HoD Grammar thread

[gunner154]

Talking about language is no longer being out of topic here ;)

[Khan]

Ah where is Nema when one needs him. I usually define grammatically correct as what gets past his filter.

[Dunenewt]

Good point, I'm intrigued to find out the answer now.

[nemafakei]

As per MrF and Newt:

"try to" is grammatically correct. "try and" is grammatically incorrect, but is a common idiom in spoken language and will always be understood as "try to", even though a strict reading of it would render it incomprehensible.

Edit: Would help if I write "try and" in the second instance; thanks, Khan.

[Khan]

I think your own correction may have gotten the better of you there Nema.

[Dunenewt]

Careful, the spellchecking machine may short-circuit.

[nemafakei]

Hah, of course, there's the counter-example of all this where "try and" makes perfect sense.

Paul: "They tried and failed?"

Mohiam: "They tried and died"

Does not mean "They tried to fail"/"They tried to die"!

[Emperor Harkonnen]

it seems that if you write try in infinitive, it would never be grammatically correct to write "and" afterwards.

and if you write it in preteritum (past), you could either write and or to, depending on whether there are two or one action.

[MrFlibble]

Hah, of course, there's the counter-example of all this where "try and" makes perfect sense.

Paul: "They tried and failed?"

Mohiam: "They tried and died"

Does not mean "They tried to fail"/"They tried to die"!

That's obviously a different "try and".

[Dunenewt]

I now try and to correct myself each time, and I never really realised how often I say it!

[MrFlibble]

I'm still with the "broader" view of grammaticality, which includes those forms that don't go against a speaker's intuition under the "grammatically correct" header. You wouldn't be using an expression if you were sure it was wrong, would you?

Linguistic intuition works pretty well when it comes to incorrect things, since their presence in speech might hamper understanding. You may have doubts about what is correct, but incorrect forms (in a broader sense of grammaticality) are usually easily spotted by a native speaker.

[gunner154]

That's about the same reason why we have Singlish in Singapore.

[MrFlibble]

Don't forget that, unlike prescriptive grammars, which are all about rules, language itself is about choosing one of several acceptable variants while constructing speech. If it were not so, there would be no language change, and we'd be still speaking PIE :D

[Emperor Harkonnen]

IMO language change should be avoided. It is a part of our culture, and in Norway language precervation is of great importance. You cannot stop the development of languages orally, but you can greatly reduce it in writing.

You don't have to write the exact same way you speak.

[MrFlibble]

It is true that written language has become very different from spoken language, but "avoiding" language change is a bit too much. The view that language is a static system which changes only "occasionally" (which stems back to Ferdinand de Saussure), is now considered obsolete. Change lies in the very nature of human language; without change, it would not be actually able to function anymore. E.g. if you enter a room you've never seen before, and see a table there, and say (when, for example, somebody outside asks you: what's in the room?), "There's a table in the room", that's also a minor, insignificant, but still change - because you apply a word ("table") to completely new circumstances. That's a small step on the road to polysemy, or even creation of new words.

[Dunenewt]

When talking English I would rather use standard English, so that people who don't speak English as a first language know what I'm talking about, which is why I'd like to avoid anything that people don't perceive to be proper English.

[SandChigger]

IMO language change should be avoided. It is a part of our culture, and in Norway language precervation is of great importance. You cannot stop the development of languages orally, but you can greatly reduce it in writing.

Yep. And eventually you end up with a written language that is more or less divorced from the vernacular...which kinda defeats the purpose of having a written form of the language in the first place: communication. ;)

(Not to mention that it makes learning to read and write a REAL BEECH!)

(MrFibble...it'd probably be something much older than PIE, no? :D )

Remember: Tolkien got it right when he portrayed change in the languages even of the immortal Elves. ;)

[MrFlibble]

(MrFibble...it'd probably be something much older than PIE, no? :D )

Sure. It'd be the Mother of All Languages :) But if it didn't change, then we prolly wouldn't be able to use it properly anyway, so what's the difference ;)

[Emperor Harkonnen]

Yep. And eventually you end up with a written language that is more or less divorced from the vernacular...which kinda defeats the purpose of having a written form of the language in the first place: communication. ;)

(Not to mention that it makes learning to read and write a REAL BEECH!)

So you are saying that if the written language is very far from the spoken language, then it does not serve the porpose of being a means of communication?

Perhaps it would be difficult to learn, but I don't see any harm in a challenge.

[MrFlibble]

You know, Emperor Harkonnen, it had been done before. Take the language of the sacred texts, for example. The original texts of the Pax Slavia Orthodoxa were written in Old Church Slavonic, which was based on the southern Slavic dialects. Since the religious texts are sacred, the scribes who copied them tried to accurately preserve the originals, although traits of the scribes' own dialects creeped into the texts anyway, eventually leading to regional varieties of the language. Those varieties, however, would also become different from the spoken language as time passed, as had happened with the Russian variant of Church Slavonic. Eventually, the need arose to create a new translation of the Biblical texts, since the Church Slavonic version had become almost completely incomprehensible to Russian speakers.

[SandChigger]

So you are saying that if the written language is very far from the spoken language, then it does not serve the porpose of being a means of communication?

Perhaps it would be difficult to learn, but I don't see any harm in a challenge.

No, of course not. The standard/classical written language of China served as an excellent means of communication, helping to link the Empire and make its administration possible, long after the regional varieties of the spoken language had, essentially, become mutually unintelligible. And there's the example of the use of Latin as a written lingua franca in Europe after spoken/Vulgar Latin was well on its way to becoming French, Italian, etc. IIRC Sanskrit functioned in a similar way in India, as does Standard Modern Arabic across the Arab world.

However, in China for example, only a very very small percentage of the population could read or write for a couple of millennia, until well into the last century.

The problem is that the more divorced from the spoken language the written version is, the more difficult it is and longer it takes for someone to acquire it.

A "challenge" is fine for well-heeled upper and middle classes with plenty of time on their hands. The attraction loses a bit if your goal is a 100% literate, well-informed populace able to express itself.

[MrFlibble]

Another thing is that written language will change anyway, simply because change is innate to all human languages. Of course, this doesn't mean that written language will become closer to speech in its change, but change it will.

[Emperor Harkonnen]

In your examples we have completely different languages, but they do still serve the purpose of communication. And in China it is of course difficult with so many different dialects to consider, when creating a written language. It would be more practical for them to have two languages, one local and one national.

I was thinking about the situation in Norway, where we have two official written languages, just because people wanted to write just as they talk. I find that unnecessary when we just see minor differences.

Of course when the differences are so large that you could talk about different languages, like Russian and Church Slavonic, it is time to develop a new written language.

But what I mean is that I think there is no need to change the written language over a few differences.

[MrFlibble]

But what I mean is that I think there is no need to change the written language over a few differences.

Oh yes, this is certainly true. In Russia, there was a "spelling reform" project some time ago, which also intended to introduce minor changes that would be more of an irritation for educated people who'd have to "re-learn" how to write certain words (most of them specific or not frequently used anyway). Luckily the project has been suspended.

[SandChigger]

And in China it is of course difficult with so many different dialects to consider, when creating a written language. It would be more practical for them to have two languages, one local and one national.

Um...the written language (was) developed long before the current "dialects".

Many (most?) Chinese are diglossic, speaking their local variety and the national standard Putonghua (based on the old standard written language and Beijing variety). Some of the major varieties, like Cantonese in the south, incorporate non-standard characters into their written forms.

Because the Chinese writing system expresses meaning more than sound, it remained relatively stable while the spoken language changed and diversified. (With a bit of adaptation, you could use it to write English or any other language. That's essentially how the Japanese writing system came about, since the two languages were originally completely unrelated.)