Tracy, I came to this thread by accident. If you “troop” on over to the other thread, you’ll find me there.

Cite or I’m calling shenanigans.

I’ll tell you the time frame is the Elizabethan era. Armed with that, do your own damned research.

:))

We need a separate pronoun for 2nd person singular and 2nd person plural.

Oren: What support do you have for the proposition that sentence adverbs must all follow the same rules of grammar?

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.

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.

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.

(Of course, when I replied to that query from my boss “these are they,” she told me that was incorrect. Sniff.)

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.

How will we be able to speak well of political life once ‘political’ has come identical to ‘partisan’?

Aren’t we finding out now?

That cause is already lost.

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”?

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.

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.

But none of the irregular verb crap.

Sure, I understand all that. Chinese is uninflected. My question was addressed to this:

One measure of the ‘primitiveness’ of a language is, in fact, the number of cases it uses.

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.

I insist that a learned and thoughtful person can distinguish between change that enriches a language and change that adulterates a language.

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.

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.

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,

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.

I don’t think this is true, at least if one looks at good writers.

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.

Spasticblue, “you” would be fine for singular if everyone would follow the simple and appropriate rule of using “y’all” for plural.

What, no love for “youse” or the even more hilarious possessive “youse’s”?

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. [ ... SNIP ... ] 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.”

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.

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.

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.)

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.

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.)

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.

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“.

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.

How then to characterize Chinese (in any of its dialects)?

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.

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.