Pat’s Polemics

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Let's say we are trying to get across the language situation in Norway where at least 2 forms of language compete. We show two different plural formers: boeker and boka and say both are acceptable but belong to two different standards.

Students may ask, do we have anything like that in English? Most instructors would jump to the very minor differences between American and U.K. English in spelling (labor~labour) or vocabulary (hood~bonnet). But those are not grammatical differences. What is an example of a grammatical difference?

Well, clearly, we could cite he saw~he seen or you went ~ you all went or he doesn't have it ~ he don't have it or he might be able to go ~ he might could go or there isn't ~ there ain't or we don't have any ~ we don't have none. Most of the variants could be ascribed to a sort of general Southern English of Scots-Irish origin but generally Southern though many of these usages extend far beyond the South.

The problem is the students will react with "But that's bad English!" They have been so brainwashed by the idea that simple variety is somehow dangerous and undermining of the faithful that they simply cannot be brought to see/hear these without concurrently passing on an air of stupidity and backwardness, inculcated by generations of school marms.

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Every waiter of every language background uses the Yiddish expression, "Enjoy!" Leo Rosten discusses this in his Hooray for Yiddish.
I am reconstructing here, but I know the German for 'enjoy' is a reflexive verb, erfreuren sich. When told that this in English is 'enjoy', Yiddish speakers, realizing English does not use reflexive pronouns where Yiddish/German does, would drop the 'yourself', which is mandatory in English.

So when waiters say, "Enjoy!" they are using a grammatical form influenced by another language. On a much grander scale, this has happened around the world with many languages and can even create what is called a Sprachbund, a German term meaning a group of languages bound together by common features even though they are not directly related.

So in southeast Europe, the Balkans Sprachbund consists of Greek, Serbo-Croation, Bulgarian, Rumanian, Macedonian, and Romani. I had to look up Sprachbund on Wikipedia to avoid going to my bookshelf (I am really tired this last day of school). This develops over many centuries but I thought it interesting that we do have an example in American English, just a tiny nick in the transitive very system, but it is just from such little nicks that larger linguistic streams flow.

Another thing I've heard shows influence from Spanish where the word 'apenas' is used a lot and Spanish-speakers have heard it expressed as 'barely' in English. So you hear things like, "They barely came when the wedding started". Many non-Spanish-speakers are picking up expressions like this where many anglosajones mingle with speakers of English as a second language.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balkan_sprachbund

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Here's a quote from Stanley Fish writing on the interpretation of the U.S. Constitution:

"In short, they wanted to protect the expression of ideas, but not expressions like “incitement to riot” and “treason,” which are indistinguishable from action."

In linguistics, a type of verb which, when uttered, actually does something rather than labeling it is called a 'performative'. An example is, "I now pronounce you husband and wife." The word pronounce is a performative as long as the person saying it is vested with the authority to marry people.

So imperatives might be separated from hortatory subjunctives, "Storm the building!" from "Let's storm the building!" or "We ought to storm the building."

Illocutionary acts seem to be a broader category with verbs like "I promise...." fitting in here. Apparently, this whole realm of semantics has been muddied and I won't bother now to try to unravel it. I'm still working on the middle voice concept.

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The m of the Latin accusative in a word like bonum reduced to a simple nasal sound, thus nasaling the vowel u. The nasalization gradually dropped away, leaving a u which changed to o which changed to schwa. Then the schwa dropped off leaving an n. Then the n reduced to a nasal sound, nasalizing the vowel, leaving us with the current situation: bon. [I haven't checked the actual situation in French, but the course of change is something like that - this is a schematicized rendering of that historical course]

Most people don't like that. They esp don't like people who point out that such changes appear not to have disturbed the language overmuch, i.e. French is still an expressive language, n'est-ce pas? That really frosts people who imagine that any change must be not only a reduction in sounds but also a reduction in communicativity or beauty or tradition or loyalty or national pride or something, just something bad b/c it's CHANGE! And change is bad.

So we all must pause here and say, "Say what?" Yes, from certain ideological perspectives, change is bad. In language we achieve this by positing a Golden Age at which the language was perfection itself: the Siglo de Oro, Shakespear's English, Pushkin's Russian, Dante's Italian..... every country, nation, region has its period of perfection. And linguists who show that the great exemplars of the national tongue violated many of the shibboleth-like rules the conservationists believe are enshrined somewhere, and show also that the language contines to serve well as a medium of not only communication but of belles-lettres as well, become the object of hatred and scorn on the part of those who "plant their flags" in the service of TRADITION and STANDARDS.

Thus the origin of the conservationists' hatred as described by H. A. Gleason in Linguistics and English Grammar.

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Two books, one from the 50s and one from the 90s, treat the English relative pronouns. The history is briefly mentioned on p.132 of Robertson's & Cassidy's The Development of Modern English (1934 & 1964):

Old English possessed no distinctive relative pronoun. The relative function was variously performed (1) by the demonstrative se, seo, thaet, (2) by the indeclinable relative particle the, (3) by the joined with the demonstrative, or (4) by the joined with the personal pronoun. The sole remnant of all these forms is that, originally the neuter of the demonstrative, but widely used as the relative pronoun for all genders in Middle English, and the only relative which is in general colloquial use today. The other relatives of Modern English - who and which developed their relative use much later, though both are from Old English forms, the interrogative indefinites hwa and hwilc respectively. Which was the earlier to develop a relative function, it became, in early Middle English use, a general and indeclinable relative form, like that. A familiar instance of its earlier applicaton to persons is the oopening phrase of the Lord's Prayer, "Our Father, which art in Heaven." The present use of who as a relative and the distinction between who for persons and which for animals and for things were not fully worked out until the eighteenth century. {note}. Even yet, as has been suggested, who and which are used as relatives less freeely than as interrogatives; the man in the street unconsciously prefers that to who - partly, no doubt, because by using that he avoids the uncomfortable choice between who and whom.
{note} The classical illustration is "The Humble Petition of Who and Which," in the Spectator for May 30, 1711. As Jespersen points out (Essentials of English Grammar, p 359, Addison turns historical truth topsy-turvy by describing the relative that as an upstart that hs recently done injury to who and which.

Just a quick comment on the note. Addison is a revered figure in English literature and Jespersen is a revered figure in the study of English linguistics; who do you think English teachers will trust more?

To current times: Celce-Murcia and Larsen-Freeman in their The Grammar Book list several modern English relative pronouns with notes on their use for ESL teachers to base their lessons on. Page 371 states:

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Gimme a minute, will ya?
Such speech is labeled slovenly by our grammar mavens. It should be pronounced 'giVe me" and 'you', they declare, otherwise, all language will descend into chaos and incomprehensibility. Every listserv has its Jeremiah warning us of the on-coming wave of confusion.

English is not the only language with this tendency to run sounds together, even words, as in 'give' and 'me' into 'gimme'. Another language even has a special name for it. It was early linguists, explicating the rules of the ancient language of Sanskrit so as to preserve the all-important ceremonial text of sacrifices. They recognized that some sounds merge in pronunciation and called it 'sandhi'.

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The following is excerpted from a post written by an Englishman:

"In it there is a ceiling reproduction that shews at one end what I interpret
to be the Sybil's cave and Charon with a disorderly queue on the way to
Hades. Jupiter in clouds more to the centre, was blowing a trumpet.
There seems to be a large figure of Christ over the central half-way mark
displaying his 'stigmata'"

In this paragraph we see two British usages: queue and shews, one a lexical item and the other an spelling item. Believe it or not, there are people who have tried to instigate a "two language" policy toward British and American English on the basis of just such silliness. "Queue" even has seeped into American English just as American usages have seeped into U.K. usage. Nothing, to my mind, so illustrates the totally political and social basis on which is decided what is a language and what is a dialect.

Far more to the point is the pronunciation issues which sometimes make spoken British English incomprehensible to Americans at first blush. After a while, it clears up some.

Nevertheless, most attempts to argue for separate languages revolve around these barely discernible lexical vagaries. More substantial attempts are Serbia and Croation and Hindi and Urdu, essentially the same languages with vocabulary differences at the level of academic language, Hindi borrowing from Sanskrit and Urdu from Perso-Arabic sources while Serbian is Slavic oriented and Croatian more Latin and German oriented. Nevertheless, both pairs are the same language with angry partisans ready to take to the streets to enforce the indefensible notion that they are separate and distinct languages, with the emphasis on "separate".

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The following is an very irritating post sent to a Latin listserv. My response, which I have not sent, follows. Let me know what you think.

>I don't normally jump into these debates, but having taught Spanish &
>Latin,
> and having attended DLI, I can speak from experience on this subject
>
> Latin has 5 declensions & 6 cases - spanish has 2 declensions & 2
> (singular
> & Plural) cases - it seems to me Latin nouns are harder. Anticipating
> that
> someone somewhere will argue that Spanish has 3 declensions, I'll concede
> the validity of that viewpoint, but it still lacks the system of cases,
> and
> that makes it 'easier' to learn.
>
> Spanish has more 'irregular' verbs, most of which are fairly regular
> within
> their own pattern, but only 1 passive voice, and that is periphrastic;
> Latin
> has 2 complete passive systems; colloquial Spanish does have a impersonal
> passive voice, but how many impersonal verbs does Latin have? Latin verbs
> seem much harder to me;
>
> Spanish has 2 participles, Latin has 4
>

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Subject: What does it meme?

> Something that's been on my mind recently..
> What is stress for? (In speaking, not in marital relationships)
> I got to thinking about stress with Latin, since it's so regular. Is it
> a way of telling the listener, "Hey! end of the root, coming on the
> inflection!"
> What about other languages?

I can tell you that French, for instance, stresses the word at the end of the sentence or phrase, not individual words. To trace the evolution of a language and how it might wind up that way (incidentally, I just committed an "anticipation" in writing-== I wrote "mind" instead of "might" b/c I was thinking of "wind").

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