Hello, @Paramanand! Good morning!

@amWhy: hello and Good evening!

I was going through the large number of messages in CURED for the last 15 min

@ParamanandSingh Indeed! Yes. The activity has picked up there!

And also, the activity has picked up in the math mods' office chat at least it has over the last couple of days.

@XanderHenderson: envy, envy, envy! It's been a long long time since I did some real travelling.

Does anyone think that I am over-reacting here:

mathoverflow.net/posts/comments/990133

@XanderHenderson: I disagree with what you think because of multiple reasons. Firstly, it is common for speakers of one language to make a mistake in another language due to their original language having a word that does not match up well with the target language. This is in fact what happened here. A Tamil idiom for asking whether students get what is being said uses a Tamil word that means "doubt". Students who are not aware that this is not idiomatic in English transfer it over.

When an error is left uncorrected, and spreads to too many people, it does indeed become endemic, and some people call it a dialectical variation, but I disagree with this characterization because exactly the same process led to the "would of" error (instead of "would've").

That is to say, I consider true dialectical variation to arise via natural divergence of the same language over a period of time, and not via propagation of errors in grammar, vocabulary or spelling. From the history of this "doubt"/"question" conflation, it does not fall into my classification of dialectical variation, unlike for example s/z spelling and "diary"/"calendar" usage.

@user21820 Very true. I must say that despite never studying Tamil in school I managed to pick up formally written Tamil (as opposed to spoken, colloquial Tamil) by urging myself to believe that it would improve both my expressiveness as well as clarity. I think if people want to express themselves clearly and passionately (as I often do), they should take more care with the words they use.

Of course, the urges worked a treat, I find speaking Tamil a very blissful experience now.

@TeresaLisbon I see. Very nice!

@user21820 Thank you. One of my main motivations for doing this, was so that I could go through those TV actress interviews which appear in Tamil magazines. In my fifth grade I'd come back from school, drop my bag on the shelf ,pick up the magazine and flip to the interview. Those were the days. It's been ages since I've seen any magazine , let alone a Tamil one.

That, and the recipes' section "Semma Samayal" (or something like that) were my favourites.

@TeresaLisbon Ah I see. What's your favourite recipe?

@user21820 Favourite recipe? Podi Idli, by a long distance. Just make the idlis and spread milagai podi (a kind of red chilly powder, if you are Tamil or know something about this I won't need to explain) all over each one, adding a drop or two of gingelly oil for good measure. Serve hot. Great stuff.

See, in recent times the books don't cover traditional recipes anymore. Cakes and bakes are in vogue now. Another one I loved was Ragi dosa, then there is a nice "Masala Thair Vadai" (masala curd vada), they are all delights. Not to add, there's some fancy drinks as well, none better than the traditional "Paanakam", or "Kashayam".

"Kashayam" and Ragi dosa are cheat codes for cold and protein/balanced diet requirements respectively. Another delight is the various kind of sambars : heard of JACKFRUIT sambar? Then there's payasam and sweet : my best was the "Javvarsi" (Sabudana in Hindi, sago in English) payasam, and the "padusha" and "adhirsam" in sweets (the "unniyappam" is not far behind). As I write, the smells are coming back to me!

@TeresaLisbon I haven't had the chance to eat Indian cuisine more than a few times, so I am naturally unfamiliar with them. But Google helps to tell us what you're talking about, though sadly not the taste. =)

I have at least heard of jackfruit and sambar, though not jackfruit sambar. But it seems that jackfruit is a very popularly grown fruit in asian countries.

@user21820 Oh, very nice! I hope you get more opportunities to have good Indian food. If I come by someday I will give you a good crash course. How did you know about the little Tamil anecdote? It piqued me, since my grandmothers too use the word for doubt ("sandeham") interchangeably with the word for question ("keLvi"), and I've never had the habit of doing so.

@TeresaLisbon When I first heard it from an Indian student back when I was studying, I deduced logically that it must be due to a vocabulary mismatch. I didn't know the technical details, but it can be found by Google (again!):

@user21820 I see. There are many languages in India, and I could have spoken any one of them (or not been from India at all!) so I found it quite interesting that you managed to pick out a Tamil quote from all that, the one language that turns out to be my native language.

@TeresaLisbon It's probably an observer bias here. If you hadn't used "doubt" incorrectly, I wouldn't have pointed it out. Only those who happen to have learnt the semantic range of "doubt" incorrectly would use it incorrectly. And typically such phenomena are sporadic enough that it is likely that there is a single origin.

Maybe a bit of luck, of course, but not as much as might seem to be needed?

@user21820 Indeed, you are correct! I , well, I don't quit speak English outside of MSE, instead preferring to using a trio of other languages which I probably know better. For that reason, I've wanted to avoid lingo and prefer speaking in British English, which I felt was more polished, formal and suited me. I thank you for bringing this subtlety to my attention, though. I have grandmothers to address in the near future.

@TeresaLisbon I see, you're welcome! I have had a few quirks myself, due to learning vocabulary mostly from reading books, which for very rare words can sometimes result in 'learning' the wrong meaning. I can't remember examples off the top of my head now, but I know some were really off!

@user21820 On the topic of books, imagine reading Roald Dahl and Tintin : I've found myself wanting to call out PSQ users as "arabesques" and "snozzwangers" and "Bashi-bazouks" but no, I will have to stick with "reckless" and "impatient" and such simpleton adjectives! I am crodsquinkled!

@TeresaLisbon Blistering barnacles! Those comics are a bad influence! What with the chain smoking and drunkenness and recklessness! =P

@user21820 Aha, I often get PTSD flashbacks following a PSQ hop (Yes, that's the term I use to describe hopping from user profile to user profile in search of PSQs), and I think I need these fancy expletives to express the right feelings , but still need to follow it up with a peg (of orange juice). No cigarettes, though.

But the author correctly speculated (before the moon landings) that there is water on the moon, though nuclear-powered rockets have not been used.

@user21820 Ah yes, that book's (Explorers on the moon, was it?) where I learnt the words "stalagmites" and "stalactites" from!

Yes that's the one. It can't happen like in the comic (ice deep in a cave not at the poles), because water ice has only been found in large quantities at the poles, whereas Tintin and his friends landed in the Hipparchus crater. But well, there's still prediction of water before people knew.

Or maybe it can, and we have yet to find out, who knows lol.

@user21820 Indeed, imagine : Herge could have seen a cave on the moon from his study, and we can't see it with the technologies available at our disposal, even if we land on the place. Of course the entire episode is fantasy, but to think that it would be true to this extent is warming.

I think Herge was trying hard sci-fi in that book, so plausible hypotheses made it in. Though when he wrote other more fantastical books, like the temple of the sun book, I found the resolution extremely dissatisfying (I won't spoil it but you know what I mean right?) in its incredulity haha..

@user21820 Oh, don't worry, I've read the entire series. Yes, the conclusion to that particular book (one word : eclipse) was the result of a coincidence to rival them all! Calculus (yes, here's where I saw the word "calculus" for the first time!) though, what a humorous and well written character. Not enjoyed a character as good as that since the Baudelaires in "a Series of Unfortunate Events". Heck, I loved Violet!

It's not just the coincidence; it's the stated ability to make powerful crystal balls and voodoo puppets that contradicts their inability to do what they wanted to do at the end.

Anyway, I'm the sort of person that is sensitive to plot inconsistencies, so it's not just Tintin that gets it from me haha..

Alright, I need to go now. See you next time!

@user21820 That is an inconsistency that is being pointed out to me for the first time, and I'm humbled to say I did not notice it! If you are insensitive to plot inconsistencies, my sincere humble request would be to never watch, apart from a handful, any Bollywood suspense movies. Anyway, see your around here!

@user21820 I am much more of a descriptivist than a prescriptivist. Language, an element of culture, is used for communicating ideas. Any language which facilitates communication between members of a given group (e.g. residents of southern India, students on a university campus in California, etc) cannot be incorrect.

@XanderHenderson Ah. I'm half-half, because errors degrade communication. For example, "would of".

Usage can be "non-standard" (like the Black American English pronunciation "aks" instead of "ask"), and usage can mark a person as being from a particular location, socio-economic class, etc.

@user21820 "Would of" is a spelling error. When language goes from speech to text, there are other formalities that come into play.

@XanderHenderson No, descriptivists would say that it is not a spelling error but simply a dialectical variation.

@user21820 Citation, please?

My Googling is turning up mostly sources which seem to agree that it is a misspelling, and not anything much deeper than that (though sometimes done intentionally in order to indicate regional dialects).

e.g. this blog posts cites Merriam Webster and the Columbia Guide: stancarey.wordpress.com/2012/10/23/… .

And this blog post (the research blog of a British group) seems to indicate that "would of" is a genuine usage in the spoken language of some groups (which surprises me---I may have to revise my previous statement and instead claim that "would of" is a non-standard, but regionally inflected, usage).

In any event, I don't think that "would of" degrades communication at all---in spoken language, "would've" and "would of" are generally indistinguishable, and in written language I would be surprised to find anyone who is confused by the orthography.

@XanderHenderson Let me answer the easiest question first. It does degrade communication. The first time I saw it I was wondering whether there was something missing that resulted in the grammatical failure.

Now, over time, of course people can learn these various idiosyncratic variations. But that's really the trouble; the more variations proliferate, the lower the efficacy of communication due to the increased learning needed.

For the harder question, I distinctly remember that some people insisted on descriptivist grounds that whatever variation is in widespread use should be considered legitimate linguistic variation, even in the case of "would of". However, I am unable to find clear instances of such claims at the moment. One half-hearted 'statement' from a high-rep user on EL&U SE (but not a linguist) can be found at the end of this post.

Even the blog post you linked at stancarey.wordpress.com says "Authenticity of dialect and character are all well and good, but I think the main effect of the deliberate usage in edited prose is further uncertainty and error (not to mention irritation, in some quarters).", supporting my first point, but links to another linguistics blog that seems to be arguing for "would of" as an idiom and not misspelling.

Oops I see you linked indirectly to that same one later, by linking the entire category instead of the specific post lol!

Anyway, it's easy to figure out what happened. There were two stages. In the first stage, some people learnt only spoken English and broken written English, and their spoken dialect pronounced "would've" the same as "would of", so when they attempted to write a significant fraction of them wrote "would of".

In the second stage, some of this fraction taught others how to speak and 'write' English, and so the resulting group learnt the wrong thing, but a significant fraction of them also learnt basic grammar but since "would of" was already widespread they simply (likely unconsciously) accepted it as an idiomatic construction rather than a spelling mistake. This explains all the observations in the linguistics blog post!

I would still call it an error that was not fixed, and not a dialectical variation.

Same phenomenon for the conflation of "its"/"it's" or "your"/"you're".

@user21820 That you, personally, took a second to parse the phrase does not provide very strong evidence that the phrase, in aggregate, "degrades communication". The plural of "anecdote" is not "data". Again, language is typically studied at the level of groups. I would also wonder if it was simply a code switching error (as when my students use "pls" instead of "please" in written communication, because that is how they communicate with their in-group).

@XanderHenderson "pls" is not an error, because it is a meaningful contraction.

That was my point.

"your"/"you're" is an error because anyone who learns the rules for contractions would know that it is wrong.

This is my point. Some things are in fact errors. =)

@user21820 I was not responding to that---I had not gotten that far down your comments.

Oh hahaha ok.

I was responding precisely to the comment that I responded to.

@user21820 I disagree. Language is constantly changing. Words are constantly being brought into languages, falling out of use, and have their meanings changed. The proliferations of change are either widely adopted (if they prove useful), or locally adopted (if they prove useful to a smaller group, or gain a foothold as an in-group marker), or disappear.

@user21820 Indeed---any widespread variation should be considered legitimate. I had not understood that "would of" was considered such a variation, and was taught in my linguistics course 20 years ago that it was a common transcription error, but had little relevance to the spoken language---people simply don't parse set phrases in that much detail (in general).

It looks like the consensus now is that "would of" is a class marker.

So, at worst, using "would of" when communicating with you would be a code-switching error.

@user21820 These are spelling / transcription errors. Again, written language is very different from spoken languge.

In any event, the original comment was that "doubt" meaning "question" is common enough in Indian usage that it should not be regarded as an error. Rather, it is a regional usage, which is perfectly well understood by a large group of culturally related people.

@XanderHenderson I think you're inconsistent. I can very well claim that "would of" is a spelling error!

@user21820 I originally did claim that it was a spelling error.

Lol.

And then did some research, and discovered that there are a lot of folk out there who are now claiming that it is representative of some kind of cultural marker---that it signifies some regional or class membership.

You rejected my analysis of "would of" as the same kind of error as "your"/"you're", on the basis that the latter is a spelling error. But as I described in the two stage explanation, the former is also a spelling error, and just because it is taught as correct in the second stage does not imply that it ceases to be a spelling error.

@user21820 Disagree. If a large enough group of people agrees that some usage or spelling is correct, and they consistently use that usage or spelling, then it is correct within that group.

So that's exactly the issue; you're 100% descriptivist, which is precisely why I said:

@user21820 And I then asked for a citation, and found several of my own, which seemed to support that statement.

I had my mind changed by the evidence. :P

Which shows that indeed my analysis of you as a descriptivist was correct. I implied from the beginning that any descriptivist would naturally come to a different conclusion from me. There's no doubt about it.

Indeed. As I said early on, I am much more descriptivist.

In any event, the use of "doubt" to mean "question" is, as far as I can tell, no more incorrect than using "lorry" to mean "truck", or "elevator" to mean "lift".

It is incorrect, because "doubt" connotes "disbelief", and completely different from "lorry"/"truck".

At the end of a purely mathematical talk, the speaker should in most cases not be able to legitimately ask: "Do you have any doubts?"

Nor can you use it in "To be, or not to be, that is the question" in place of "question".

@user21820 Not in Indian English, apparently.

@XanderHenderson Yes, but Indian English has errors that were never fixed...

According to the Linguistics SE post which you cited above, "doubt", in Indian English, means "misunderstanding".

I know that, I linked that post as a descriptivist-leaning post. I didn't say I agreed with it at all!

Okay, let's move on. With respect to doubt and question, I have to side with @Xander. I don't like it when people dismiss others languages or variations, different from their own, as wrong. All I keep hearing from @user21820 is "My way, my standards, how I write English are the way things ought to be."

I don't know why you keep thinking that I am only in support of my way, but it's fine that we stop discussing this since you don't like it.

@user21820 I'm not saying that, but you have a tendency to occasionally seem rigid in some of your positions.

@amWhy Ok thanks for clarifying, and sorry for misinterpreting you. I readily admit that I tend to be more rigid than 'the average person' in my positions. Hope it doesn't cause too much friction! =)

@amWhy Thanks! I hope to stay that way for a long time.

How does one "unstick" a letter on one's keyboard?? I'm finding my "r" key sticky - so every time I want to write "your", I see only "you." It might have to do with the force in which I'm typing words ending in "r". Drives me crazy when I comment on main or in chat, and cannot edit after I notice it, to correct it! (We need comment previews!!!!! Feature Request!!!)

@amWhy No idea. I have a four year old MacBook with the terrible butterfly keyboard. About half of the keys don't work correctly, and the D key outright fell off. I spent $100 on a mechanical keyboard.

Don't forget my Feature Request!!!: We need comment previews!!!!

@Xander ^^^^ :( Most of us don't have mod privileges, like editing any time they want to, their comments. I think it's a conspiracy to always enable mods to correct normal typos, etc. they make, so they look more superior to the poor surfs who don't notice a typo/misspelling until after they can edit it. Aha! ;D (Please know that I don't actually believe that!)

@amWhy Obviously. We must maintain appearances, mustn't we?

:P

@XanderHenderson ;D