Hello!

Post by **Freakzilla** » 14 Jun 2008 17:53

A Thing of Eternity wrote:Right? No, it didn't mean correct, I meant turn right!

Two wrongs don't make a right but three rights make a left.

A Thing of Eternity · Post by **A Thing of Eternity** » 14 Jun 2008 18:03

Freakzilla wrote:
A Thing of Eternity wrote:Right? No, it didn't mean correct, I meant turn right!
Two wrongs don't make a right but three rights make a left.

Indeed! I almost added that.

SandChigger · Post by **SandChigger** » 14 Jun 2008 18:26

Never thought about it that way.

LiquidBlue wrote:Language is fluid, we add and create words all the time...too bad we can't get language to drift away from things like that...no, we get to add muggle and shizzle to our vocabulary...

Well, pronouns are essentially a closed class, more functional than content, so it's very difficult to add new ones. Nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs are the open classes...that's why we adopt muggle and shizzle and slig so easily.

"Woman" is even funnier than you suppose, Thang, because it comes from wifmon/wifman, which meant "female (person)"+"human".

Man originally meant "human being", with wer and wif distinguishing the gender. Man later replaced wer (except in things like werewolf

) and that's when this problem started.

Funny...but I don't have any problem referring to a baby as "it" if I don't know its gender. And the spoken language uses the neutral third personal plural (they/them/their) to avoid the s/he issue. ("A student who forgets their homework will find themself[!!!] on my shit list."

)

I felt so terrible gender-biased when I said "he", then I felt so left wing extreemist when I said "she"!!

I hate it when writers switch back and forth to show how PC they are. I try to fudge or switch to the plural. The thing is, though, that language is a living thing and it resists attempts to cage or redirect it. And simply changing the language won't change some ways of thinking. Our experience over the last few decades with ethnic and other slurs illustrates this pretty well. (Introduce a new PC term to replace something found offensive and soon the new term becomes the slur. The linguistic elements changed, but not the mental processes determining their use.)

Ah well...interesting way to start a Sunday morning!

A Thing of Eternity · Post by **A Thing of Eternity** » 14 Jun 2008 18:34

And the spoken language uses the neutral third personal plural (they/them/their) to avoid the s/he issue. ("A student who forgets their homework will find themself[!!!] on my shit list." )

I see that all the time, including in my own speach, but I've always assumed that is an incorrect usage because it's used to refer to a singular being as a plural. Is it actually an accepted use, or is it just so common that no-one questions it? If it is correct, you're saying it is only correct in spoken English and incorrect in written? Sorry to bug you, I'm just interested by this kind of issue.

SandChigger · Post by **SandChigger** » 14 Jun 2008 19:01

Here's the simple test:

If you say something and the people you're talking to don't give you the "WTF?! look" AND they say the same sort of thing themselves, well, then, it's ACCEPTABLE!

I haven't looked into the development of the usage or read anything about it, but I suspect (if it's recent) it's a natural response to the unwieldiness of "he or she/his or her/him or her/himself or herself/etc" in conversation. (The other possibility is that it's a very old usage that has always been around and is now filling a new niche.)

It's not acceptable in formal writing YET (because of that number mismatch), but then neither are split infinitives, sentence-final prepositions, blah blah blah. (A lot of those rules are for the birds.) Written language is always ultra-conservative, but it eventually follows the spoken (if allowed to).

LiquidBlue · Post by **LiquidBlue** » 14 Jun 2008 20:11

I was more referring to the possibility of adopting something other than "man" and "woman", not changing he/she/it...sorry, that was my fault for not being specific...but good point none the less!

Singular/plural agreement is something that is falling by the way side in my public school system. Example: I had to TEACH, not review, singular and plural verbs with my 11th and 12th graders. (Not to mention subject/predicate, noun, and adverb, to name a few)

A Thing of Eternity · Post by **A Thing of Eternity** » 14 Jun 2008 20:25

LiquidBlue wrote:I was more referring to the possibility of adopting something other than "man" and "woman", not changing he/she/it...sorry, that was my fault for not being specific...but good point none the less!

Singular/plural agreement is something that is falling by the way side in my public school system. Example: I had to TEACH, not review, singular and plural verbs with my 11th and 12th graders. (Not to mention subject/predicate, noun, and adverb, to name a few)

My highschool and junior highschool english classes were a joke. I wish they would have tought that kind of thing. They should have called it a literary class, not a language class, because we only studied lit, and very rarely actually talked about the grammer or use of english at all. We talked about the socialial, political and artistic merits and content... but the language? Hardly at all. I still enjoyed it for obvious reasons, but I have a big problem with what is essentially an "art" class being a core subject, at least when most of my peers can barely communicate a thought clearly. If it must be manditory then fine, but to leave out the actual language study... BS. I haven't had a class focus on grammer since I was ten or twelve years old. Worked out fine for me because I've always read a lot, but it really didn't meet the needs of most of the students.

Post by **Freakzilla** » 14 Jun 2008 20:33

I had seperate English and Literature classes.

LiquidBlue · Post by **LiquidBlue** » 14 Jun 2008 20:37

I think the idea is that you should have mastered these grammatical things by the time you get to highschool. That, however, is not the reality. I found that I couldn't teach paragraph writing because my kids didn't know what a went into a sentence. I couldn't teach what a sentence was because they didn't know the parts of speech...seriously, they ALL failed an assignment where all they had to do was circle the singular nouns and underline the plural nouns...so back to the basics we go...

Really, I feel like the point of an uppler level highschool English class is to teach kids how to gather and synthesize information...basically how to think on their own using text as a vehicle, but thats just my opinion...and you know what people say about those...but as a teacher, if you see a deficit in your class then its your job to try and correct it.

A Thing of Eternity · Post by **A Thing of Eternity** » 14 Jun 2008 20:41

LiquidBlue wrote:I think the idea is that you should have mastered these grammatical things by the time you get to highschool. That, however, is not the reality. I found that I couldn't teach paragraph writing because my kids didn't know what a went into a sentence. I couldn't teach what a sentence was because they didn't know the parts of speech...seriously, they ALL failed an assignment where all they had to do was circle the singular nouns and underline the plural nouns...so back to the basics we go...

Really, I feel like the point of an uppler level highschool English class is to teach kids how to gather and synthesize information...basically how to think on their own using text as a vehicle, but thats just my opinion...and you know what people say about those...but as a teacher, if you see a deficit in your class then its your job to try and correct it.

Agreed, unfortunatly the education system won't admit that it needs to go back to the basics, at least through Jr High IMO. Whether the kids should know or not doesn't make any difference to whether the do. Like I said I was one of the lucky ones, and that said my knowledge of gramatical jargon is very limited. I can't understand 90% of what Chig says when he's talking about language.

Post by **Freakzilla** » 14 Jun 2008 20:46

I had a really hardcore English teacher my freshman year. She failed me because I was in the hospital for two weeks with pancriantits and didn't do a term paper. I had to take the class over the next year and got B. In your face bitch! I swear, she must have been a nun before becoming a public school teacher. But she made sure her students learned proper english.

LiquidBlue · Post by **LiquidBlue** » 14 Jun 2008 21:00

So true...

I think there is an attempt, at least in my district, to correct that kind of thing, but now we've got a whole 5 or 10 years of kids that just don't know anything about it.

We just teach kids to pass their grade level comprehensive exames...not how to think and how to do, but how to tell us what we want to hear, it makes me sick to think of how they will impact our future...what else can they do except what we have groomed them to do? I will just buck the system until it spits me back out...

Name me the final number, the highest, the greatest.
But that's absurd! If the number of numbers is infinite, how can there be a final number?
Then how can you speak of a final revolution? There is no final one. Revolutions are infinite.
We -Zamyatin

(Maybe I should teach that book! Bet that would get me in tons of trouble)[/i]

LiquidBlue · Post by **LiquidBlue** » 14 Jun 2008 21:02

I didn't know how big of a bitch I could be until I started teaching...I think I used to be nice!

SandChigger · Post by **SandChigger** » 14 Jun 2008 21:02

(Edit: in response to Thang not understanding:)

90%.

Sigh.

LiquidBlue, is it still the "Age of Feeling and Self-Expression" in English education back there then? (Odd, I've never thought to ask Nekhrun about this.) (Edit: You kinda answered this already, it seems.)

I never could understand that who philosophy. Hell, we diagrammed sentences when I was in grade school. (I even had one ancient teacher who insisted we pronounce the non-existent-in-our-dialect initial "h" in words like white and whale.

)

It's no damned wonder these new "Dune" travesties are more popular among young people: they tend to have limited language skills and don't know the difference between good and bad (written) language.

Oh well.

On the singular/plural verbs topic, are a lot of your students speakers of AAVE?

A Thing of Eternity · Post by **A Thing of Eternity** » 14 Jun 2008 21:07

SandChigger wrote: (Edit: in response to Thang not understanding:)

90%.

Sigh.

Just the jargin, I usually get the drift of what you're saying. It's only when your sentences are 50% jargin... then I'm a bit behind. I'll start whipping out the dictionary and learning though, it's never too late. (Unless you're dead, then it's too late.

)

LiquidBlue · Post by **LiquidBlue** » 14 Jun 2008 21:26

SandChigger wrote: On the singular/plural verbs topic, are a lot of your students speakers of AAVE?

Yep...and I understand that AAVE has specific/predictable grammar and that "A language is a dialect with an army and navy"...but come on, get with the program kids...even the ones that are speakers of AAVE had problems with it when it came to classifying parts of speech and number

A Thing of Eternity · Post by **A Thing of Eternity** » 14 Jun 2008 21:39

AAVE =

LiquidBlue · Post by **LiquidBlue** » 14 Jun 2008 21:45

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/African_Am ... ar_English

less pc: Ebonics

A Thing of Eternity · Post by **A Thing of Eternity** » 14 Jun 2008 21:46

Ah. Getto speak in da hood

SandChigger · Post by **SandChigger** » 14 Jun 2008 22:03

And I speaks Ivorics.

(Sorry, I refuse to use the silly PC term.)

Actually, I was over on WP as you were posting the link here, LB. I can't remember the last time I looked at it, but the article is really improved.

I agree with the idea that teachers should be familiar with the dialect and work to help students become proficient in the use of the standard dialect in appropriate contexts. Trying to eradicate it is misguided.

(As is people trying to classify it as an African language. Now THAT's amusing.)

LiquidBlue · Post by **LiquidBlue** » 14 Jun 2008 22:17

I tell them that there is a time and a place, and that they know the difference even if they don't want to admit it. There is no need for them to stop speaking it all together, they just need to learn both...the same way Spanish speakers in America need to learn English...

I think the idea that its a creole language is vallid...at least, thats how it was taught in my linguistics class...

BTW:

(I even had one ancient teacher who insisted we pronounce the non-existent-in-our-dialect initial "h" in words like white and whale. )

RoTFL!

SandChigger · Post by **SandChigger** » 15 Jun 2008 00:03

The example of Spanish speakers in the U.S. is a good one to use.

And a creole? That's probably true as for its origins, but as they mention in the WP article, AAVE is much closer to Standard American English than Haitian Creole is to French. (Or than Gullah is to SAE, probably.)

LiquidBlue · Post by **LiquidBlue** » 15 Jun 2008 07:59

well, my linguistic professor's field of study is creole language on Carriacou, an island of Grenada...so, there is always a slant

He is a professor with the anthropology department...so whenever I had him (I think I had 3 classes with him) we always worked with the creole spoken on Carriacou and French creole spoken on Grenada. He was a student of Hardman, btw...

AAVE is close to SE, but I still sometimes don't know what my students are talking about and I have to ask them to say it a different way...sometimes because of the grammar, but sometimes because of the lexicon, though some of that lexicon is slang for sure...

inhuien · Post by **inhuien** » 15 Jun 2008 08:29

I've nothing to add to the over all conversation so I'll just say Hiya LiquidBlue.

LiquidBlue · Post by **LiquidBlue** » 15 Jun 2008 08:44

Hello!