I Am Using This Icon Because David Mitchell Looks A Bit Like A Teacher.

[rionaleonhart]

I recently looked up 'oh dear' in Wiktionary, hoping to find information about the phrase's origin. Whilst it was not terribly informative, I was amused by the example sentence: Oh dear, you seem to have forgotten to wear clothes.

This is an entry about language! Here are some facts about language that I enjoy.


- Children just beginning to learn to speak will often correctly use irregular verbs: for example, I went. However, when they are slightly older, they will begin to say I goed before returning to I went.

The theory is that at first the children are simply repeating what they hear. However, at some point they realise that adding -ed onto the end of a verb puts it into the past tense, and so they apply that rule universally, saying not only I looked and I wanted but I goed. Later, they realise that some verbs are exceptions to this rule and begin to say I went again.

This is interesting because it shows that children aren't simply parroting back what they hear; they are actually learning and applying grammatical rules. Awesome.


- In a verb string, the form of each verb is determined by the verb preceding it. For example:

I ride the unicorn
I am riding the unicorn - the use of am, a form of the progressive auxiliary to be, puts ride into the progressive form, riding.
I have ridden the unicorn - to have puts ride into the past/perfect* participle, ridden. (The past participle is not necessarily the same as the simple past (I rode the unicorn), but in regular verbs the two forms are the same (I licked the unicorn; I have licked the unicorn.))
I have been riding the unicorn - to have puts to be into the past participle, been, and that in turn puts to ride into the progressive participle, riding.

* This is also called the passive participle, because it is used with to be to form the passive voice: The unicorn was ridden by me.

What fascinates me about this is the fact that it all seems so complicated, and yet people follow all these convoluted grammatical rules without really thinking about it. Does it occur to you, when you ask 'Does Riona realise how boring this is?', that what you're essentially doing is taking the sentence 'Riona realises how boring this is', adding the optional auxiliary to do to make 'Riona does realise how boring this is', and then switching the subject and auxiliary around to form a question? (German can do this without the auxiliary verb: 'liebst du mich?' is essentially 'love you me?', but because in English we can only switch auxiliary or modal verbs with the subject we have to add a 'do'.)

...well, I think it's interesting. I love grammar! I can't help it!


- I imagine many of you will already know about pidgins and creoles, but they're so fascinating that I want to mention them anyway. A pidgin is a simplified language, developed as a means of communication between groups of people who don't share a common tongue. It doesn't really have grammatical rules; the idea is just to convey meaning. However, if the speakers of a pidgin have children, and if those children grow up hearing the pidgin, they will spontaneously give the pidgin grammatical rules. It will become a full-blown language, called a creole. Without consciously knowing what they're doing, these children will give the pidgin a whole new level of consistency and complexity, just in the process of learning it. THAT'S CRAZY.

(I should note that my knowledge of the pidgin-creole relationship came from Stephen Pinker, rather than my course, and as Pinker is an advocate of Chomsky's theory that language is innate he may have an interpretive bias.)

Comments

[timydamonkey.livejournal.com]

Interesting!

I have been learning bits of "young kid" language from the kids at nursery. It's just little things, like: "I'm four in five sleeps!" or the kids all have a tendency to chorus in response to a sentence another one of them says: "And me!" Apparently kids around here just don't use 'me too', just 'and me', lol!

[rionaleonhart]

I would be terrible in a nursery. 'Do what you like, kids; I'll just sit in a corner and make notes on your language development.' I suppose it makes sense that they'd say 'and me' rather than 'me, too', because 'me, too' can be used only in the specific context of responding to something, whereas they'll recognise 'and me' as something that could be appended to the original sentence to include them.

[timydamonkey.livejournal.com]

Ahahaha, I spend a lot of time helping them out then I come home and note down occasional phrases I think might help me write young kids legitimately.

I think you're onto something there. It is very much about including them. So, a kid'll say something like, "My dad has a really cool car", then like three kids in unison will practically shout "and me!" and tell me about said cool cars, and I wish I understood more about cars from watching Top Gear...

It is interesting to hear language development though - there's a kid who seems to parrot back what's been said to her at various points which fascinates me (stuff like "I'm a clever girl" or "what colour is that?" in a way that isn't so much curious so much as she's been asked it before and is repeating it to interact the other way) for instance!

[misskass.livejournal.com]

I find it very odd that grammar rules confound me, yet I can still use it well. And I can correct other people when something reads wrong, I just can't explain to them why it is.

[rionaleonhart]

Exactly! I was very surprised when I started studying grammar and found that I'd been doing all these complicated linguistic things without even thinking about it. Humans are weird.

[timydamonkey.livejournal.com]

There's a question in Persona 4 along the lines of: "Which of the following isn't a free morpheme?" I remember being confused over the terminology - even though the game does explain the phrase - and then realising it was insanely easy and I could do it, I just didn't know the technical terms for it.

[serriadh.livejournal.com]

And of course, we could say: If Riona were to realise how boring this is, she would stop. Which would be a lovely new level of complexity! Because it has a subjunctive! (Which most people, myself included, aren't too sure how to use in English.)

Obv I don't find this boring at all. I'd love to learn English grammar properly.

[rionaleonhart]

I love the subjunctive! I am quite sad that it's falling out of use. 'Were I more self-aware' is so much more elegant than 'If I was more self-aware'.

[littlered2.livejournal.com]

I was having a conversation with someone yesterday (about French translation) who claimed that we no longer used the subjunctive in English. I vehemently argued the point, but it's true that it's not a feature of the language in anywhere near the same way it was a few canturies ago.

[rionaleonhart]

One of my language tutors good-naturedly mocked me for using the subjunctive in casual conversation and putting an apostrophe before 'flu and pronouncing suit with the yod ('syoot'). She once passed around a handout detailing aspects of the language that began to fall out of use in the late nineteenth century. I still used most of them.

[vergil24.livejournal.com]

Until recently, I didn't know that "shall" is technically used with future 1st person verbs, while "will" is used with second and third. Was that one of those old rules?

[rionaleonhart]

I think the 'shall/will' distinction may actually have come into the language around then; I remember my tutor saying that initially there was no distinction between them whatsoever, so some grammarian or other came up with an arbitrary rule.

[vergil24.livejournal.com]

Ah, one of those. Good, because I don't like that rule. Same with splitting an infinitive. Silly. I know you can't split an infinitive in Latin; it doesn't mean you can't do it in English.

[amy-wolf.livejournal.com]

Suit with a yod? Really? I'd never heard of that!

[rionaleonhart]

For one of our seminars, we were asked to find examples of how the language had changed in the past two hundred years.

Fellow Student: We found that people used to pronounce 'super' and 'suit' with a yod! So they'd say 'syooper' and 'syoot'!
Riona: ...I say 'syoot'.

(I'm not quite old-fashioned enough to use it in 'super', though.)

[amy-wolf.livejournal.com]

You're a time-traveler, aren't you?

[loz]

I have quite a lot of trouble with the subjunctive. I seem to spend a lot of time going, "is it was or were here? [repeat sentence] [repeat again] I have no idea."

[strangefrontier.livejournal.com]

The subjunctive does indeed feel elegant! I think you've just pinpointed why I'm fond of it.

Does your Pinker-based knowledge come from The Language Instinct? I read that a few months ago and wriggled with glee throughout. I definitely lean towards the Chomskyan theory of innate grammar/language, from an evo-bio perspective.

[littlered2.livejournal.com]

:) I love language! I wish I knew more about it - my degree is technically Language and Literature, and I've done a few language/linguistics options (because they are awesome) but I feel like I'm just scratching the surface.

[rionaleonhart]

I sometimes wonder whether I should have taken a pure English Language degree, rather than Language and Literature, because I enjoyed the language aspect more and I was much better at it. Still, I suppose having the balance between the sciencey and arty subject helped to keep me from going entirely mad. I hope you have the opportunity to take more linguisticky (well, it should be a word) options!

[loz]

I found this post most fascinating, not boring. I learned both French and German in high school, so at one stage I had a relatively good grounding in basic grammar knowledge, but I've forgotten a fair amount.

In the next few years I'm planning on taking a functional grammar course.

[rionaleonhart]

Ooh, I hope you enjoy the course! Studying grammar was possibly my favourite part of university. People look at you with sympathy when they find out you're learning about it, but that is because they do not understand its joys.

[lotus0kid.livejournal.com]

*raises hand* It's interesting to me too! Taking Latin in high school really opened my eyes to the layers of verb tenses we use all the time. It's actually helped me write fic- I've found I prefer using the present tense because it's easier for me to move into the past tense and then perfect when I need to, rather than start in the past tense, then go to perfect (all those "had"s, ugh), then to... um, I forget what the one is after that- pluperfect? Though, now it stands out to me when someone skips a tense in their fic.

There's an awesome joke in Mystery Science Theater 3000 where one of the movie's actors says "Well, maybe then it's too late!" and Mike says "Wow, the future conditional pluperfect subjunctive." Which, looking at it now, I don't actually think it is, but still, grammar jokes are rare.

[vergil24.livejournal.com]

I love that joke, even though I don't think it's true, either.

[justspaz.livejournal.com]

THIS Is VERY RELEVANT TO MY INTERESTS. Language is amazing! Especially the glorious, frustrating, strange, and wonderful English language. I read this entry earlier, had to jut to my Linguistics recitation before commenting, and then during said class we discussed the 'went->goed->went' thing!

[cobecat.livejournal.com]

Whee, language! I love language. If you're interested in more info on pidgins and creoles, I've done some work on them and could give you a few sources?

Also, oh man, Steven Pinker. Was the one you read "The Language Instinct"?

[bubbles-san.livejournal.com]

This is not boring! I like language, but my love of language is more human psychology, and what a person's personal dialect, and the dialect of an area, and their familial dialect, and all that, say about them. And one of my favorite catchphrases after people ask me to spell so many words for them is "Words is mah bitch" (grammatical errors intentional). I wish I could psychoanalyze my own dialect, because it jumps all over the place with no seeming pattern, but there'd be a bias there if I did.

[draegonhawke.livejournal.com]

OH MAN. You should check out "Bastard Tongues" by Derek Bickerton.

It's an adventurelogue of pidgin and creole studies.

Very. Enjoyable.

[dracothelizard.livejournal.com]

Never stop being a grammar nerd :D

(Although my inner literature-preferrer frowns upon you focusing more on your lecturers' way of speaking than what they were actually saying. Then again, with some books, I can't blame you)

[fictionalfemme.livejournal.com]

I will probably have to read those rules and the examples a million times more before it ever sinks in on a concious level, but thank you anyway for explaining it. You are awesome. Even if you are crazy/beautiful for licking a unicorn in one of those examples! *gigglesnorts*

[vergil24.livejournal.com]

I love grammar, too, so don't worry. I'm a Latin GTA, too, so I teach these sorts of things to students, but in LATIN. Like you say, you don't necessarily notice all the complicated rules you use every time you speak, but once you start learning another language, you sure become aware of the complications in that language. Greek verbs are the worst things ever for complications.

[amy-wolf.livejournal.com]

And just to confuse things more, Pijin is a creole! Seriously, Pijin is one of four separate English-derived South Pacific creole languages (along with Bislama, Tok Pisin, and Torres Strait Creole), which involve Austronesian grammar and a mostly-English vocabulary. I can understand about half of what they say when it's written down ("Haus blong sik dogs" is Tok Pisin for "Veterinary clinic", for instance), but very little when it's spoken (particularly with Bislama, which is mostly-English in vocabulary, mostly-Austronesian in grammar, and mostly-French in accent). The pronouns are really interesting. In Bislama, for instance, 'hem' covers 'him' or 'her', but for things English speakers would cover with 'us', Bislama has 'yumi', 'yumitufala', 'mitufala', 'yumitrifala', 'mitrifala', and 'mifala'. They also avoid verb conjugation, which is something I like in languages.

[th-esaurus.livejournal.com]

I feel I have learnt stuff!

[spencerpine.livejournal.com]

That U-shaped development (went, goed, went) is fascinating. It occurs in various things: for example, medical students making diagnoses. They go through a middle stage where they get it wrong, before they start getting it right again.

Isn't there something about a sign language creole? They tried to enforce lip-reading in...some school or other, I forget. Instead, the children spontaneously developed a grammatical sign language. (I've probably got some of that wrong, but it's a fascinating story.)

[saaski-moql.livejournal.com]

It's more than just one school where that happened. In speak-only schools for Deaf children (still prominent now, and sometimes still as strict), the children were forbidden from being taught, learning, or using Sign, so the point of being forced to sit on their hands/having their hands tied during classes, etc.

So on the sly, they'd get together and teach each other Sign that they'd made up, which would quickly spread throughout the school and become a uniform language that all the children used, eventually developing its own grammatical structures for things like story-telling. Each school would spawn it's own mini-language that would then continue to grow and evolve once the Deaf students left and met other students who had been boarded at other places.

I think it's pretty fascinating too, if I do say so.

[rionaleonhart]

medical students making diagnoses [...] go through a middle stage where they get it wrong, before they start getting it right again.

That's very interesting! Do you know why that might be? (...and it occurred to me after posting this comment that I'd used a rather bored-looking icon, but I assure you that my icon choice was because the character in it is a doctor.)

Probably the most famous example of a sign language creole is Nicuraguan Sign Language, which is absolutely fascinating.

[spencerpine.livejournal.com]

It's basically the same as the verbs, I think. At first, students diagnose using specific rules: does this look like another specific case I've seen? Then they start trying to generalise, which is error-prone at first, but more successful later.

But there are different explanations. Pinker favours the rule-based ones. You can also build clever neural models of the brain, which also show that U-shaped pattern as they learn, without being told rules. It's all rather fascinating.