".

Yeah, **** science, right. Let's all get on the politically conservative bandwagon. It's never misled us before.

Quote:

I hope to have convinced you of two things. Many prescriptive rules are just plain dumb and should be deleted from the usage handbooks. And most of standard English is just that, standard, in the sense of standard units of currency or household voltages. It is just common sense that people should be given every encouragement and opportunity to learn the dialect that has become the standard one in their society and to employ it in many formal settings.

[added emphasis is mine]

Using SWE/SFE doesn't entail rejecting the equally correct, equally appropriate but, sadly oh so poorly named, Nonstandard English, the one we all employ for the vast majority of our existence. NSE is at the vanguard of linguistic change/variety. Life would indeed be dismal if we were confined in our language use to SWE/SFE.

We'd all sound like droning queen elizabeths.

As you may have noticed, it isn't Steven Pinker that needs ot get up to speed. I suggest that you should be the one to get up to speed on the very issues you want to discuss. It might also help if you got shed of those blinkered conservative memes and engaged your gray, or is it, grey matter.

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@timur,

Quote:

I've no point to make, just surprised by your first results, which you have corrected by now.

Weren't my first results for a different set, Timur?

There were two [no noun] versus there was two [no noun].

1 Reply

@JTT,

The ratio between them is even higher, unlike on your first set.

So, "there were two" is 15 times more used than "there was two".

Still no point to make..

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@JTT,

Oh grow up !

If you check out my posts you will find that I am a proponent of "appropriateness" and have pointed out the academic folly of a "correctness" concept.

The fact is however, that in "the real world" there is the ever persistent lay idea of "correctness" which informs market forces, and educators who do not drive that home to kids are failing in their duty to prepare them for such a world.

Now we can argue until we are blue in the face about what the "brief" of "education" should be, but such arguments seem to be confined to us wealthy "first world intellectuals" with time on our hands to muse over such things. And at the end of the day, kids who have been left to wallow in the social forces of their peer groups and encouraged to assert their "individuality" often end up unemployable, and can even turn to antisocial behavior when they see jobs go to "educated" migrants who know what the score is.

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@JTT,

Quote:

That actually illustrates much more ignorance than what you are suggesting, Fresco.

Is it really ignorance. Why not another point of view? The imputation of ignorance is tautological because the user is defining what ignorance is.

Which is a far more serious matter than the subject of the thread.

1 Reply

@spendius,

You might check out my analysis of the word "ignorance" on another thread.

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@fresco,

And "folly" falls at the first fence fresco. (How's that for neat aliteration?)

Mr Arnold, in his essay about the French Academy, an authority on correctness, provides the justification for their choice whilst coming down on the side of England in rejecting such an official body. And, as is easily imagined, there was pressure to have an English Academy.

But he never says the French are foolish or ignorant.

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@ExplosionsHurt,

Quote:

"There was two Mini Cooper parked in front of my house", or
"there WERE two mini coopers"?

Hurt Did you actually find the previous somewhere, or are you merely inquiring in general terms. If you're quoting something we need you to give us a link to its setting

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"There was two Mini Cooper parked in front of my house", or "there WERE two mini coopers"?

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