Bravo Aupick! You have debunked more than a few false premises and conclusions free of logic.

I just enjoyed a short tract by Henry Fowler, in which he adeptly skewered the enemies of the split infinitive. He praised--or was he condemning?--American preservation of grammatical forms which had, in the early twentieth century, become obsolete in BE. Was this saudade? I doubt it.
Nor was it nostalgia, which is a rather different matter.

 

We Norwegians get something of a shock when we discover that verbs which are simply conjugated in Norsk like jeg er, du er, han er, etc. (I am, you are, etc) have to be conjugated in first, second and third persons, both singular and plural, in most of the European languages. But we learn...!

 

OMG! It's happening in France too! Pretty soon, we will reduced to moans and grunts! The End is near!

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/1235401.stm

 

Oh dear, oh DEAR!!! "To the rescue...!!!? And (some of) the English deplore the use of Americanisms in British English that seem (according to them) to foul up the language! Aand here we are not talking of grammar.The infiltration of American English into British English started with the onset of US films, and some of todays underthirty British don't even know what is British-or American English!. Brits write "honour, colour, night" but I have seen Britishers write "honor, color, nite"...in the belief that this is British English. But regarding the history of the American English it's a wonder that the English language survived at all. I'm thinking of all the foreign tongues that immigrants from all over the world brought with them,including my countrymen, and made the American language what it is today. In Norway we are taught both British and American English, and both languages are regarded as equal.

 

Here's in interesting article which (or that?) addresses the issue of American English fouling up the English language:

http://www.pbs.org/speak/ahead/change/ruining/

 

Isn't it shocking, Residente? It's up to us to see that high standards are maintained, otherwise the whole world is doomed.

LET OUR GRAMMAR NOT DECLINE!


LRV

 

Oh come on!
Isn't that a rather arrogant statement for an English-speaker to make?

Can the nuances of double-meanings in other languages be expressed in English? Can a German pun be translated… or a French crossword clue… or an Irish allegorical poem?

 

I second Maxi and those who hold the same idea. If you happen to know any other languages(put aside Western ones for a moment), and I DO wish, you would know that it's nearly impossible(if ever) to translate(maybe to transliterate) or express EXACTLY the words of say Confucius or any other figures that you guys are not that accustomed to. So please or at least try not to be SO arrogant or cocky or should I say competent in your speech when you're diving for the extreme or the impeccable absolute, which I doubt if any. By doing this, you're also paying tribute and respect for other cultures that may have survived much longer than the existence of the English language itself.

 

Yes! It's quite shocking! The sky is most definitely falling! In a few years, we shall all become deaf and mute! The end of all language on Earth! Oh my!

 

I think the correct expression is "Homer nods"

"and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee."

 

If a clod be washed away...

Been there, Donne that.

 

It'll take more than washing to get rid of this clod!

 

Hi Aupick
These are some of the simplifications that make English a great language, and in my objective way of thinking superior to others.
One accent in Spanish and the whole Spanish speakers are in disarray and that is a simplification on the numerous French accents
You mentioned some adverbs and I like to give a simple example on the strength of English with adverbs:
I gave this advice to you.
Only I gave this advice to you.
I only gave this advice to you.
I gave only this advice to you.
I gave this only advice to you.
I gave this advice only to you.
I gave this advice to only you.
I gave this advice to you only.
Thus only emphasised the word after it with such simplicity and gave different shades of meaning to a simple sentence.

English has pricked your balloon with a big bang
My mother tongue is not English, but I am objective I was brought up with silly grammar rules, conjugations, such rules that will make you go mad etc. My mother tongue is a major world language spoken by over 200 million people in over 20 countries i.e. not like Spangish spoken by a few as a mother tongue in some corner near Mexico.

Boys will be boys = juvenile behaviour must be tolerated. It is not a comment on bla bla bla

Your supposition about will is only partially correct.

With its massive simplication in grammar, there is no human thought that can't be expressed in English.

With that big bang to your balloon, English has got rid of 50,000 pages of stupid grammar rules.
If I assume that you are French, please tell me why can’t your language find a word for eighty or ninety

Pronunciation is not part of grammar rules. The Americans have simplified pronunciation

Regards

 

I also think that English grammar is becoming more simplified over the years, but that doesn't mean it's a simple language to learn! I've had many people tell me that English is actually a very confusing and difficult language!

-Korena

 

I like your diagram of the adverb only. It's pretty and tidy, and the orange diagonal is very dynamic, but I hope you don't think this is how only functions in normal English. You would be doing a big disservice to any learners of English you handed this to. I'm not sure I can explain the rules governing the placement of only myself, and there wouldn't be space here if I could, so please bear with me as I try to use your example to show that English grammar -- in this case and generally -- is a lot more complicated than you seem to imagine.

Problem 1: You say that only “emphasises the word after it” (“with such simplicity”), yet in the last sentence you give, there is no word after it. The sentence is valid, so what does only qualify? It sounds like there are exceptions to your rule that you need to justify.

Problem 2: In the third to last sentence, only is followed by "to". Do you really believe it qualifies "to"? In other words, do you understand the sentence to mean "I didn't give this advice from you or with you or under you, but only to you"? I don't, and I suspect I'm not alone. To me, only qualifies you, which comes two words later.

Funnily enough, in the last sentence only also qualifies you even though it comes before it. In fact only qualifies you in all of the last three sentences. But the only one in which only precedes you, thereby following your rule, is a sentence that I wouldn't say myself because it sounds ungrammatical. I think you need to add a few pages back into your English grammar to explain all these exceptions.

Problem 3: One of the sentences you wrote is incorrect ("...this only advice..."). Why? It follows your rule perfectly, but there are other rules, no doubt included in those 50,000 pages you’ve thrown out, that prevent you from saying this. And at that point how do you emphasise “advice”?

Problem 4: Sentence 2, “I only gave this advice to you”, can mean exactly the same as any one of the other sentences except the first. This is what the majority of English speakers would say, and many would write, whatever they want to qualify with only. In fact it’s unlikely that only would ever qualify “gave”, as your rule would state. So how do we know what only is referring to? In spoken English we use intonation to direct only to its target, saying either “I only gave this advice to you” or “I only gave this advice to you” or whatever else, according what we want to say -- which goes to show that, despite your claims to the contrary, pronunciation is sometimes part of grammar rules. Intonation is even enough to change only’s part of speech: in the first sentence we would presumably raise our voices when pronouncing the following I (“Only I gave this advice to you”). If you don’t raise your voice when pronouncing the I, only becomes a conjunction and the sentence comes to mean “Except that I gave you this advice to you”, “It’s just that I gave this advice to you” (along the lines of “I would have a coffee with you, only I’m running late today”). This time, we’re squeezing the word order part of the balloon, and the intonation end of it bulges.

It’s not that your rule is wrong and should be discarded. There’s a lot of truth to it, but a lot of exceptions too, and describing these would require several pages. When it comes down to it, there are two systems for determining the meaning of only in a sentence (word order and intonation), each with its set of rules and exceptions. Having two systems is definitely not simple. And all this is just for the one adverb only. It’s pretty clear that other adverbs have their rules, too, as the different behaviour of the near synonyms also, too, and as well shows. The following are valid positions for each of them. Borderline cases are in parentheses:

Also, I gave this advice to you. > also refers to the whole sentence
I also gave this advice to you. > also refers to I or to this advice or to you
I gave this advice also to you. > also refers to this advice or to you
I gave this advice to you also. > also refers to you

I,too, gave this advice to you. > too refers to I
(I gave this advice, too, to you.) > too refers to this advice
I gave this advice to you too. > too refers to you

(I gave this advice as well to you.) > as well refers to this advice
I gave this advice to you as well. > as well refers to I or this advice or you

What are the rules that you infer from these patterns? Why can also appear in four different positions in the sentence, too in two and a half positions, and as well in one and a half? Why is the referent of also ambiguous in two cases but not all four? Why is the referent of as well ambiguous? Why, in contrast, is the referent of too perfectly clear? Why is also followed by a comma in the first example but not in the other? Why is too surrounded by commas in the first two cases but not the third? Why are there no commas around as well? And what intonation patterns would you use to pronounce each sentence?

I hate to be this boring, but demonstrating that grammar is finicky and complicated is a little more tedious that “demonstrating” that it’s simple.

 

That was my point entirely.

Will has many more functions than simply indicating the future, and each one requires pages and pages to describe fully. Here are just a few examples:
- I will buy a new car next year. > will = future
- Boys will be boys. > will = eternal characteristic
- Their plane will be landing right now > will = supposition
- Will you marry me? > will = want, be willing

Don’t worry, I’m not going to defend French numbers. Suffice it to say that French people have no more difficulty at maths than people from anywhere else. (I’m not French, as the top right corner of this post shows.)

Basically, what you say about English (“there is no human thought that can't be expressed in English”) is applicable to all languages. I don’t know why you assume that other languages are incapable of the same “human thoughts”. Each language has different ways of expressing things and in the end they’re as good as each other, although we might have individual preferences because of our native language, because of our background, and because our brains work differently. What seems simple to one person might be massively complicated to someone from another culture. I find Polish incredibly difficult because so much is expressed by word endings, which I’m not used to, but my extended family includes several people from Poland who, despite living in the US for a couple of decades, cannot master English articles, because there are no articles in Polish. Polish is a lot simpler for them because of this. But not for me. But nor do I claim that English is simpler or better than Polish just because it's easier for me. Trying to teach or explain English to other people has taught me that much.

Er... I’ll look forward to your demonstration of this in another thread.

 

Is it really possible to declare oneself objective? Anyway, I totally disagree with your conclusions, but that's my subjective point of view.

 

Good Question!!
A local newspaper in a part of Northern Ireland is called "The Impartial Reporter", and has been for over 200 years.
You may be assured that its impartiality was, for many years, more imagined than actual.

 

The writer of this claim needs a few pages of grammar to explain it, linguistically. It is a false statement, but that is a matter of logic, rather than grammar.

 

Yes. I agree with Fenixpollo. What makes you think that English is superior to other languages? Which language would you consider to be the most inferior in the world?

Any language is precious to its native speakers. Language is the channel by which we communicate. The reason for English being so widely spoken goes back to the days of Empire and Colonialism. That doesn't make it a superior language.


LRV

 

I think Cornish is feeling pretty sorry for itself!

 

I think some forum users write down the language they're learning in their profile.

P.S. Or perhaps, in this case, the language they use the most often in their everyday life.

 

If you think objectively i.e. without your subjective point of view, what language is superior to others?
You are objective if you have a scientific mind. The happy man is the man who lives objectively, who has free affections and wide interests.

It had been a shock that:
(a) The earth revolves round the sun and the whole universe does not revolve round our infinitely insignificant planet.
(b) Every one of us 100,000 years ago had a chimpanzee ancestor in Africa
(c) English is best…The list is infinite.

Only the scientific objective brain uncovered the truth
Admit to yourself every day at least one painful truth. If that is difficult, as is the case with those people who disagree with me, then let us know what is the next superior language after say your mother tongue? Please don’t declare that crab that there is no such thing as one language better than another

Without comparing your mother tongue with English, what conclusions do you disagree with?

Regards

 

Scientific fact: You have derailed this thread.

Anyway, you are right. English have been flexible enough to adapt words from other languages (specially, French). OBVIOUS and CHAUVINISM are good examples.

 

Hi Your Majesty
Not long ago, people in Rome used to think their precious city was the centre of the earth
If only they admitted to themselves one painful truth by thinking objectively.
Regards

 

Whether or not English grammar has improved or declined, logic seems to follow old rules: Making an assertion, and then repeating it over and over again, does not constitute proof of anything but stubbornness.

If someone has knowledge of a few languages, and knows little or nothing about thousands of others, and makes sweeping assertions about the superiority of one over all others, that is "proof" that the proximity of the chimp in some lineages is greater than in others.

 

So it was London all along, instead?

 

Hmmm....

Objective = Uninfluenced by emotions or personal prejudices.

Subjective = The best.

"English is the best language" is NOT an OBJECTIVE statement.

Please hang up and try your call again.

 

Am I the only one that thinks that this (well-aimed) thread have derailed?

Could any mod open the following threads:

- Is English the best language? It is a legitimate discussion.
- Is Magmodcity the center of the world? (Kidding, no offense intended)

 

Hi
You need a scientific mind to be objective. From the data available one makes an objective conclusion.

For example, a famous scientist concluded that smoking is harmful

Regards

 

Enough! Following Fernando's fine advice, any further posts that do not address the original thread topic will be deleted, even if offered with total and absolute objectivity.

This is a Moderator notice.
Thanks to all.
Cuchuflete

 

Like all languages, ever eixisted, they evolve. English in paricular, resulting from its globality due to the american and british influences, undergo constant evolution.

The title ''Decline of English Grammar'' is therefore in my opinion innacurate. Language is not invented and is ever present as a major part of human culture. And grammar, is present only to CONTAIN this language instead of creating it.

Grammar changes as language does in order to tell what is ''gramtically correct'' so that it can be used in literature, speaking etc.

 

It used to be that "My house is being painted." was considered horrible English. The correct version of that sentence was "My house is painting." which to English speakers today sounds like somebody who had a stroke said it. I forget the justification. It might be as retarded as the silly aversion to splitting infinitives or double negatives.

But people said and wrote "My house is being painted." much to the horror and dismay of the purists who said English was...I think I just ran out of metaphors for "English Grammar is in decline."

But if English Grammar is in decline, so be it. I can only wish it a quick and painless death. Better sooner than later. Why let this thing drag on forever?

 

Here's more stuff on how English is being torn to pieces by lazy and illogical speakers. It's been happening since...

Well, you read and make up your own mind. I can't stay in this room for very long; it's painting.

http://www.bartleby.com/224/1504.html

 

Creole answers the whole change issue. i see way too many french grammatical elements to not say that english aint a creole. Aenglisc was English, it mixed with francien (french) and produce a pidgin, which then evolved into the creole known as middle english, then continued to evolve and solidify into modern english. Yes old english was in a state of simplification, but no where near the simplification of middle english.

it's my beliefe that there was an unrecorded pidgin between old and middle english:

• Prolonged, regular contact between the different language communities (french takin over england)
• A need to communicate between them (french soldiers marring english women)
• An absence of (or absence of widespread proficiency in) a widespread, accessible interlanguage(children had to communicate somehow, think of how spanglish is, code switching or severly mixing both lnaguages)

Then again, middle english could be that pidgin.
At least thats how i look at it, draw your own conclusions.

 

We have a thread called "Is English a creole?". It's certainly not the mainstream view among Anglicists. See, for example, excellent posts on the issue here, here and here, all summarising the problmes surrounding the alleged "English, the creole".

Groetjes,

Frank

 

Thanks i'll look into it.

It's just, to me, it seems like a lot of things tell me that English is a creole, but i'm open to evidence saying otherwise but as for now, that's what the evidence shows me. I say at the very least, it's a mixed language.

 

I didn't know that the whole "Our language is in decline" thing existed in other language communities (we have lots of people here saying stuff like "Finis Graeciae" when even the smallest language change goes mainstream).

English inevitably changes, as all living languages do. That's actually something to be happy about. If no changes occur, it would mean that English is a dead language.
English verbs and nouns might lost most of their inflectional endings but it seems to me that new ways to express the same thing as before were developed at the same time. I don't thing anything can go wrong when you leave the language evolve on it's own. There are some universal rules, limits that made an utterance non-sense if violated, and these rules are far more broad that prescriptive grammar rules.

I am actually a bit envious of English. It generally accepts new words and syntax patterns more easily than Greek (the English speaking population is more diverse than Greek's, I think that's the main reason).

 

I wonder what languages don't have the "our language is in decline" thing!

 

Language decline, which I do understand as "people complaining that language X declines" rather than a language actually "declining", is probably one generation younger than language itself.

By the way, I always wondered what "decline" in this context could mean. And when a language manages to be in a "state of decline" for a few thousands of years, then I do think something else is going on .

Frank

 

Wow! I am a non-native English speaker and I want to assure you that teaching English in my country has become serious in private rather than in public schools. Many people consider that they can learn English from the Internet (which has a bad influence on English nowadays). It's maybe the same with the English speakers. There is a tendency (esp. with the younger generation) to mix everything: text messaging with oral communication, industries blend: phones-Iphones, IPODS tunes (music industry), marketing, car industry, banking system, people communicate faster, not necessarily better. Under these circumstances, words and rules of using them are continuosly changing.

I can see complaints about not learning enough grammar in schools. In my country, we have had too much of it (I mean Romanian grammar)! I don't agree to leave it aside, but I think that these generations need to understand the basics of present events occurring in any language, for instance, the presence of so many English words in my mother tongue. It's like living under a permanent 'linguistic' storm due to the birth and extremely fast growth of the new technologies in all domains. In my country, there is
a gross difference in covering grammar of the 70's up to now. It was taught simpler. And English was taught better than now.

 

There are 3 components to any language: the sound system, the grammatical patterns, and the stock of words. For a language to exist and persist, these may be allowed to vary, but within limits. As soon as the variations start to interfere with meaning, we can say the language has deteriorated. This will be an objective statement, because it is now less fit for purpose than it used to be.
The components of the language should be taught to everyone using it: you can't simply wish that everyone starting in first grade knows all he needs to know about it. So you need to teach the sound system, the grammar, and the vocabulary.
Now, taking American English, we find a marked deterioration in the sound system over the last two decades or so. This came about because of the influence of CNN, at first, where they decided deliberately to use a Midwest accent to be comprehensible, as they thought, to the majority of Americans. The result is a marked decline particularly in the vowel sounds of AE.
Also in AE, as has been noted, schools no longer teach grammar, so students are left to make it up as they go along, with predictably awful results. And imagine trying to teach a child who has absolutely no concept of grammar a foreign language!
Vocabulary has suffered too. While we have many more nouns for concrete things - because we have many more concrete things - we have added only a handful of verbs, while dropping almost the whole class of adverbs and retaining only two adjectives - cool and gross. Or so it seems to a detached observer! And we have lost many abstract nouns, in parallel with the loss of the power of abstraction.
If you think this is a harsh evaluation, just get yourself an old Hitchcock movie - without subtitles - and compare it with a modern piece of trash from Hollywood. You would be forgiven for thinking that Americans of 50 years ago did not speak AE.
Language is much more than a tool of communication, and it communicates much more than can be put into pictures. It informs, controls, and directs thought. It is the one art form instantly available to everyone. It should be something we nurture and cherish and delight in, instead of something we want to reduce to the simplest sequence of grunts necessary to convey our desire to get an iPad and log on to Facebook.
I think it can be demonstrated that the utter banality of American public discourse, where the clowns running for election would have been laughed off the platform a generation or two ago, is the result of the dumbing down of the American people and the American language. The only solution is to set up an academy to preserve (without pickling) the language, and appoint evangelists to go into all the schools to teach people how to speak, and therefore how to think, and how to conduct themselves in a civilized world. Perhaps there is still time!

 

My daughter, who is currently in high school, has often complained about not having been taught grammar in school. She has actually bought a couple of grammar books, and borrowed others from the library, so she could study the subject hrself.

 

^ a crying shame

Grammar and punctuation are forms of heavy-duty glue for stringing our thoughts together (coherency + word significance) . It is very important, despite what you often here out of the mouths of "New Age" learning. Just imagine reading a text with with no grammar and punctuation rules applied?

At university, you will be expected to have mastered English grammar, apart from a few loose ends (maybe not in a community college). High school teachers are truly doing their students a great disservice, I'm afraid, in not pushing grammar down their little throats.

What are kids learning in high school and junior high these days? How to make posts on Facebook in the most creative of ways?

 

Ich cannot really understand how anybody could understand the verb in "my house is painting" as passive tense. Is that something that has "survived" since the times when there was a "real" passive tense in English - I mean without having to use the auxiliary verb "to be"? In Icelandic which has a lot of similarity with OE, verbs have active and passive tenses. Even Danish, which has had its grammar simplified in a similar way as English has, includes a passive tense not always needing any auxiliary verb.

 

I'll give you a hint as to what it could mean: I could mean a decline in the ability to express complex matters in that language. I think that English has compensated a lot by adding more vocabulary. When you translate High German into Danish or English you'll discover that advantage. Something may be expressed in a way that exploits the possibilities that a complex grammar - and higher freedom to make compound words - offers you and it may still be easy to express exactly the same in English because you have a larger vocabulary. And in Danish? You often have to choose between making very odd phrases. Or try to spread the same info in several phrases (which again alters the style of the text). Or you have to throw some of the info in the source text overboard and try to maintain the style and the flow of the original.

 

Hi,

Why do you mean the passive tense here? In my view, this is pretty similar to the modern 'I closed the door' vs 'the door closed'. Not exactly the passive tense, rather the latter phrase points that there was some closing, and so we infer the rest (that somebody closed the door, or maybe that it closed by itself). Why not?

And simple matters as well.

 

Well, doors actually do seem to close by themselves - being moved by the wind or by mechanical devices. So "the door closed" surely is not passive. Not even visually. You actually see the door moving, while it happens.

Houses don't paint themselves, do they? Neither do they paint anything else. So when I want to put the focus on the fact something is happening to my house and not on the fact that somebody is actually doing something, I need a passive tense.
Like "my house is being painted". In Danish I would have two possibilities. One basically like the modern English construcition and one using the main verb in a passive tense (which does not exist any more in English). But "the house is painting"! Would YOU understand that as a passive tense. I surely would not and therfore I am asking if, or rather when the ending marking it as passive tense, was lost?