15:04
@StoneyB I would not call spacing punctuaction. Typographical conventions adopted from a fantasy novel doesn't seem so relevant for learning English.
@StoneyB: My objection is not to do with Joyce per se, but the fact that the OP here is trying to understand modern grammatical constructs via pre-war fiction texts in this and multiple other questions. Whilst I will be the first to say that Shakespeare, Dickens, Joyce and others are no doubt part of a fine education in English Literature, IMO they are not serving as good indicators of English in modern use, and may in fact be a disservice to the OP by teaching a style of language that may not be in common use. This is why I was asking if the OP had more recent examples. — Matt 11 hours ago
1 hour later…
16:19
@kiamlaluno Typography is typography. And language is language. Yes, of course your command of English would improve by reading any well-written book that interests you. You will learn more about how to write and speak English by reading J.K.Rowling or Neal Stephenson or Isaac Asimov than by reading pedestrian business communications and semi-literate software instruction manuals.
... and your Romulans and Vulcans are straw men. This is a question about language, not about early 20th-century Irish sociology; just as your own question about Supernatural was a question about language, not about demonology.
1 hour later…
17:35
@StoneyB I don't see where we are going on, with a question that asks why the sentence didn't start with due spaces. If the user asked if he should have used or not two spaces at the beginning of a sentence he wanted to write, the question would have been different. Asking why the editor chose to use two spaces at the beginning of a sentence doesn't help much.
I would not understand much English from a fantasy novel that makes up idiomatic expressions just because the author is imagining a world where English is different from the one spoken nowadays.
17:51
@kiamlaluno OP sees the author departing from established typographic convention and asks if it is meaningful. (In fact it was.) It is exactly the same order of question as this one of yours.
@kiamlaluno I would be the first to close a question about mathom or lembas - but nobody asks questions about that. They ask questions about grammar: Is this a relative clause? What is this tense? - and those have nothing to do with the literary genre. English grammar has been stable for over 200 years; there has been no significant innovation since the Lake Poets introduced the passive progressive at the end of the 18th century...
18:08
@StoneyB My question is quite different, since it is about punctuation, and I am asking about something said in a book whose topic is punctuation. I didn't ask why the author of a fantasy novel used a comma before a quote.
This user seems to open a book, read it, and ask questions. In the questions the user asks, I don't see anything that tells me he is going to use what learned in his own questions in some way.
He doesn't ask about a sentence he is going to write; he doesn't ask if he can use a phrase in a specific context.
If I read Burning Chrome by William Gibson, I would have more questions than he has, but I am not sure most of the questions would be interesting for future readers that are not reading the same book.
Guaranteed, it is also the answer that can make the question more interesting or relevant for future users. I don't think that asking every question about what read in a novel is the most productive way of asking questions, or learning English.
When I read an expression in a book that I don't understand, I would first check if the expression is used in a different context, and try to understand what it means.
18:49
@StoneyB: I don't doubt that many of Listenever's questions are very interesting, and many of them touch on topics that are relevant to modern everyday English
but part of me worries that OP in this case is trying to derive everyday modern usage from several different books, many of which are old, and many of which are fiction
@kiamlaluno There are many reasons for learning a language. Talking and writing to people is one of them; listening to people and reading what they have written is another. In graduate school I mastered Middle and Early Modern English, I have spent time on Middle Welsh and Biblical Hebrew, my wife is now working on Old French and Old English and Old High German; we study these things to read, not to write ...
19:17
Listenever raises questions from Dubliners because that's where the questions arise. She also raises questions from Harry Potter and To Kill A Mockingbird and BBC soap operas and the Cambridge Grammar of the English Language, and she cross-references them - she takes what she learns in one context and applies it to others, with steadily increasing sophistication. Go back and look at her first half-dozen or soquestions and you'll see the difference.
@Matt Listenever's questions aren't about LitCrit, they're about language fundamentals. They strike you as 'abstract' because she's coming at the language from the outside, where matters you take for granted are immeasurably strange; and they strike you as 'esoteric' because they arise in contexts unfamiliar to you. But exactly the same questions would come up if she were reading Game of Thrones or The Structure of Sceintific Revolutions or whatever your everyday reading is.
19:36
Don't let yourself be intimidated by famous names; James Joyce speaks the same language as you and I, only with an Irish accent. Granted, he does Big Things with the language, but Listenever doesn't ask about those, at least not around here. This isn't LitCrit, any more than the Excel help file is Computer Science.
19:55
@StoneyB: I disagree. He speaks a similar language, sure, but there are important changes that would make someone speaking like him (or anyone from that time) appear stilted and strange if they were to copy their style of language in a modern setting.
My objection is not that they are famous, or even that they are classics, but that they are old (and also fictional) texts.
The Great Gatsby written in 1925 right at the end contains the sentence "It eluded us then, but that's no matter - to-morrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther . . . . And one fine morning ----"
but the word "to-morrow" does not exist anymore. It might be perfectly understandable, but the way to spell tomorrow is without the hypen nowadays. The language of 1925 is not the same as the language of today, and people speaking or writing it as if there have been no changes will appear strange to those of us living in the 21st Century.
Learning modern colloquial English from old texts is a minefield; and it's commonly the case that things that do not appear as they seem in old texts (and particularly old fiction texts - and even more particularly in old fiction texts by famous authors), the language is not what is in everyday use
That is my objection. This is why your quote from the New York Times is so much better for ELL than the OP's original quote from James Joyce.
Finding a strange sentence or word in a old fiction book by a master of English only tells you that you either (A) don't understand the structure because you need to learn more English (B) that the structure is indecipherable now, but was valid then or (C) that the structure was invalid even then, but was put there because the author was using artistic licence
It is easier to learn everyday English by reading texts and listening to everyday English than by learning it from something that is very much not everyday English, such as James Joyce, Shakespeare, or frankly even Game of Thrones.
Now that is not to say that those texts are not worth reading - they are great books - but merely to say that they are written to entertain the audience of the day. Not to teach 21st Century English.
1 hour later…
21:50
@kiamlaluno: If ELL were for teaching everything about English, it would overlap ELU, since everything that is on-topic for ELU could be construed as learning something about English. In order to try and keep the two from overlapping too overtly, I think ELL should really be concentrating on helping people how to read, write and speak everyday English, and that ELU should really be concentrating on everything else.
But if that the remit of ELL, then questions such as "Why does this pre-war author write this sentence in his grand book of fiction in this particular way?" are very borderline off-topic. And if that is not the remit of ELL, then we need to decide what the remit of ELL is.
What I really am trying to get at, is we need to dispel the notion that ELL is defined as "everything that is off-topic for ELU"
22:26
@Matt Our product is not questions; questions are just the packaging. Our product is answers, and our answers are and must be vastly different from ELU's. We can't give the half-assed yes/no answers that pass muster on ELU, we can't appeal to our readers' vast experience of the language for analogies and examples, we have to explain every answer from the ground up and indicate how far the explanation will take the reader the next time the situation arises....
To say This is worthy of your attention and that is not is condescending and infantilizing. They're grownups, not third-graders; some of them are graduate students or aspire to be graduate students in top-flight universities; and they should be presumed to know what they want to know better than we. Let them do the questions, which they're good at, and let us do the answers, which is what we're good at.
22:55
@StoneyB: Sure, our value may derive from our answers and the quality of them, but that does not mean that all questions are on-topic or within scope of ELL. If all questions are on topic for ELL, then there is no point having a distinction between ELL and ELU, and we should all go back to being the same site.
And we should not be going by who the learner is either. The distinction between the two sites cannot and must not be whether the person is learning English. "What is the etymology of the word 'Hello'?" is a great question for ELU and a bad one for ELL, whether the questioner is a native speaker and Professor of English or a third grader two days into learning English as a foreign language.
And I am certainly not saying that the OP's question is not worthy of an answer, or even that it is not worth of my answer. There are very many questions that I migrate to ELU that are fantastic questions.
I did not send it to ELU because it was beneath an answer. I sent it to ELU because IMO it is off-topic to ELL. It's a fantastic question, and I loved reading the answers to it on ELU. And it's not to say that we couldn't have answered it here, either. It's just not a good question for ELL (it is not about learning how to use everyday English), and is a great question for ELU (because it is about history of English, and ELU is much more about the academic study of English).
To me, ELL is not, and must not be a free-for-all party where any question is answered "just because". If we do not have a niche that we answer questions for, and more importantly, a scope that we do not answer outside, then we are not a Stack Exchange site at all, but merely a luxury Ask-Me-Anything Answers site. That is perhaps what Yahoo Answers is, but it is not (IMO) what ELL is, or should aspire to be.
I do not like the implication that questions here are answered because we do not wish to infantilize our questioners - firstly because that is not what I am saying - and secondly because that is the same attitude that some people on ELU have been using as a justification for sending their "trash" questions to ELL (because "this is off-topic here and ELL will answer any awful question, no matter how bad")
If ELL is merely the trash-heap of ELU, or the junior site to ELU where questioners then "graduate" to when they grow up, then I want no part of it.
On the other hand, if ELL is a site that is different to ELU, rather than subordinate to ELU, then we, like ELU, need to discuss what is off-topic to ELL. We are not here to answer the questions that are off-topic to ELU. We are here to answer the questions that are on-topic to ELL.
That is the reason I object to some of the OP's questions. Not that I think that they are not good questions, nor that I think they are not worthy of answer, and not even that I object to the OP's learning style, or wish to impose any views I may or may not hold on "how to learn English" on the OP.
My fundamental objection is that old texts - and particularly classic old fiction texts are not everyday English. And in my mind, that is what ELL is about. The question is perfectly good, as it stands, for ELU. But questions that are asking about uncommon grammatical structures in old literature are always likely to be a better fit for ELU than ELL.
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