More linguistic nonsense

[Martin Gardner]

I thought I'd start a little thread for any linguist points anyone wants to make, or questions they have. I'll start

First of all, I remember that Jeff corrected me in a thread for something a bit like the following example:

"I have two brothers, Sam and Matt; Matt is the most annoying."

Jeff said something like "most annoying of the three, more annoying of the two". I tend to disagree. While textbooks might agree with him, it would make me sound like I'm Prince Charles! I tend to think the construction is a bit dated and 20th (or even 19th) century. What do people think?

[Charlie Reams]

First of all, I remember that Jeff corrected me in a thread for something a bit like the following example:

"I have two brothers, Sam and Matt; Matt is the most annoying."

Jeff said something like "most annoying of the three, more annoying of the two". I tend to disagree. While textbooks might agree with him, it would make me sound like I'm Prince Charles! I tend to think the construction is a bit dated and 20th (or even 19th) century. What do people think?

Agreed. Logically speaking it makes perfect sense to say that Matt is the most annoying of the two. Certainly you can't say "more" with sets of more than 2, but that doesn't imply the converse.

But then I start sentences with conjunctions, love to freely split the infinite, and tend to think a preposition is a fine thing to end a sentence with. So what do I know?

[Gavin Chipper]

Agreed. Logically speaking it makes perfect sense to say that Matt is the most annoying of the two. Certainly you can't say "more" with sets of more than 2, but that doesn't imply the converse.

On a vaguely related note, I think it's OK to say "less" instead of "fewer". "more" works with both count nouns and mass nouns and I see "less" as just the opposite of "more". It just happens that there is also an extra word "fewer" that only works for count nouns and has no opposite.

[Martin Gardner]

Yeah "to boldly go", the argument is that in Latin the infinitive is one word, so you can't put an adverb in the middle. That makes no sense to me whatsoever! For the simple reason that English is not Latin, and Latin is not English.

Next question, when doing essay titles, when and where should I use capital letters. I tend to use them for everything but prepositions and conjunctions, so "A Political History of the United States".

Anyone strongly disagree?

[Gavin Chipper]

Yeah "to boldly go", the argument is that in Latin the infinitive is one word, so you can't put an adverb in the middle. That makes no sense to me whatsoever! For the simple reason that English is not Latin, and Latin is not English.

Next question, when doing essay titles, when and where should I use capital letters. I tend to use them for everything but prepositions and conjunctions, so "A Political History of the United States".

Anyone strongly disagree?

Not especially strongly but I've always found the convention of capitalising words (unless they're "small" words) in titles slightly weird.

[Paul Hammond]

Next question, when doing essay titles, when and where should I use capital letters. I tend to use them for everything but prepositions and conjunctions, so "A Political History of the United States".

Anyone strongly disagree?

I can get quite obsessive about this, to the extent of going through my entire mp3 collection and correcting what I consider to be capitalisation errors. But it gets tricky - what about songs whose title ends with a preposition or conjunction, or some other common linking word? My nice little rules could render "For What You Dream Of" as "For what You Dream of", which just looks wrong.

[Martin Gardner]

Re the subjunctive, I should definitely try and find out more about it, but I do know there are two distinct forms in English. The preterite used as the subjunctive, as pointed out by Charlie (if I were, were doesn't refer to an action in the past here) but also the infinitive. A good example would be "I demand that he be here before 9am" or "I insist that he have his passport with him". This does come over as old fashioned and I think "I demand that he's here at 9am" is just as good.

Usually English has ways of getting round the subjunctive, like "I want you to shut up!" instead of "I want that you shut up!" which isn't good English at all. Compare with "je veux que tu te taises." in French.

[Gavin Chipper]

I've always found it interesting that the infinitive is seen as the "main" form of the verb. What makes "to" so special?

[Martin Gardner]

First of all, I remember that Jeff corrected me in a thread for something a bit like the following example:

"I have two brothers, Sam and Matt; Matt is the most annoying."

Jeff said something like "most annoying of the three, more annoying of the two". I tend to disagree. While textbooks might agree with him, it would make me sound like I'm Prince Charles! I tend to think the construction is a bit dated and 20th (or even 19th) century. What do people think?

Agreed. Logically speaking it makes perfect sense to say that Matt is the most annoying of the two. Certainly you can't say "more" with sets of more than 2, but that doesn't imply the converse.

But then I start sentences with conjunctions, love to freely split the infinite, and tend to think a preposition is a fine thing to end a sentence with. So what do I know?

I wouldn't argue with any of those, really. It's pretty easy to think of a good example of each. English has a lot of prepositional verbs like to look at, to walk on, etc. They often have idiomatic meanings that can't be broken down into the some of its parts, like be able to has a meaning fairly distinct of its three words.

In French in formal or semi-formal language you should always avoid ending a sentence with a preposition. In English it's pretty easy, like "the woman I'm talking with" would become "the woman with whom I am talking" which is pretty artifical and awkward. The only example I can come up with in French is "je joue avec" meaning I'm playing with (him/her/it/whatever). Of course in English this doesn't work at all! But that's a very informal example and in any formal context you'd go for "je joue avec lui" or whatever the noun is.

But no, sentences like "The goldfish of which I'm thinking" seem artificial and a bit pointless.

[Charlie Reams]

There are plenty of sentences where recasting them to move the preposition away from the end gives a very awkward result, e.g. "The children knew what I was looking at." and some where even a simple sentence would require major surgery to remove the trailing preposition, e.g. "The dog was run over." And since there's no goddamn reason to avoid trailing prepositions, why would anyone bother? Lots of modern grammar texts point out that this "rule" is totally fictitious, but then proceed to advise following it anyway, just in case the reader is a hyper-corrector. Personally I'm not in the business of using grammar to impress people who don't understand it, but this is good advice if you are.

[Martin Gardner]

Thanks, Martin and Charlie- that also teaches me to look before I post! In some French sentences, phrases like "bien que" (although) use the subjunctive despite not looking like an obvious sign for it- is this because of impending doubt or uncertainty at the end of the sentence?

Hmm. You're certainly right about the other ways the subjunctive is used. Either to express doubt, to express an opinion or to express emotion

Je ne suis pas sûr que...
Je voudrais que...
Je suis content que...

And then the final one is constructions usually with 'que' at the end, like bien que. So why hmm. I'll edit this message when I have an answer for that.

Ok I found this but it's not too helpful.

[David Roe]

There are plenty of sentences where recasting them to move the preposition away from the end gives a very awkward result, e.g. "The children knew what I was looking at." and some where even a simple sentence would require major surgery to remove the trailing preposition, e.g. "The dog was run over." And since there's no goddamn reason to avoid trailing prepositions, why would anyone bother? Lots of modern grammar texts point out that this "rule" is totally fictitious, but then proceed to advise following it anyway, just in case the reader is a hyper-corrector. Personally I'm not in the business of using grammar to impress people who don't understand it, but this is good advice if you are.

That was exactly Churchill's point in his quote "This is the sort of English up with which I will not put." He was getting at someone who'd gone to convoluted lengths to avoid ending a sentence with a preposition.

[Peter Mabey]

There are plenty of sentences where recasting them to move the preposition away from the end gives a very awkward result, e.g. "The children knew what I was looking at." and some where even a simple sentence would require major surgery to remove the trailing preposition, e.g. "The dog was run over." And since there's no goddamn reason to avoid trailing prepositions, why would anyone bother? Lots of modern grammar texts point out that this "rule" is totally fictitious, but then proceed to advise following it anyway, just in case the reader is a hyper-corrector. Personally I'm not in the business of using grammar to impress people who don't understand it, but this is good advice if you are.

That was exactly Churchill's point in his quote "This is the sort of English up with which I will not put." He was getting at someone who'd gone to convoluted lengths to avoid ending a sentence with a preposition.

This "rule" is another example of treating English as if it were (subjunctive alert ) Latin. Although those words ending the sentences can be used as prepositions, in the examples they're adverbial particles and so are correctly placed.

[Hannah O]

Hm, subordinate clause...I see! As for Latin, my class has finally figured out what the subjunctive is- if we'd been taught grammar with the proper terminology (such as subjunctive, imperfect etc.) right from the start of secondary school, I'd be up to scratch by now! In Russian, our teacher told us we should change the endings of some words (because Russian has cases, just like Latin) but not why. As a result, not only do I have to absorb a large amount of new vocabulary, but I also have to learn to change the endings depending on gender and case. It's difficult, and if we had been taught the complete grammatical stuff from the beginning, it'd be easier now. When someone labels something, "See this word? It's in the pluperfect tense", I know exactly where I am. When someone says "With a word of quantity, you add this letter, or change this letter to this other letter", (Russian genitive case) it confuses me as to when exactly changes are needed. I know that through most of Year 7 I would have probably struggled to pick all of this up, but it would lay some really strong foundations to build on when learning languages.

[Martin Gardner]

Hm, subordinate clause...I see! As for Latin, my class has finally figured out what the subjunctive is- if we'd been taught grammar with the proper terminology (such as subjunctive, imperfect etc.) right from the start of secondary school, I'd be up to scratch by now! In Russian, our teacher told us we should change the endings of some words (because Russian has cases, just like Latin) but not why. As a result, not only do I have to absorb a large amount of new vocabulary, but I also have to learn to change the endings depending on gender and case. It's difficult, and if we had been taught the complete grammatical stuff from the beginning, it'd be easier now. When someone labels something, "See this word? It's in the pluperfect tense", I know exactly where I am. When someone says "With a word of quantity, you add this letter, or change this letter to this other letter", (Russian genitive case) it confuses me as to when exactly changes are needed. I know that through most of Year 7 I would have probably struggled to pick all of this up, but it would lay some really strong foundations to build on when learning languages.

Are you really 16? How come you know all this stuff and do it at school? Are you a gifted child (or teenager, now)?

[Martin Gardner]

I'm having trouble with unicode characters. I'm trying to learn some Ancient Greek (fun!) but when I try and write the letters, well, for example it gives alpha as U + 03B1 but when I try Alt + 0, 3, B, 1 the alt B makes my bookmarks open, so that doesn't work.

[Dinos Sfyris]

I'm having trouble with unicode characters. I'm trying to learn some Ancient Greek (fun!) but when I try and write the letters, well, for example it gives alpha as U + 03B1 but when I try Alt + 0, 3, B, 1 the alt B makes my bookmarks open, so that doesn't work.

When I'm doing word processed documents for uni and such and need to use Greek symbols I just switch to Symbol font where q=theta, p=pi etc.

[Martin Gardner]

I'm having trouble with unicode characters. I'm trying to learn some Ancient Greek (fun!) but when I try and write the letters, well, for example it gives alpha as U + 03B1 but when I try Alt + 0, 3, B, 1 the alt B makes my bookmarks open, so that doesn't work.

When I'm doing word processed documents for uni and such and need to use Greek symbols I just switch to Symbol font where q=theta, p=pi etc.

True, but if you copy it to this forum or the Wiktionary, it turns it back into Latin letters, as the font generally just changes the a to look like an alpha, it isn't an actual alpha. But yeah thanks I do have that font.

[Charlie Reams]

I'm having trouble with unicode characters. I'm trying to learn some Ancient Greek (fun!) but when I try and write the letters, well, for example it gives alpha as U + 03B1 but when I try Alt + 0, 3, B, 1 the alt B makes my bookmarks open, so that doesn't work.

That code is in hex, you need to convert it to decimal to use the Alt+whatever method (bloody Windows.) There are various ways to convert to hex but my favourite is just to type "0x3B1 in decimal" into Google. This will give you the decimal code which you can then type with Alt+stuff. Slightly inconvenient but much more portable than just using a Greek font.

Alternatively you can install a Greek keyboard layout, which I'll explain if you're thinking of doing more than a small amount of typing. I did this for Hebrew and it was pretty easy.

[Martin Gardner]

I'm having trouble with unicode characters. I'm trying to learn some Ancient Greek (fun!) but when I try and write the letters, well, for example it gives alpha as U + 03B1 but when I try Alt + 0, 3, B, 1 the alt B makes my bookmarks open, so that doesn't work.

That code is in hex, you need to convert it to decimal to use the Alt+whatever method (bloody Windows.) There are various ways to convert to hex but my favourite is just to type "0x3B1 in decimal" into Google. This will give you the decimal code which you can then type with Alt+stuff. Slightly inconvenient but much more portable than just using a Greek font.

Alternatively you can install a Greek keyboard layout, which I'll explain if you're thinking of doing more than a small amount of typing. I did this for Hebrew and it was pretty easy.

No I've found a way round it, albeit a bit laborious it works. Kinda useful for doing etymologies on the Wiktionary, but not more than that. Btw Dinos, do you do Greek at Uni? I think modern Greek characters are similar but not quite the same anyway.

[Hannah O]

Martin: Yes, and I'm 16 for a good few months more! I started AS Levels in September- other people in my classes are gifted (they're geniuses!), so we did a lot of advanced grammar a few years early and now we just build on it. As for Russian, I'm lucky as my school offers it as a second language. That, and grammar fascinates me so I pay as much attention as possible whenever we learn new things.

[Charlie Reams]

No I've found a way round it, albeit a bit laborious it works. Kinda useful for doing etymologies on the Wiktionary, but not more than that. Btw Dinos, do you do Greek at Uni? I think modern Greek characters are similar but not quite the same anyway.

The characters themselves are the same but some of the phonology has changed.

[Hannah O]

I've always wondered how similar or different Ancient Greek and Modern Greek were, considering many classics teachers only seem to know Ancient Greek. As for the alphabet itself, since it was plagiarised for the Russian alphabet, it's relatively easy to have an intelligent guess as to how to read words in Greek if you know Russian. As for understanding Greek words, unless we have an English derivative (e.g. philosophy) or it's the name of a a person, I'm stuck.

[Rosemary Roberts]

I've always wondered how similar or different Ancient Greek and Modern Greek were, considering many classics teachers only seem to know Ancient Greek.

When my son's Greek teacher took the class to Greece they were all very surprised to find that he could not make himself understood. He communicated rather like your standard Brit abroad: speaking the wrong language (Ancient Greek) and shouting to make up the difference.

[Martin Gardner]

No I've found a way round it, albeit a bit laborious it works. Kinda useful for doing etymologies on the Wiktionary, but not more than that. Btw Dinos, do you do Greek at Uni? I think modern Greek characters are similar but not quite the same anyway.

The characters themselves are the same but some of the phonology has changed.

I'd have thought that the exact shapes have changed a bit, haven't they?

Oh, and this

Aorist (Greek: ἀόριστος), describes an action which happened once in the past:

ἀνὴρ ἔθυσε βοῦν.

A man sacrificed an ox.

Isn't this just another name for the preterite then?

[Martin Gardner]

I've read the first few words of the Odyssey. Turns out that the 11th word is Troy IMO (Troiês).

[Charlie Reams]

I'd have thought that the exact shapes have changed a bit, haven't they?

Don't think so, I learnt Classical Greek and modern Greek looks exactly the same to me, at least in printed form. They're also encoded as the same characters in Unicode, which tends to be fastidious about this sort of thing.

[Dinos Sfyris]

Btw Dinos, do you do Greek at Uni?

Nope chem and maths (if you hadn't guessed already) but I encounter Greek symbols a lot for both these subjects.

[Martin Gardner]

I just finished reading Larpers and Shroomer : The Language Report 2004. While it's not a bad book, it's not particularly the style of linguistics I'm interested in. She starts off with certain fields, like business, Internet and texting, politics, sport and gives examples of neologisms that have entered into the language over the past 12 months. These chapters are mainly made up of discussing specific examples. Then there's a couple of chapters on changes in meaning, spelling, grammar punctuation and pronunciation. Now that's more my style. But in fairness, how much can one language change in 12 months? Not a great deal. And then in the final chapter she moves on to discussing specific international dialects of English, like Indian, Australian, South African, etc.

It's not a bad book but it's not really the side of linguistics that I prefer.

[Charlie Reams]

But in fairness, how much can one language change in 12 months? Not a great deal.

Indeed not, in a permanent sense; most of the words discussed are probably transient floaters in the great sewer that is the English lexicon, which I think Susie acknowledges in the book. But it's interesting to have some kind of historical record of these words just for the few moments that they surface. I imagine the Language Reports being the kind of books that people look back on quite fondly in about fifty years' time.

[Jon O'Neill]

I've just finished it too, and I thought it was terrible. I was looking for something more to do with a history of 18th century pirate ship construction. There was barely anything on the history of 18th century pirate ship construction in it. There was a bit about the internet, which is more my style, but mostly I was disappointed bye the lack of history of 18th century pirate ship construction.

Overall, not a bad book, but not enough about the history of 18th century pirate ship construction.

[Martin Gardner]

But in fairness, how much can one language change in 12 months? Not a great deal.

Indeed not, in a permanent sense; most of the words discussed are probably transient floaters in the great sewer that is the English lexicon, which I think Susie acknowledges in the book. But it's interesting to have some kind of historical record of these words just for the few moments that they surface. I imagine the Language Reports being the kind of books that people look back on quite fondly in about fifty years' time.

Two things:
#1. It really brings back memories of what was going on in 2004. Gordon Brown was the Chancellor, Tony Blair was PM and the war in Iraq was in its early stages.
#2. It's very well written; clear, easy to understand, plain English. These are pretty much the three reasons why the University library didn't purchase the following editions - not academic enough. By which I mean alienating and difficult to understand.

[Ian Volante]

Overall, not a bad book, but not enough about the history of 18th century pirate ship construction.

They were all clinkaaaar-built.

[Mike Dunbar]

Don't know if this has been posted, it probably has to be fair, but since the book has been brought up...

http://www.askoxford.com/worldofwords/wordfrom/larpers/

...an interview with Dent regarding the tome.

[Hannah O]

Fascinating! I'm proud to say I'm fluent in leetspeak and I know what LARPers are. Pretty sure that 'pash' isn't a new word, I thought that it was originally Australian slang and has made its way over the sea to here.

[Ian Volante]

Fascinating! I'm proud to say I'm fluent in leetspeak and I know what LARPers are. Pretty sure that 'pash' isn't a new word, I thought that it was originally Australian slang and has made its way over the sea to here.

They were saying that in Neighbours twenty years ago...