Grammar Post

[Rodpr]

Well this has gone a long way since I last looked!
I think it is important to remember that in face to face conversation polite or courteous people will adjust the way they speak to move closer to the speech of others. This can involve non verbal aspects of communication such as use of hand gestures and 'personal space' as well as accent, dialect and register. We subconsciously (and sometimes consciously) notice the extent to which people do this and this becomes part of what we know about the kind of person they are. A person who steadfastly insists on 'maintaining standards' and refuses to adapt to others is seen as a prig or a pedant and sees others as lazy or sloppy.

When people address crowds they face the same problems (even when the crowds are self-selecting, like supporters at a political rally) and some participants may feel patronised or talked over while others feel the speaker was on their wavelength.

When we write, particularly when we write to/for people we have not met, it may be more difficult to make courteous adjustments and this is where conventions are particularly useful. Knowing what may irritate people allows us to choose either to avoid those things or to deploy them effectively. The conventions may be described as 'rules' but that ignores the fact that they are by no means universally agreed, and they change over time.

There is a huge amount of playfulness and creativity in what people do with language and societies probably benefit from having a mix of people, some keen to push the boundaries and do new things and some concerned about maintaining a degree of consistency and order.

 

[jim1950]

My spelling is atrocious due to terrible dyslexia. I do have a very large vocabulary and good command of grammar. My school reports were always a source of amusement because they always said “try to get him to read more”. I read all the time and my parents actually had difficulty getting me to do anything else. The adage of needing to read more is often thrown about but doesn’t always apply.

There wasn’t a diagnosis of dyslexia when I was at school and certainly not support or understanding of the condition.

My problem is I just don’t see the problems. My mind fills in what should be there rather than what is actually there. I am very good at quiz show questions with missing words or letters . To indicate the extent of the problem, without spell checker, I can spell a work like ‘the’ in two or three different ways in a single sentence. Ask me to read it and they all come out as ‘the’. I just don’t see the problem. The most embarrassing example was at school when the entire class was called over to see my ‘perfect’ technical drawing and asked to spot the mistake. Most of them saw it immediately and had a good laugh. I couldn’t see it until someone pointed out where I had spelt my name wrong in the title block.

I too had the same problem at school in the late 50s early 60s I was often told by teachers "your a f--king ***** go sat at the back" but I was lucky to get an apprenticeship as a carpenter and joiner, at building collage in Brixton first day we was told "we don't care if you know how to spell Lintel we do care if you know where and the correct way to use one". I went on to pass ordinary and advanced level city and guilds both with credits then trained as a general foreman (site agent). Had my own firm for over 35years never advertised once and now own a £1.3millon house.
So do I think grammar matters that much, well I think errors are pointed out by a lot of small minded people

 

[JAW911]

Language, the blessing and bane of life!
English is a technical language and very precise with words exactly describing form or function. Dutch on the other hand is a particularly earthy language. English 'binocular' describes the function of the device - the Dutch word translates to a more basic 'far-looker'. And an all time favourite, those baggy horse riding trousers, jodhpurs which I think is a word of Indian origin is translated from the Dutch name as 'sh*t catchers'. And I remember my M-I-L cooing over someone's baby in a pram and saying 'mooi kleine scheetje'. And rolling around the floor laughing when I asked the wife what she said and wife replied that it was a common phrase for cute little babies and translated as 'a beautiful little fart.'
But if English is technical and Dutch is earthy, Irish is way out there in oddball land.
I would stress that I don't really speak Irish, I just study the language in an effort to stop my brain turning to mush.
And I read that Ireland has just penned a new phrase for a black man - 'duine de dhath.' - a person of colour
As to why this was necessary, dubh=black, fear=man. So 'dubh fear' is a black man, right? Well, no. A black man is, or was, a 'gorm fear' which translates as a 'blue man'. The reason was that the Irish 'black man' referred to the devil which would of course be insulting so since ages past a back man was a blue man, until recently with the latest iteration.
And as far as I can understand the entire Irish language is littered with these idiosyncrasies whereby word meanings and phrases change entirely depending on the sentence and the sentiment being expressed and further complicated by quite significant regional differences. I can translate the words 'thank you' directly into Irish and it would engender bewilderment in the recipient. The Irish thank you translates for some reason to 'may there be goodness at you.' I remember an Irish shipmate saying to me once that you could go into any pub in the world, and if there happened to be two irishmen at the bar they would end up fighting. I understand that now, it's because I suspect they don't know what the other is talking about...
English has some odd rules, but it's not so bad.

Disclaimer: 25% Irish so allowed to poke a bit of fun..

Really interesting thank you. Asked a Dutch friend for a useful phrase I could use - he suggested “heb je een elektrische vliegenmepper” which I found out is ‘do you have an electric fly swat?’ !!

 

[sometimewoodworker]

That should be “I am just baiting …..”

humm superfluous dots? As an ellipsis is … !

 

[JimJay]

When someone has an unhealthy penchant for the stuff, they are sometimes referred to here
as a Palinkashevich.

Spirit, another word with a multitude of meanings.

Pálinka, schmálinka! It's a second-rate version of the REAL thing - Ракия

Coincidentally, here's a bottle of the home-made peach version I got from a mate last night.

 

[Yorkieguy]

Some musings on how many words are there in English, and where did they originate from?

(MS 'Word' lists 17 variants of 'English', the most commonly used versions being Brit and US).

If you're reasonably literate; enjoy reading; use language extensively in the course of employment, you'll understand about 30,000 words well, and another 8,000 - 10,000 vaguely. You'll use about 15,000 of these words often, and the rest only occasionally.

It's been said that there are as many as 2 million words in English, which is growing all the time. The success of English is in no small part due to its speakers readily accepting "loan" or "borrowed" words from other languages, whereas in some countries - notably France, there's been futile resistance to, for example, the absorption of English words into "Franglais". (Le weekend, le parking, le Walkman, le shopping, le camping etc).

It's also difficult to decide what counts as 'English'. What about medical and scientific terms? What about Latin words used in law, French words used in cooking, German words used in academic writing, Japanese words used in martial arts? Do you count Scots dialect? Youth slang? Computing jargon?

In England, people would say 'that's outside my responsibility'. In Scotland they would say 'outwith'. In the hymn 'There is a green hill far away without a city wall'. That doesn't mean the city doesn't have a wall - the term 'without' mean the green hill is 'outside' the city wall, 'without' being to antonym of within'.

When older people say 'wicked' they mean 'cruel' - when younger people say wicked in urban slang, they mostly mean 'cool', as in expressing satisfaction or admiration. There are countless colloquialisms in everyday informal English. 'Is there much on the box tonight?' The box in question being the TV ('goggle box').

The Second Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary contains full entries for 171,476 words in current use, and 47,156 obsolete words. To this may be added around 9,500 derivative words included as subentries. Over half of these words are nouns, about a quarter are adjectives, and about a seventh verbs; the rest is made up of interjections, conjunctions, prepositions, suffixes, etc. These figures take no account of entries with senses for different parts of speech (such as noun and adjective).

This suggests that at the very least, there are a quarter of a million distinct English words, excluding inflections, and words from technical and regional vocabulary not covered by the OED, or words not yet added to the published dictionary, of which perhaps 20 per cent are no longer in current use. If distinct senses were counted, the total would probably approach three quarters of a million.

As to what proportion of today's English is derived from other languages, again, it's very hard to make this estimate, particularly as many words reached English indirectly, for example from Latin by way of Norman French.

However, the result of a computerized survey of roughly 80,000 words in the old Shorter Oxford Dictionary (3rd edition) was published in Ordered Profusion by Thomas Finkenstaedt and Dieter Wolff (1973). They reckoned

the proportions as follows:

Latin, including modern scientific and technical Latin: 28.24%
French, including Old French and early Anglo-French: 28.3%
Old and Middle English, Old Norse, and Dutch: 25.0%
Greek: 5.32%
No etymology given: 4.03%
Derived from proper names: 3.28%
All other languages contributed less than 1%

Surprisingly perhaps, almost all the most commonly used words in everyday English, wherever it is spoken anywhere in the world, aren't from French, Latin, Greek, Old High German, or Old Norse, but from Old English.

Of the top 100 most frequently used English words, there are only three from Old Norse, ("they, "their" and "them"). The first French-derived word only manages to come in at 76, and that's "number".

Given the huge fund of words, consider this well-known rousing speech by Winston Churchill, which shows how English can resonate powerfully and can inspire people in dark times:

We shall go on to the end...
We shall fight on the seas and the oceans....
We shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air...
We shall fight on the beaches...
We shall fight on the landing grounds...
We shall fight in the fields and the streets...
We shall fight in the hills;
We shall never surrender.

Amazingly, every single word in that speech except one is from old English. That word is the last one - surrender, which is from 15C Old French "surrender" (to yield) from sur+render.

Quite enough for now.

 

[Phil Pascoe]

And very few words from Celtic languages.

 

[Cozzer]

I would stress that I don't really speak Irish, I just study the language in an effort to stop my brain turning to mush.
And I read that Ireland has just penned a new phrase for a black man - 'duine de dhath.' - a person of colour
As to why this was necessary, dubh=black, fear=man. So 'dubh fear' is a black man, right? Well, no. A black man is, or was, a 'gorm fear' which translates as a 'blue man'. The reason was that the Irish 'black man' referred to the devil which would of course be insulting so since ages past a back man was a blue man, until recently with the latest iteration.


Disclaimer: 25% Irish so allowed to poke a bit of fun..

But can blue men sing the whites?


Other Disclaimer: 100% Irish, raised Dun Laoghaire, in God's own country. (Another bit of fun...)

 

[Yojevol]

@Yorkieguy The amazing statistic I came across is that by adulthood the average person's vaccabulary amounts to about 17000 words. That means learning about 3 words a day.
Brian

 

[Geoff_S]

 

[jcassidy]

And further to the above:
If there are any Irish speakers here can anyone tell me why 'gread leat' is considered so insultingly rude given that the words themselves are innocuous. An online search doesnt help at all.

NO, YOU "p**s off!"

Means 'p**s off' in a very demeaning and informal tense. like, "Ah would you ever just go away you stupid annoying little gombeen you, you're annoying the bejaysus out of me"

You may consider that 'screw you' isn't very offensive if you only consider the literal meaning of the phrase.

 

[Phil Pascoe]

One that irritates me - "if you've bought a ********** you might have been mis sold.