Dear JTT
I'm going to go forward with the belief that your comments are genuine and an attempt at debate. Please understand that when people are speaking face to face, there are many physical ques and voice inflections that better convey the intention. The actual intent of words on paper (or words on screen) can be mistaken as rude or dismissive, even when the drafter has nothing but the best intentions. So, it's 11:26 here in Maryland, and I will try to address as many of your comments before I get too tired or too bored. I would have like to highlight my responses, but for some reason my old computer is not cooperating. Please be patient: Here goes.....................
Re: glitterbag (Post 3732632)
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To JTT, you might not understand the example I gave regarding the implied verb, and I may have used the wrong word to identify the process, my other languages sometimes confllict with English spelling and grammer nomenclature.
You were trying to suggest that there was ellipsis involved, but that wasn't the case, GB. 'respect' is definitely a verb, has been since 1560, according to M-W.
(My copy of Webster's Seventh New Collegiate Dictionary, says nothing about respect as a verb, doesn't mention 1560 and also labels respect as a noun. However if your use of M-W means something other than Merriam-Webster, I would be delighted to take a look at whatever it is)
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M-W
Main Entry: respect
Function: transitive verb
Date: 1560
1 a : to consider worthy of high regard : esteem b : to refrain from interfering with <please respect their privacy>
2 : to have reference to : concern
synonyms see regard
(My M-W uses all those examples but identifies them as nouns)
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For instance in Romanian, vowels are used differently in some cases...such as in English we might say Child, in Romanian it is "copi", we say "children", they say "copii "(plural) we say "the children" and they say "copiii". As an English speaker I found this very hard to pronounce...I said to my instructor "You can't hear the difference because all the words are prounounced the same". She said I was wrong and every vowel was pronounced That was very hard for me to even come close to the proper pronunciation.
Similar idea for Japanese pronunciation. I didn't find it much of a problem at all.
(I never needed to study Japanese, but Mandarin and Vietnamese didn't cause any problem with my English, however they are in a whole different catagory and are not considered Romance languages. Personally I liked Vietnamese more than Chinese only because of the sound. Vietnamese is tonal and can be quite lovely to listen to. (please don't gig me for ending a sentence with a preposition). Also the Asian languages use characters, not the alphabet English speakers use. Russian was difficult and I am not fluent but I can read Cyrillic and with the help of a Russian-English dictionary, I can deal. Polish was interesting and also very lovely to the ear, but Romanian which is a Romance language is a little different than French or Spanish. Although if you have studied those two, Romanian comes easier....and Latin is a God-send in breaking down the Romance languages and English....but I tend to think of Romanian as a Slavic/Romance hybrid and I really don't know what esteemed Linguistist Experts think, but Romanian was the only other language I studied that made me think once, twice, three times about English words that I used to spell without thinking.
(inadvertently deleted the first part) r as grammer and proper sentence structure, you need to consult a good English primer, hopefully one geared to college students but a high school primer will do the trick. Another good source for consistancy is the "Government Printing Office" Style manual. It is a life saver when you need to communicate with a huge organization and you get confused about the proper use (I should say the formal use) of punctuation or grammer questions or words that can be used in a incorrect way.
For the last half century at least, the English primers used in the USA have been anything but good. They have been filled with page after page of nonsense, prescriptions that have nothing to do with the English language.
Well that's an intersting idea, do you have any recommendations for manuals that explain English????? There are many countries that use grammer books as the last word for proper French, Russian, and all the other languages....want to weigh in on the usefulness of their Language Primers. You mentioned Japanese, how did your instuctors prepare you????? Did they hand out Film magazines???? My husband's room mate from Grad school teaches English in Japan and has been there since the early 70's. Should I send him a note and explain that English grammer books are bogus, because if that's true he would probably appreciate the tip?
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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.
(Forgive me, but this is a ridiculous argument and not worthy of you, I know you are brighter than that.)
...
The legislators of "correct English," in fact, are an informal network of copy-editors, dictionary usage panelists, style manual writers, English teachers, essayists, and pundits. Their authority, they claim, comes from their dedication to implementing standards that have served the language well in the past, especially in the prose of its finest writers, and that maximize its clarity, logic, consistency, elegance, precision, stability, and expressive range. William Safire, who writes the weekly column "On Language" for the [New York Times Magazine], calls himself a "language maven," from the Yiddish word meaning expert, and this gives us a convenient label for the entire group.
To whom I say: Maven, shmaven! [Kibbitzers] and [nudniks] is more like it. For here are the remarkable facts. Most of the prescriptive rules of the language mavens 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.
(Forgive me again, but his show a total intellectual deficit regarding the evolution of language, English or any other language)
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.
(Well this is apples and oranges.....literature, novels and other papers are intended to capture a mood or idea.....they are not intended to be a scientific roadmap to inform or instuct....they are written to enrich and entertain those of us who still read. Think of Mark Twain, his novels were a rich depiction of his era...folksy and incredibly enjoyable. This being said, Samuel Clements was a talented man who had a good grasp of the English language and this grasp made it possible for him to capture local language.....looking at it from a different angle, Comedians can't be funny if they are dumb, the best comics are very bright because if they are not bright all they can do is poop and fart jokes)
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.
(OK, this sounds very elegant but I don't have a clue what you are trying to say...maybe you left something out...hey, it happens)
http://pinker.wjh.harvard.edu/articles/media/1994_01_24_thenewrepublic.html
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In casual conversation or on forums like this the rules are relaxed. There was a time when the use of "ain't" was a signal that the speaker was ignorant. Now most people use it occasionally to punch up their conversation, but few people use "ain"t" exclusively.
Rules are not relaxed for conversation, formal or casual. That's an old saw. Who is the person who relaxes them, GB? The rules for writing and speech are much different and it's ridiculous to hold up writing as a holy grail for speech.
(You might want to take another look at this part, you are contradicting yourself. First you state I am mistaken about casual speech then you state "it's riduculous to hold up writing (sic) as a Holy Grail for speech (sic)", I am guessing you are referring to conversation)
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Other things I could have mentioned as pet peeves are "He ain't got no more", "I ain't never.....", "irregardless", supossably instead of supossedly, the list goes on and on.
But they'd still just be peeves and many of these peeves are simply nonsense.
(check your online dictionary or whatever vehicle you like to define "peeve", it doesn't matter if it is nonsense to you....the thread is about "What are your pet peeves......" not, what does JTT think is worthy of being annoying to others.
They are not even your peeves. They are simply repeats that have been done, been debunked many times before.
(Well they are indeed my pet peeves, they may also annoy others which could account for the "repeats" you mention, but frankly, if it pisses me off, that's all there is to it. I don't comb my hair with a fork, and if I saw someone do it, I would be repulsed regardless if anyone else thinks this is a nornal use of a fork. However it can be a great tool for a comic, for the reasons stated above)
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So once again, this thread is about pet peeves, I mentioned what makes me wince, it seems some of you think if you hear it a lot it has been bestowed with acceptance.
By the same token, people think that if they read these prescriptions in a style manual or a dictionary, they have some validity.
(I use dictionarys and grammer primers for information and guidance, I can't imagine where you go to look up an unfamiliar word or check a rule of grammar, but I would be happy to type the definition from Webster's if that would please you)
(As far as the information you have provided below, I thank you kindly but I'll pass in favor of a bonafide English Professor)
(I spent an entire hour addressing your comments on my opinions and that's an hour I will never get back. The only reason I got engaged was the hope that this was actually a discussion about valid differences and not just somebody ticked off that he/she had to learn punctuation and diagram sentences while he/she was in grammer school. I will grant you that it is a miserable effort trying to master the basic rules of grammer, punctuation, spelling and don't forget math......however, without a few guidelines to cling to, we would all be making up our own language. That's really the best argument for dictionaries.....dictionaries establish a norm only for the purpose of preventing every tiny town in these United States from forming it's own version of English. I am not talking about eliminating regional accents or idioms...I find the diffenence fascinating and enjoy them. But without an agreed upon format, communicating in your own language could become impossible.)
Now I'm really tired and I will not go back to check for spelling errors or typos, I'll leave that to David.
For more discussion on this same overall issue, see,
http://able2know.org/topic/135113-1
Prescriptivism - peddling myths about language
http://able2know.org/topic/134913-1
http://able2know.org/topic/133093-1
FIVE MORE THOUGHTS ON THE THAT RULE
http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/002189.html
THE CHICAGO MANUAL OF STYLE --- AND GRAMMAR
http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/001869.html Signature... these days Americans make a living by selling each other houses, paid for with money borrowed from China. One way or another, the economy will eventually eliminate both imbalances. [Paul Krugman Aug 2005]
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