A side benefit of understanding the rules of English, using proper grammar, and expanding my vocabulary is that I'm better able to organize my thoughts in a nuanced way.
Also, I find that a person's parents have a huge influence on their English.
Well keep working on it.
.
This actually shows something that you guys don't seem to get, not even you, kavik. Macclack just wrote something that, by all definitions of "correct" English, is wildly incorrect. I mean, blatantly so. Literally 101, second week of English class wrong, and
nobody cares, nor has anybody truly cared for
over 500 years, but the truly pedantic among us find it irritating. That's right, he used the wrong pronoun.
That's, grammatically, as bad as calling your father a she. He used "they" to refer to a singular person. How dare he do such a thing.
Of course, Chaucer also does it in the Canterbury Tales, and so does Shakespeare, but that's not important right now.
Thanks for writing this right at the start. Avoids the usual passive aggressive replies.
Time for the passive aggressive comment.
What is important is that while we all admit that language changes, as we know we, in standard English, no longer distinguish the technical differences between thou and you, we somehow seem to think that all the language that is changing in our lifetime is somehow bad, or incorrect. Who decides? The majority of speakers? Well then the old people are all speaking nonstandard English. When your grandmother refers to Christmastide, she's speaking nonstandard. Every ruffian, brigand, snollygoster, or cad thou floutest now has the grammatical upper hand as your superannuated dialectal obloquys are now rendered
grammatically incorrect.Typically people counter that with a deference to older forms. Well, by that metric, RP is famously new. Virtually every non rhotic English speaker needs to develop some Rs. And not retroflex, either. Trilled. Indeed, we need to basically revert to Frisian or extreme dialectal forms of English that retain our old pronouns. Obviously that's ridiculous, but let's look at a real life example.
So what do we say to the man speaking Black Country English, who's retained older be forms and use thou, but use "her" to mean she? They have resisted the addition of the engma, but also are non-rhotic, in line with RP? Is he speaking incorrectly when he asks you how thou beest? I would bet that most of you don't like it when someone says "oh I be at work" but in Black Country English, that's how people say it, and the
young people are speaking much more closely to the standard.
So we can't err on the side of things being old and we can't really err on the side of things being spoken by the majority, either, since that means that old people are now speaking incorrectly.
That's because what you guys call standard English and what linguists call standard English are very different things.
To you guys, standard, or "correct" English isn't what's most widely accepted or understood, but what's the prestige dialect.
As long as the most educated and fanciest people to whom we look up the most speak in a certain way, that's what we're going to consider correct. Before you go back and fall back on "no it's about subtleties and understanding the language!" It isn't.
Consider the following from kavik's post.
"I didn't eat yet"
"I haven't eaten yet."
These sentences give you the exact same information. You know that the speaker hasn't eaten yet, and there's no confusion here. Let's take another present perfect example, still widely regarded as correct.
"I am come."
Now that **** is confusing as ****. If we cared about understanding the language, we might celebrate such clarity as doubling down on past things and the elimination of relatively minor forms of the perfect aspect, but we don't. We enjoy that obscure but still correct usage and praise it as command of the language, though it's creating confusion.
So perhaps we don't value clarity, but the added ability to express oneself. No. We don't. See the fact that people consider the copula "be" as is often used in African American Vernacular English to be deleterious to the use of the language, even though it's an incredibly useful thing to have that causes no confusion among those who understand it.
For example, I used to run the observatory at my university with my astronomy club, and a student asked a Professor "how late does the telescope be open" and the Professor answered "all night." Well that night, it was open all night since we were going to see a triple shadow transit on Jupiter. But the student was asking "how late does the observatory typically stay open, on the regular, so to speak?" and the professor didn't understand it. I told him "usually we're here until midnight," and he got it. Sometimes it do be like that.
The idea is, when a strong AAVE speaker says "be" in a traditionally grammatically incorrect manner, he's talking about the routine. I be working means I have a job and I habitually and regularly do it. I be writing about English on forums means that you can regularly find me talking about this stuff online, not that I happen to be online right now talking about it.
How many of us would decry that usage as ungrammatical simply because we don't understand it or because it's not traditionally associated with education or being rich? Most of us, probably.
So anyway, to reiterate something kavik wanted to get rid of in his initial post but I'm going to type here anyway,
There is no incorrect grammar in English. What we perceive to be correct is based on social prestige, and varies with time. No objective measure of antiquity, robustness, popularity, nor clarity can return anything resembling correct English.I apologize kavik for going largely off topic on your thread about a specific, real phenomenon, which is increasing in frequency in the United States, but the rest of the thread has veered off topic so we're going that.
