English Language & Usage: Multi-Layered Discourse Room

Tonepoet

00:42

@WillHunting I scarcely know anything about bible versions. The King James version is more or less the definitive text for the past 400+ years and it'd be the bible I'd reference unless I wanted to know something about christian theology from even longer ago. Technically speaking, Noah Webster updated and censored the text of the King James version in his 1833 bible, which is actually rather unfortunate since he had the mastery of language to make an original translation from if he wished.

Other than that I know that there's a King James Only movement which strikes me as somewhat odd. Maybe it has something to do with the divine right to rule or something. I'm somewhat interested in whether they're right about the Septuagint bible being a forgery. I'm interested in reading the Geneva bible or a translation based on the newly discovered Ethiopian Bible.

The last bits of biblical knowledge I have is that there have been special 400th anniversary fascimiles which look nice, but are wee too expensive for a public domain book. Earlier translations used to refer to dragons and some people have hypothesized that based upon that, and other cross cultural stories regarding dragons, that the scientific dating methods are wrong and humans actually did coexist with dinosaurs, but eeehhh... that's it.

tchrist

@Tonepoet Are you like his many-great grand-dawter? You giv us all a lot of greef about a guy cloked in the mystery of holiness, one you seem to beleev could do no wrong with his steddy stream of violations to our tung. If that isn’t Biblical, I don’t know what is. And have you seen what hainous and grotesk things he did to wimmin? Seriously! My hart akes to hear it.

Hope you like the authentic spellings he invented.

Tonepoet

01:04

@tchrist If you want me to criticize him, Webster's bible intrigues me, but I dislike censorship. Calling a "whore" a "lewd woman" simply does not do. I also think he should've left the orthography well enough alone in retrospect, because although his spelling reform was well intended, it only split the spelling base further apart because it was only half adopted. Granted, part of that is Joesph Emerson Worcester's fault. Also, I wish I had a cup of soop now that I think about it.

If Noah Webster's spelling reform was fully adopted, we'd be better off for it probably, but because it wasn't it only makes the system worse.

tchrist

What the heck is that was?

You mean if it was fully adopted, then we are better off?

Like if he took the train then he got there on time?

Also, grammar has nothing to do with punctuation or writing. That’s nuts. Grammar exists in the illiterate’s speech, for it needs no writing to support it. Grammar = morphology + syntax. Because your antediluvian patriarch Saint Noah lived before the invention of 19th century comparative philology let alone modern linguistics, he has no say in what grammar means to professionals today.

It appears that you have confused grammar with orthography. Many do.

@Tonepoet Do you mean had been for was?

@Tonepoet So he Websterized the Bible? What would Mr Bowdler say to that, I can but wonder.

> Thomas Bowdler (1754 – 1825), LRCP, FRS was an English physician and philanthropist, best known for publishing The Family Shakspeare, an expurgated edition of William Shakespeare's work, edited by his sister Henrietta

How nice! They were contemporaries!

I guess it’s what one did then.

Tonepoet

@tchrist Professionals have far and by large alleged to have adopted the descriptive model of language. They have no right to be making a special definition of a common word, lest they be thought of as hypocrites. You should at at least have to admit punctuation into the common definition as well, but people here deny that too.

tchrist

Well, not by all. There’s always Captain Sir Richard Francis Burton’s The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night.

@Tonepoet Nope. Won't do it. Punctuation has no trek with grammar.

I can quote linguists.

For even the devil can quote Scripture, ’tis said.

Tonepoet

@tchrist Can you quote nonlinguists as saying punctuation has nothing to do with grammar?

tchrist

Scientists do not care what the uneducated make of those scientists’ terms. The uneducated have no say.

Grammar is about the underlying structure of the language.

Grammar is about constituents.

It is not about typesetting.

Nor the flourish of one’s swash.

Tonepoet

01:19

@tchrist Now you're robbing the word structure if you don't include letter forms. =P

tchrist

The completely illiterate are perfectly capable of having perfect grammar. They do not need writing for that. They understand the structural mechanics of their native tongue. That’s all that matters.

Michael Swan: What Is Grammar?

Grammar is about structural rules, not about tittles and squiggles.

The problem is that people ask whether a sentence is "grammatically correct" when they mean nothing other than "Is this written correctly?"

Those are not the same thing.

Orthographic correctness is something else.

It includes spelling, capitalization, and punctuation.

Tonepoet

Why can't you just use the words morphology and syntax separately? What special need is there to combine the two words?

And why can't you use some neologism to do it if there is a need?

tchrist

Orthography therefore covers those non-grammatical elements of putting something down on paper without getting them marked wrong by a composition teacher.

We need no neologism. We have grammar. We have orthography. They occupy disparate axes of meaning, and to conflate them is a category error of the first degree.

Grammar is about ordering and inflections.

Punctuation plays no part of that.

Grammar is what allows us to identify syntactic constituents. Punctuation and spelling and capitalization are utterly immaterial to that.

Tonepoet

Grammatically correct, according to tchrist:

James while John had had had had had had had had had had had a better effect on the teacher

"James while John had had had had had had had had had had had a better effect on the teacher" is an English sentence used to demonstrate lexical ambiguity and the necessity of punctuation, which serves as a substitute for the intonation, stress, and pauses found in speech. In human information processing research, the sentence has been used to show how readers depend on punctuation to give sentences meaning, especially in the context of scanning across lines of text. The sentence is sometimes presented as a puzzle, where the solver must add the punctuation. The example refers to two students, James...

tchrist

Perhaps you have a point.

But I don't see it.

I also cannot see why you would put words in my mouth.

Tonepoet

01:28

a slight bit of hyumor my good friend =)

tchrist

12

A: Is there one term for grammar, punctuation and spelling?

There isn't really a word that refers to those three things and no others. Grammar is not a part of writing. It's part of language, which is spoken. Spoken language, of course, doesn't have any punctuation or spelling, but it does have grammar. And there are a lot of other things that go into ...

That’s from someone whose bona fides is definitely up to the task of identifying these things for us.

If you speak the language, you know the grammar, whether you can discuss it or not. And if you speak the language, you use your knowledge in writing it. That's certainly true. But grammar is only a very small part of the things you use in writing: there's rhetoric, stress, vocabulary choice, construction choice (one aspect of grammar), sociolinguistic factors, audience specialization, et complex cetera. "Grammar" per se, especially as taught in Anglophone schools, is largely irrelevant, when it's not downright mythology. — John Lawler Jul 11 '12 at 17:30

That’s how linguists speak of grammar.

Why would you have us dilute the term by making it mean nothing more than a fuzzy-brained synonym for "language"?

> In linguistics, grammar is the set of structural rules governing the composition of clauses, phrases, and words in any given natural language.

That has a very distinct meaning.

Why mess it up?

> People often think of grammar as a matter of arbitrary pronouncements (defining 'good' and 'bad' language), usually negative ones like “There is no such word as ain't” or “Never end a sentence with a preposition.” Linguists are not very interested in this sort of bossiness (sometimes called prescriptivism). For linguists, grammar is simply the collection of principles defining how to put together a sentence.

Tonepoet

We have a slight bit of overlap in that we both agree that grammar is about the systematization of language. Cant language is still language.

tchrist

That’s Geoff Pullum, in case you care or don’t recognize it.

Tonepoet

The tale of ain't is a sad one to anybody who has ever researched the history of it. The world just hasn't been fair to the word. Since we use am not, I see no reason we shouldn't have a contraction for amn't, but ain't became an equivocal word since its pronunciation doesn't make it clear what it's supposed to contract. It's strange given that I'd and you'll type contractions have similar ambiguities, although perhaps not to the same degree.

tchrist

I know.

> However, there is another aspect of grammar in which languages differ more radically, namely in morphology, the principles governing the structure of words. Languages do not all employ morphology to a similar extent.

So syntax is the structure of phrases, morphology that of words.

Grammar is inherently a matter of structure.

Not of writing things that don’t get marked wrong for capitalization, spelling, punctuation, or other formatting artifacts.

It has a specific meaning. Why sacrifice a good, solid, technical term on the altar of the fuzzy-minded masses?

Pullum’s two little pages on grammar tell the tale very nicely, in my estimation.

Why do we need a neologism? We have a word. It suits us fine.

Tonepoet

01:45

It suits you folk and only you folk fine. It confuses everybody else and this meaning lacks the priority necessary to justify that.

tchrist

Grammatical ≠ Did I do this right?

That's a gross misunderstanding. Why does it confuse "everybody else"?

@StoneyB Excellent! The OED needs to move on from 1842! Perhaps I'll drop them a line. — WS2 54 mins ago

Tonepoet

Because the progenitors who founded the basis for your art forced everybody to learn that it does, starting in the mid-19th century?

tchrist

No.

It dates from the times of the Ancient Greeks.

Trivium

The Trivium is a systematic method of critical thinking used to derive factual certainty from information perceived with the traditional five senses: sight, sound, taste, touch, and smell. In the medieval university, the trivium was the lower division of the seven liberal arts, and comprised grammar, logic, and rhetoric (input, process, and output). Etymologically, the Latin word trivium means "the place where three roads meet" (tri + via); hence, the subjects of the trivium are the foundation for the quadrivium, the upper division of the medieval education in the liberal arts, which comprised...

Tonepoet

B.R.B.

tchrist

It is only the child victims of switch-happy schoolmarms who have become deluded.

Diluted.

> Grammar teaches the mechanics of language to the student.

The Greeks knew grammar.

So did the Romans.

It has never meant getting a gold star on your A+ composition paper for having no spelling mistakes.

Tonepoet

01:52

I said forced for a reason.

tchrist

So this "linguists' version" is not a new meaning in any fashion whatsoever.

The new lack of meaning is that of the miseducated.

Tonepoet

@tchrist If we're appealing to etymology, how can you have an Art of Letters if letters don't exist?

tchrist

Who said letterforms did not exist? But graphics are something else.

Why do you so cling to this folk misunderstanding?

serpent alert

strike that

not serpent but rodent

I haven’t learned to differentiate trophy calls.

Tonepoet

I suppose being a weasel, I can't complain. =P

Færd

02:11

Tonepoet

Nice ice.

Færd

This situation is called a breakup in Canada. (A spring breakup, for example)

tchrist

True enough.

Færd

This is the picture that I have of Canada. Not a warm place.

Of course not all the country has the same climate.

And it can be really beautiful too.

That's methane trapped under ice.

tchrist

Oh my!!!

Oh cool, I don't get to do this every day:

1

A: Optimistic and optimist

We would say I am very optimistic when you might say Eu estou muito otimista, while we would say I am very much the optimist when you might say No fondo eu sou otimista. That is, you would use the noun when you are expressing a permanent trait inherent to the person (hence ser in Portuguese), b...

Færd

02:27

Yeah, whether or not an adjective refers to a permanent trait is sometimes a challenge for me.

Tonepoet

02:38

@tchrist That might be because you don't seem to visit E.L.L. nearly as often as you do English Language & Usage, based upon the rep. I flagged that question as being better suited for that website shortly after it popped up into the news feed. Maybe I'm wrong?

tchrist

Maybe you are.

Here’s another one for you then:

1

Q: The origin of the word, aw-shucks

I was drawn to the word, aw-shucks appearing in the following paragraph of the latest article which I forgot to take note of the source: “You know, I’m new to this campaign. Honestly, I never thought I would be standing here. I thought I would be spending this evening with all my friend...

Tonepoet

@tchrist Maybe the Century Dictionary & Cyclopedia's entry for shucks would be of interest to you?

tchrist

?

Tonepoet

Well the C.D.C. was the largest complete dictionary before Oxford's, consisting of 12 volumes and it seems to be the earliest one that has the word Shucks out of the dictionaries I usually check. The definition looks interesting, although I think it'd be better to link to the page than a dictionary scraper website since the etymological notes are allegedly quite interesting. Granted, it probably won't provide any vital insight over what you already suggested.

tchrist

02:55

ok

Tonepoet

@tchrist Here it is. It's an early 20th century definition, so make what you will of it.

tchrist

"Vulgar"

Now what pray tell might be vulgar about it? :)

Tonepoet

I don't know but doesn't that throw a wrench into the origins as a minced oath theory? I mean the point of a minced oath is to avoid vulgarity. Granted, some people have a stricter standard of what constitutes vulgarity than others...

tchrist

Gosh and darn were once considered too close for church.

Because people still remembered what they meant, so they were vulgar.

Nowadays, not so much.

Tonepoet

That seems to make sense at a glance.

tchrist

03:05

Dagnabbit it sure as shoot better!

Tonepoet

03:15

@Færd I hate to break the news to you, but I saw that and it vaguely interests me now. I'm not sure but it sounds like a vaguely Christian sentiment.

Færd

I checked a few dictionaries; all say it's reserved for bad news.

What sentiment?

Tonepoet

Breaking good news.

Vaguely like this.

That's a little more mixed though.

Færd

Ah.

@Tonepoet Maybe dictionaries should rethink the restriction to bad news:

goo.gl/Si6zg3

Tonepoet

Most dictionaries aren't very good to be honest. I think the issue is that it's so much more often used for bad news, that if you don't qualify the sentiment it's implied to be bad. The idiom dictionaries are a little more responsible and use the word "usually".

I wonder what relationship it has exactly with breaking news.

What dictionaries did you check?

Færd

Especially since when it's used intransitively (when a piece of news breaks), the limitation seems to vanish.

> since the news broke I've received thousands of wonderful letters

@Tonepoet Oxford Online, and Longman Contemporary.

And one other.

Merriam-Webster tends to be more liberal about these limitations:

> 8a: to make known : tell <break the bad news gently>

Tonepoet

03:33

Different inflections do have different implications. I would probably expect the development of a cure to cancer to be called breaking news by someone.

Færd

Mhm.

Tonepoet

04:31

@tchrist How late in the 18th century did comparative philology start anyway? It seems almost as if it couldn't have been that long after Webster died because I know the Philological Society of London existed in 1857, because I recently started reading On Some Deficiencies in Our English Dictionaries to better understand Oxford's ideology. Also, is there a special signification to the word comparative?

Philology is more or less a very recent word in my vocabulary, which more or less entered it when I learned that William Dwight Whitney, who was the chief editor of the C.D.C., was the first president of the American Philological Society.

user227867

@Tonepoet Your total chat rep is 1800, a very nice number.

Tonepoet

My Rep. on this website was 1337 at one point in time. I should've taken a screenshot. =P

user227867

I have lots of reflux these days, stomach acid coming up the oesophagus.

Tonepoet

@WillHunting You might want to take some calcium carbonate tablets, like TUMS, for that.

user227867

@Tonepoet Do you know why you have so many stars in this chat? =P

Tonepoet

04:43

@WillHunting I've suspected it's because of you for quite a while now.

user227867

whistles

Tonepoet

You might want to slow it down somewhat, if not only so that the moderators don't have to spend as much effort deleting the stars. =P

Tonepoet

05:48

@Cerberus I think this English Language & Usage meta-question needs the touch of a person who actually uses E.L.L. on a regular basis, and I think you're probably the best person for the job. Would you please post an answer to that question?

That's mostly because I saw you posted the top rated answer in the dictionary close reason question.

caub