A commenter writes:
I’ve never liked the cyclic reasoning of the paradigm that if an otherwise incorrect use of grammar or spelling becomes widespread, it is declared to be henceforth correct.If you want to use “they” in this context, then rephrase it as “I would like to thank the editors at Attorney.org for their kind words...” or “to thank the members of Attorney.org...” Otherwise Attorney.org is a singular noun.
The key to this argument, I think, is the notion that we can identify certain usages as “otherwise incorrect,” independently of actual usage.
This can mean one of two things, I think: First, a usage might be “otherwise incorrect” because it was until recently nonstandard, and (the argument would go) changing practice shouldn’t make “henceforth correct” something that was nonstandard until now. I find it hard to see why this makes sense. Among other things, the usage that was standard until recently might itself have departed from past usage, and become correct simply because of changing practice. So either one insists that all changes since, say, 1600 (but why 1600? Why not 1200?) are wrong, or one has to explain why we today should be stuck with the 1900 usage and not accept the 2009 usage.
Second, and I think more likely, is the premise that a usage might be otherwise incorrect because it violates certain logical rules of English grammar. Yet the trouble is that the actual rules of English grammar including many subrules that depart from the apparent “logic” of the broader rules.
Thus, for instance, “are” is generally plural — yet we say “you are” even when the “you” clearly refers to a single person. The story behind this is doubtless complex, and of course has to do with the fact that “you” is both a second-person plural and the second-person singular, and that the informal second-person singular “thou” has become nonstandard in all but a few highly specialized contexts.
And yet whatever the story, the fact remains that the “otherwise incorrect” usage of “are” to refer to a single person — incorrect, that is, if we appeal to the simplest statement of the rule governing “are” (“are” is for plurals) — becomes correct when it is used with “you.” Or, more precisely, there is a descriptively correct general rule (“are” is used with plural nouns and not with singular nouns) that has a descriptively correct exception (“are” is also used with the second-person singular “you”). How do we know that these rules are correct? Not by appeals to logic, but precisely by reference to widespread (here, nearly universal) usage.
But, wait, there’s more: “I are” is nonstandard and therefore descriptively incorrect. “I aren’t” is, too, as are “I aren’t” and even “Are I not ...?” But “Aren’t I ...?” is indubitably fully standard, and I haven’t seen any credible usage source even claim that it is somehow incorrect. Why is it correct, even though it would be “otherwise incorrect” if we appeal to the broad logic of pronoun rules? Because it is “the will of custom, in whose power is the decision and right and standard of language.”
I could give more examples (such as this one), but I take it my point is clear without them: Lots of perfectly correct English terms and phrases are “otherwise incorrect” if one looks at some broader rules of language — but they are correct because they form exceptions from these rules (rules in the sense of regularities, not in the sense of somehow logically, legally, or morally binding laws). My tentative claim (tentative because it was based on just some casual searching) is that the “Thanks to [group] for their ...” usage is likewise an exception from the norm that a group is an “it” and not a “they.” Maybe I’m descriptively wrong on this. But if I am wrong, it’s not because the usage, even if common, is “otherwise incorrect”; that would just show it to be one of the many exceptions present in English grammar and usage.
guy in the veal calf office says:
This sounds like the global climate
coolingwarminginordinate change debate. Please don’t reply, I don’t mean to hijack the topic.Quote
November 18, 2009, 6:51 pmArkady says:
And then there is the immortal:
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November 18, 2009, 6:53 pmB.D. says:
We are all gatekeepers of the English language. If we aren’t vigilant, non-words like “themself” end up appearing in the OED.
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November 18, 2009, 6:56 pmcirby says:
...as well as terrible constructions like TLAs.
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November 18, 2009, 7:02 pmwm13 says:
These don’t seem like very persuasive examples in support of descriptivism. “Are” is the form of the verb “to be” used in the plural and in the second person singular. It isn’t some mysterious exception to the singular/plural rule which somehow proves that English doesn’t have rules about singular and plural. And “aren’t I” is felt by many to be incorrect. I certainly would never use that phrase. I would always say “am I not.”
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November 18, 2009, 7:17 pmAmiable Dorsai says:
Why not simply say “ain’t I?” “Ain’t” is a contraction of “am not” innit?
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November 18, 2009, 7:25 pmArthurKirkland says:
I have conflicting thoughts regarding this subject.
The “mob rules/lowest common denominator” approach degrades our language. It has turned “significant” into little more than a common, low-grade substitute for “substantial.” Many an educated American could not properly define “significant” with a pistol at his temple. A similar episode involves “anxious” for “eager.” It is disappointing to see an educator, particularly one shares Sarah Palin’s asserted love for the written word, acquiesence in this shabby diminution of our language.
On the other hand, this finger-pointing was started by that Arthur Kirkland, a God-doubting, gay-hugging socialist, a gun-registering, doper-defending statist, and Bush-bashing, Obama-loving commie. Even if that guy (and I am pretty sure Kirkland is not his real name, by the way) has a proper point regarding standard English, I don’t want to endorse it.
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November 18, 2009, 7:26 pmDaniel says:
“Aren’t I” gets 73 million hits. “Am I not” gets less than 5 million.
While I find Professor Volokh’s post (especially the last paragraph) clear and convincing enough that I won’t try to restate or reword the point, it’s at least worth knowing that you’re in a relatively small minority on the particular example.
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November 18, 2009, 7:32 pmB.D. says:
Good example: “It is me.”
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November 18, 2009, 7:34 pmBob in SeaTac says:
I’m afraid that “I” is transitioning into the objective just as rapidly as “me” is transitioning into the subjective.
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November 18, 2009, 7:41 pmAllan Leedy says:
Someone please explain why the language — any language, for that matter — doesn’t devolve into something much simpler over time, given the way that usage seems to develop. On the specific point, when will the substitution of “came” for “come” and “went” for “gone”, in compound verb constructions, now popular especially among younger Americans, be taken as correct? (E.g., “I would have came,” or “I should have went”.)
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November 18, 2009, 7:42 pmEjote says:
You’ve just defined the rule at the wrong level of generality.
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November 18, 2009, 7:47 pmStarman says:
I wonder if these changes have something to do with spoken v. written language?
And from there it is a slippery slope to decry the evil effects of TV and video, the general informality, present company excepted, of internet writing, and onward and downward to the decline of western civilization.
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November 18, 2009, 7:48 pmASlyJD says:
Allan,
I wonder about the reverse of this process. Sprinkled throughout etymology are the remnants of longer, more complicated word forms and formations. (e.g. essum to sum to son, meaning “I am” in old Latin, classical Latin, and Spanish) It seems some analog to the 2nd law of thermo is in place. Yet how did these complicated grammar structure and long words come into being, if the process of language is in its slow decay into something simpler?
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November 18, 2009, 8:00 pmDT says:
While a high school student forty five years ago I struggled with this question. (Plural, or singular pronoun for a singular noun representing a plural entity?) It seemed to me that the singular pronoun was the only logical answer. Several English teachers insisted that the plural pronoun was not only acceptable, but the only acceptable one. Every grammarian I could find agreed. I don’t know if this was a random result, or unique to the time and/or place (rural upstate New York). It was a sufficiently startling result that it has remained unresolved on my mine all these years.
As to the question of accepting common usage into the language: organic language of this kind is a marketplace, from the bottom up. Top down languages like Esperanto fare about as well as command economies do in the long run. It’s evolution, not creationism. Get used to it.
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November 18, 2009, 8:15 pmNutter says:
As the original commenter that started this, I want to point out that I said that I did not like the paradigm — not that it did not have a place or that I prefer ancient grammar constructs the way Scalia reveres stare decisis.
My point was that to avoid confusion or leaving a negative impression of your abilities to one unfamiliar with the admittedly rarely illustrated rule, you can rephrase the sentence to be less problematic. The same is true of the frequent vocabulary offenses of using $20 words to a $10 dollar audience; you run the risk of appearing — to some — as a pompous ass and more importantly, failing to communicate effectively.
Would you submit the same brief to Easterbrook that you would submit to a small-town state trial judge? I just worked on a brief to the 7th Circuit, and it was substantially reworked for just that situation (including an obligatory quotation from Shakespeare). If your goal is to communicate, and particularly if your purpose is to persuade, don’t risk confusing or insulting your recipient.
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November 18, 2009, 8:27 pmOren says:
All children go through this phase, called overregularization in which they try to mechanistically apply the rules they’ve learned to cases to which that rule does not apply. Apparently, some never grow out of it.
Billy Mays smiles upon us still.
Or it frees the common man from the persnickety nonsense of grammarians. Maybe the insistence on form was degrading our language by restricting its expressive value?
Significant := p <= 0.05 — duh.
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November 18, 2009, 8:33 pmwm13 says:
My purpose in speaking is to convince people that I am smarter and better-educated than they, and that they should therefore (i) treat me deferentially and (ii) hire me as their lawyer. If I weren’t trying to achieve these things, I wouldn’t speak at all.
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November 18, 2009, 8:48 pmLaura(southernxyl) says:
I’m afraid you’re right, and I rue the day. Also, “myself” is rapidly morphing into “me” and even “I”.
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November 18, 2009, 9:08 pmLaura(southernxyl) says:
On the other hand, “you is” puts me in mind of this beautiful thing.
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November 18, 2009, 9:16 pmBob_R says:
Mob rule in language is the de facto standard. The better question is “on which issues should the elite fight the mob.” Substitutions that homogenize and lead to imprecision (e.g. anxious for eager) are good fights. Attempts to correct a defect in the language like the lack of a neutral third person pronoun are in a very different category. It is no more logical to use “he” or “she” than “they” in that role. “He” is traditional but always presumptuous and sometimes misleading. “She” can be jarring and is just as presumptuous. “He or she” is awkward. “They” seems to be winning. The only way to beat it is to offer a better solution.
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November 18, 2009, 9:16 pmspasticblue says:
Well, following the argument of many on here, we should stop the dastardly usage of ‘you’ and its inflections in the singular. Why can’t ‘they’ be used as both a singular and a plural pronoun? It’s fairly common in SAE already. I accept that it may not be approbriate in all registers yet, but that doesn’t make it incorrect.
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November 18, 2009, 9:26 pmLaura(southernxyl) says:
Spasticblue, “you” would be fine for singular if everyone would follow the simple and appropriate rule of using “y’all” for plural.
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November 18, 2009, 9:30 pmDavid McCourt says:
“...a usage might be “otherwise incorrect” because it was until recently nonstandard....”
And it is now no longer nonstandard because . . . you are using it?
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November 18, 2009, 9:47 pmTravis Miller says:
Bring back the ‘singular their’!
“God send every one their heart’s desire!”
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November 18, 2009, 10:03 pmBama 1L says:
wm13: My purpose in speaking is to convince people that I am smarter and better-educated than they, and that they should therefore (i) treat me deferentially and (ii) hire me as their lawyer. If I weren’t trying to achieve these things, I wouldn’t speak at all.
I don’t think this can be beat.
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November 18, 2009, 10:06 pmEugene Volokh says:
David McCourt: I take it that it’s now no longer nonstandard because it’s standard — it’s commonly, and even more commonly used than the older usage. That, after all, is what I was remarking on in the original post that triggered this thread.
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November 18, 2009, 10:11 pmGlenn Bowen says:
Pidgins, which have no rules/tenses/genders/etc, if spoken by succeeding generations, develop grammatical rules (interestingly, by the successive generations of children speaking them) and become creole languages.
We can assume this evolvement continues, and we can assume it continues in an established language, also.
The word “disrespected”, when used as , “the ho disrepected me”, shows new use of a word, now fairly accepted, regardless of how clumsy.
Rabbits were referred to as “coneys” a few hundred years ago until vaginas began to be referred to as “cunnies”, thereby giving the word “coney” in polite conversation a sexual double entendre; thus the word “coney” fell into disuse.
...maybe that’s why “hare” has never been real popular, ya think?
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November 18, 2009, 11:26 pmDavid Schwartz says:
I don’t think it’s unreasonable to object to language changes that create new special cases or defy logical rules of grammar that previously applied. However, I think those who do object to purportedly unreasonable new rules of grammar frequently do so with very poor arguments that don’t withstand scrutiny. But let’s not throw the baby out with the bathwater.
I’ve heard many people earnestly complain about starting a sentence with “hopefully” to mean “it is to be hoped”. They insist “Hopefully she will win the lottery” is somehow wrong because it doesn’t specify who is hoping and they think it’s some special exception to the rules of grammar and thus incorrect. (And the word should only mean “in a hopeful manner” as in “Hopefully she scratched off the lottery ticket.” (Which would confuse most people, I think, they would think I mean it is to be hoped that she scratched off the lottery ticket and didn’t, say, forget to do so.)
The correct response is not “people use it that way, therefore it’s correct”. Or “using it the way you suggest confuses people”. The correct response is simply that their arugment is a load of hooey. Sentence adverbs are a perfectly normal part of English grammar and “hopefully” is not some special exception. They indicate the speaker’s attitude towards the fact expounded in the sentence. For example, “Luckily, it didn’t rain.”
99 times out of 100, the bogus argument is not bogus because the usage is usage and therefore automatically correct, it’s bogus because it’s actually factually and logically incorrect. And when the change actually adds a new senseless exception or is based on actual error, it is sensible to object to it. (But ultimately, if you lose, you have to accept it.)
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November 18, 2009, 11:30 pmKazinski says:
1600? I don’t think we want to use that as a baseline, people didn’t even spell their own names the same from letter to letter back then. Even educated (for the time) people had the quaint notion that the written word was for communication, and as long as you communicated your thought accurately then consistency in spelling and punctuation was superfluous.
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November 18, 2009, 11:36 pmGordon Haff says:
I’m more of a purist than some but not fanatic about it. The they/their as singular is one of the shifts that makes the most sense to me. As @spasticblue said, using sex-specific terms (which in English actually mean something) doesn’t work well with a modern audience in a sex-neutral context. Using he to mean “he or she” is bothersome for a variety of reasons and substituting she at random attracts attention that it shouldn’t. Just using the plural works better IMO than invented words especially given that there is precedent with thou/you.
(This seems quite different from arguments about sloppiness in meaning. Those may indeed become lost causes over time but I find such battles often worth fighting–at least up to a point.)
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November 19, 2009, 12:23 amck says:
A not-entirely-original hypothesis: when languages are spoken by small, isolated groups, they tend to get more complicated (possibly because complication allows increased precision, and complex rules can disseminate quickly around small groups), whereas when languages are spoken by large populations, they tend to get simpler (because of the need to be more widely and easily understood).
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November 19, 2009, 12:34 amJohn Burgess says:
Allan Leedy: Languages do simplify over time, but the time is measured in centuries. English used to have case endings, its grammar used to be more complex. One measure of the ‘primitiveness’ of a language is, in fact, the number of cases it uses. (I think that Finnish/Estonian lead the pack with some 20+.) Italian grammar is far simpler than Latin and modern Greek simpler than classical Greek.
But as grammar reduces, vocabulary and entirely new realms of concepts expand. Latin can be (and is) tortured to come up with ways to say, “tri-phase current mode controller,” for example, but it’s easier in a more modern language.
On the “aren’t I” v. “am I not” argument, I certainly learned, half a century ago, that “aren’t I” was sub-standard. It was in common use, but looked down upon. “Ain’t” wasn’t considered wrong, simply non-standard.
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November 19, 2009, 12:35 amsitzpinkler says:
People have tried for at least several decades. There is no better solution.
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November 19, 2009, 1:31 amGlenn Bowen says:
“Even educated (for the time) people had the quaint notion that the written word was for communication”
::quaint-
early 13c., “cunning, proud, ingenious,” from O.Fr. cointe “pretty, clever, knowing,” from L. cognitus “known,” pp. of cognoscere “get or come to know well” (see cognizance). Sense of “old-fashioned but charming” is first attested 1795, and could describe the word itself, which had become rare after c.1700 (though it soon recovered popularity in this secondary sense). Chaucer used quaint and queynte as spellings of cunt in “Canterbury Tales” (c.1386), and Andrew Marvell may be punning on it similarly in “To His Coy Mistress” (1650).
I rest my rabbit.
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November 19, 2009, 2:47 amMalvolio says:
Cite or I’m calling shenanigans. “Cunny”, or at least “cunnus”, is older than the English language.
But does put a pleasant gloss on Coney Island.
Explains why no one calls cats “pussies” any more.
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November 19, 2009, 3:07 aminso says:
Anyone interested in this sort of thing (especially those who doubt human capacity to be grammatical) should read Steven Pinker’s The Language Instinct.
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November 19, 2009, 4:27 amJay says:
“I’m afraid you’re right, and I rue the day. Also, “myself” is rapidly morphing into “me” and even “I”.”
Laura–I refer to this as “law enforcement speak,” because cops seem especially prone to saying things such as, “When the suspect and myself reached the jail,” and the like. It usually comes with a inability to say the words “man” and “woman,” in favor of “male” and “female,” or worse, “gentleman” for any man (“After the gentleman molested his granddaughter, he was taken into custody.”) I assume it comes from having a relatively low level of independent education, then having a lot of stock phrases drilled into you on the job to keep you from screwing up by trying to saying something on your own.
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November 19, 2009, 6:08 amTracy W says:
Nutter:
If the rule in question is rarely illustrated, then why would some ordinary person be negatively impressed?
There of course might be someone out there who would be negatively impressed by the word usage, but no matter what you do you are going to negatively impress someone. One of my great-aunts, on being first introduced to the man who became my father, objected to Dad’s surname on the basis that it was common. Euguene Volokh probably has encountered some people who would be negatively impressed by his surname because it’s non-English, and some might be able to identify it as Jewish and be negatively biased against that too. Would you advise Eugene and my father (and myself) to change their surnames to avoid risking a negative impression?
I see nothing unclear in saying thanks to an organisation for their help, so your other comment may be worthwhile.
Now of course in a particular case with high stakes you might want to pander to the prejudices of a particular person, however whacky they might be. To take an extreme example, people trying to escape from riots aimed at a particular group, be that based on ethnicity, religion, or nationality, often temporarily change their names, claimed ethnicity, or claimed nationality with the intent of saving their lives, and that seems entirely justifiable to me. On a lesser scale, changing your wording but not your identity for a lesser achievement (such as winning a case) seems justifiable.
But I don’t think you can take that into any general rule that it is wrong to do something just because someone somewhere might form a negative impression of you based on it. Life would be pretty bland if we did that.
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November 19, 2009, 6:24 amArkady says:
@John Burgess
How then to characterize Chinese (in any of its dialects)?
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November 19, 2009, 6:44 amkdackson says:
I simply love it when people try to assign rules of regularity to irregular verbs. Such as: to be, to do, to go, to have, to want, to ought, to must, etc.
When I was in high school Latin, I was taught these verbs are irregular because they were so common, use of the strict rules would have made the words close to impossible to speak if regular grammar rules were in place.
Of course, it grates me to no end when someone trying to sound educated says “If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to ask myself”.
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November 19, 2009, 7:34 amkdackson says:
Arkady:
Chinese has no noun cases, per se. They may add a particle to a phrase to indicate plural, questions, position (i.e., up and down, in and out). Verbs are simply weird, with a time stamp, verb, and another character to emphasize the completness of an action. For example, “I went to the store yesterday” would be phrased as “Yesterday, I go to store”. There are no articles.
Dialects are different pronounciations and word combinations to reflect similar meanings (in Beijing, the standard greeting directly translates into “have you eaten yet?” as opposed to the more common “How are you?”, which is different from asking after someone’s health). The written language is remarkably consistent across the country. This is why all TV programs in China have subtitles in the standard simplified character set.
But none of the irregular verb crap.
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November 19, 2009, 7:45 amauh2o says:
This controversy between prescription (rules) and description (usage) in language is both ancient and much better developed elsewhere than at this estimable blog. The zealous prescriptionists fail to recognize the ineluctable evolution of language. The promiscuous descriptionists abhor authority and accept any atrocity employed by a sufficient number. Recognizing that language evolves and that language requires some sense of governing logic to permit teaching, learning, and the reliable conveyance of a distinct message, I insist that a learned and thoughtful person can distinguish between change that enriches a language and change that adulterates a language. Although change is inevitable, not all changes are equal. (For example, in order to accept the benefits of the neologism “cyberspace,” I am not required to adopt “ain’t” or “Me and Bob went...”; in order to employ the idiom, I need not submit to it.) The governing question is never whether language is elastic and capable of growth; happily, it is. The question is never whether language is capable of adulteration; alas, it is. The question is insisting on the one to the exclusion of the other.
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November 19, 2009, 8:09 amWidmerpool says:
I, for one, compliment Mr. Volokh as he endeavors to boldy go where no other grammarian-lawyer has boldy gone before (with apologies to Captain Kirk).
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November 19, 2009, 8:24 amLargo says:
The thread is won.
Bob_R is absolutely right. It is the lexicon that bears the semantics. I accept that the meanings of words change, and that there are gains as well as losses, but some losses are more important than others. How will we be able to speak well of political life once ‘political’ has come identical to ‘partisan’? There is some semantic nuance that rests on grammar–I workin’ now does not mean quite the same thing as I be workin’ now–but the lexicon is key.
How precious is the first grade teacher who models a rich vocabulary for her (or his) students! But I knew a teacher who encouraged her students to make their writing more ‘interesting’ by using more ‘powerful’ words. How many of her students blithely wrote about ‘humongous oceans’ or ‘vast elephants’? (Worse, what vain feeling of pseudo-sophistication were her students taught to enjoy? But this goes beyond language...)
(BTW, I have to second the recommendation of Pinker’s The Language Instinct. A highly readable introduction to a fascinating subject.)
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November 19, 2009, 9:03 amTom from RI says:
Widmerpool, you remind us that the Star Trek introduction splits an infinitive (“to boldly go” instead of “to go boldly”) as often happens in common usuage. Does this mean that the “traditional” grammarians stand against Capt. Kirk and the Starship Enterprise? If so, I’m betting on the latter.
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November 19, 2009, 9:05 amCJColucci says:
Some odds and ends:
1. I have long advocated the use of “ain’t” as the contraction-form for “am I not,” though, for reasons wm13 has already pointed out, I rarely practice what I preach.
2. I have also, with the same limitations, advocated a second-person plural form, either y’all or youse depending on region.
3. The Star Trek problem isn’t the split infinitive (my general view is that there is no “rule,” but that most sentences are clearer and stronger with the infinitive unsplit or the sentence rephrased), but that the inserted adverb destroys the otherwise elegant parallel construction: “to find new worlds, to seek out new civilizations, to BOLDLY go where no man has gone before.”
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November 19, 2009, 9:17 amLargo says:
Laura(southernxyl):
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was by all accounts the most prodigious musician who ever lived. His gift for musical invention was such that his mind far outran his hand; before a score was completed, he was already thinking far ahead.
That is why in the year 1790–the year of the premiere of Così fan tutte–just two years after having published his last three sypmphonies–at the very pinnacle of the classical period–the people of Mannheim would sometimes observe him roaming the streets of the city, whistling: Bess, you is my woman now.
(Paraphrased from what I believe was an old National Lampoon account.)
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November 19, 2009, 9:21 amLargo says:
I like how this scans: Bold’ly to go’ where none’ have gone’ be-fore’
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November 19, 2009, 9:25 amDavid McCourt says:
EV,
You say “it’s standard — it’s commonly, and even more commonly used than the older usage.
I don’t think this is true, at least if one looks at good writers. If you quarrel with the idea that there are those who write well and those who write poorly, and believe that what is standard is to be measured by simple head counting, and no more — well, then we part company on something more fundamental.
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November 19, 2009, 9:30 amThe Volokh Conspiracy » Blog Archive » Kids These Days says:
[...] right, when you say that “their” can’t be used in these contexts? Is it that you have the Logic of the Language on your side — the same logic that tolerates the singular “you are,” “aren’t I?,” [...]
Oren says:
What, no love for “youse” or the even more hilarious possessive “youse’s”?
What support do you have for the proposition that sentence adverbs must all follow the same rules of grammar? There is no reason, a priori to believe that the “luckily” cannot be used in an entirely different fashion as “hopefully” simply because they are both sentence adverbs. Membership in that category does not automatically confer grammatical equivalence.
Your assertion is that correctness is a function of uniformity of usage and it is not one that I intend to let stand unchallenged.
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November 19, 2009, 9:51 amOren says:
Sounds like a True Scotsman argument to me, at least because you are going to define “good writers” as those that follow particular patterns of usage.
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November 19, 2009, 9:52 amOren says:
This is a silly caricature. One can believe that there is good writing and bad writing and still not believe that the metric for good writing is unfailing devotion to rigid patterns of usage.
That is, EV says he does not believe in your metric for assessing the quality of writing and you counter that he must not believe in any metric at all.
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November 19, 2009, 9:54 amCharles says:
I have the same problem with other people trying to pin down the languages according to what they view is correct. Like the “everyone has his/her/their own way” debate. They/their has been used acceptably as a gender neutral single person pronoun for centuries. But every time I use it, I get someone “correcting” me, telling me that “their” is plural and a sign of lazy English.
This needs to stop. Just because it wasn’t taught as correct in the Highschool English class that you got an A in, does not mean it is not correct.
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November 19, 2009, 9:57 amOren says:
The problem is that you get two of them in the room and all of sudden they (quelle horreur) disagree about which changes fall into those categories.
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November 19, 2009, 9:58 amArkady says:
@kdackson
Sure, I understand all that. Chinese is uninflected. My question was addressed to this:
I don’t know of any evidence from the history of the language that indicates it was ever inflected. (If there is any, someone please educate me.) I just found it interesting that we can’t apply the “more primitive –> greater number of cases” classification to Chinese. Here’s an interesting hypothesis: The more primitive a dialect of Chinese, the more tones it has. The absolute purest of speculation, of course.
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November 19, 2009, 10:10 amArkady says:
Yeah. My Chinese tutor used to take me to see Chinese movies, immersion and all that. His wife was from Hong Kong, and only spoke Cantonese. Of course, all the movies were in Mandarin. I remember being surprised the first time we went to see a movie, and I saw two sets of subtitles on the screen: English and Chinese. I knew there is a difference between spoken Cantonese and Mandarin, but, still, the two sets of subtitles kinda surprised me.
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November 19, 2009, 10:19 amConnie says:
People incorrectly use “myself” and “I” because they were corrected when young for using the word “me.” Reflexively, they become unable to say “give the reports to me.” (Of course, when I replied to that query from my boss “these are they,” she told me that was incorrect. Sniff.)
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November 19, 2009, 2:25 pmTweets that mention The Volokh Conspiracy » Blog Archive » “Otherwise Incorrect” -- Topsy.com says:
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by PostRank – Economics, PostRank – Law. PostRank – Law said: “Otherwise Incorrect” http://bit.ly/32o6Ra #postrank #law [...]
Bill Poser says:
No correlation has ever been demonstrated between any structural feature of a language, such as how many cases it has, and any cultural feature, such as technological level. “primitive” often means “of low technological level”. What do you folks mean?
As a person with emotional ties to Cantonese (the language of my godparents, or rather, of the people who would be my godparents if we were Christians..., but I digress), I must ask, in what sense do you claim that Cantonese is more “primitive” than Mandarin?
Incidentally, the phonological history of Chinese is reasonably well understood, and it is pretty clear that the number of tones in most varieties of Chinese has INCREASED over time. Chinese as spoken in, say, the time of Confucius, probably was not tonal at all. Is this consistent with your notion that the number of tones is positively correlated with “primitiveness”?
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November 19, 2009, 7:49 pmmariner says:
Largo:
Aren’t we finding out now?
That cause is already lost.
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November 19, 2009, 8:19 pmLaura(southernxyl) says:
And of course you responded, “The object of a ‘to be’ verb takes the nominative case!”
I remember a line from Shining Through (book, haven’t seen movie) in which the protagonist’s boss answers the phone and says, “This is he,” and she muses that he is the real quality.
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November 19, 2009, 9:00 pmDavid Schwartz says:
I never said that. I simply said that the argument is incorrect to argue that “hopefully” is somehow unique or different. The rule they argue is “incorrect” simply treats “hopefully” the same as every other adverb. That is, I’ve refuted the premise of their argument.
You again misunderstand my argument. I am not saying “this usage is correct because it follows rules X, Y, and Z”. I am saying “your argument that this usage is incorrect because it follows no rules is nonsense, it follows common rules X, Y, and Z”.
I am refuting their argument by showing it rests on an invalid premise. I am not, however, making my own argument for the opposite conclusion.
And, in fact, my larger point was precisely this — that most arguments that a usage is “incorrect” because it’s unprecedented or does not follow common rules of grammar are themselves based on incorrect understandings of how what the common rules actually are. The idea that “hopefully” is being used in some unique and special way is simply wrong — it’s being used as a normal sentence adverb.
Whether it should be is, of course, a different argument. And if they come back with a different argument, we can talk about it then.
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November 19, 2009, 10:17 pmJohn Burgess says:
Arkady: My assertion was too strong. I know nothing about Chinese, so should not have included it. The ‘rule’ stands, however, for Indo-European and Semitic languages. Whether it applies to any other language, I don’t know.
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November 19, 2009, 10:27 pmOren says:
Thanks for clearing that up David, I had misapprehended your argument.
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November 19, 2009, 10:29 pmJon Morgan says:
Problems: we need a contraction for “am not”. This addresses both ain’t and “I aren’t”.
We need a separate pronoun for 2nd person singular and 2nd person plural.
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November 20, 2009, 12:41 amGlenn Bowen says:
I’ll tell you the time frame is the Elizabethan era. Armed with that, do your own damned research.
:))
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November 20, 2009, 10:10 amTracy W says:
On the “England expects that every man will do their duty” implying that every man will have to do not merely his own duty, but those of the men around him (ignoring any women on the ships for a bit). What construction should be put on a sentence like:
“Every Boy Scout Troupe attending the jamboree is responsible for keeping their camping area clear.”.
Assume that the responsibility is clearly intended to be put on the whole Troupe, so that if one troupe member say knocks over the cooking pot, gets burnt and has to be dashed off for medical care, the rest of the Troupe is responsible for cleaning up the remaining mess.
How would David McCourt rewrite this one? Even assuming that every Boy Scout happens to be male, “Every Boy Scout Troupe attending the jamboree is responsible for keeping his camping area clear” doesn’t sound right.
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November 21, 2009, 7:07 amDavid McCourt says:
“Every Boy Scout Troop” — I think it is “troop,” on the analogy to a cavalry unit, rather than an acting company — is responsible for keeping its camping area clear.” The “every” refers to a collection of troops, units — things — which things happen to be composed of people, but are not people. So this is not like every one, or everybody. Every corporation is responsible for filing its 10k.
Tracy, I came to this thread by accident. If you “troop” on over to the other thread, you’ll find me there.
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November 21, 2009, 5:36 pmTracy W says:
David McCourt, sorry about the mixup in posting.
And sorry about the confusion. I speak NZ English, where groups of people are collectively referred to as their. It may be correct to say that “Every corporation is responsible for filing its 10k”, but it’s correct to say “Every company is responsible for filing their IR3”.
Thanks for the correction about troupe/troop.
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November 22, 2009, 8:01 am