What happened to English grammer and spelling ?

[Blister]

What happened to English grammer

I read this review :? I am not great at spelling but

GRATE MACHINE VERY ACURATE WHEN SETUP AND THE PRICE AGENST AUTHER MANEFACTUERS IS SUPERB BRILEANT MACHINE SPESHALLY FOR ME I CUT EVERYTHING BY BANDSAW I DONOT POSES A SERKULER SAW VERY PLEASED

O dear #-o

 

[Doug B]

My teacher told me that my grammar was awful.

I tole her that her grandad was an idiot.

 

[Unib]

Surely you have to make an effort to spell that badly don't you? I particularly like 'serkuler saw' very creative!

 

[Wildman]

no idea what did happen to spelling/ GRAMMAR, ha ha
regretfully such things are becoming more frequent as are the misuse of similar sounding words, Birth instead of berth in boat and motor home adds for instance if I see on advertised as 4 birth I usually ask the price of the little ones, hee hee

 

[RogerP]

The forums are littered with mistakes such as:
your when it should be you're
wrong use of there, their and they're
advice for advise
advise for advice
whether, weather
its for it's (and the opposite)
effect and affect

... the list is endless.

BUT there are many people who have difficulty with the written word whilst being excellent craftsmen. Many times it's best to ignore the mistakes and pay attention to the message.

 

[Silverbirch]

no idea what did happen to spelling/ GRAMMAR, ha ha
regretfully such things are becoming more frequent as are the misuse of similar sounding words, Birth instead of berth in boat and motor home adds for instance if I see on advertised as 4 birth I usually ask the price of the little ones, hee hee

Yep, and punctuation too!

Ian

 

[Digit]

Any minute now a certain gentleman will surface to tell us it's perfectly understandable and you are all being pedantic! :lol:

Roy.

 

[monkeybiter]

Any minute now a certain gentleman will surface to tell us it's perfectly understandable and you are all being pedantic! :lol:

Roy.

Yeah, keep prodding :roll:

 

[wobblycogs]

A few years ago I got quite into languages and how they change over time. I came to the conclusion that if there is one constant in the world it is that language, particularly spoken language, will change.

One of the interesting things I discovered was that right the way back, almost to the start of written languages, there is evidence of people trying to stop the language from changing - they all failed. There was one example a few thousand years ago where the king had decreed that the the written language, which was similar to the spoken language, would never change because that was the official language of state. Since there were very few scribes around at that time he, and his descendants, actually managed to enforce the rule.

The trouble was he also went off on a conquering spree which caused a huge amount of immigration. The spoken language began to change due to the influence of the immigrants and within a hundred years the spoken and written languages had diverged so much you needed to translate between them. At the same time a new commoners written language had emerged which was similar to that used by the conquered people.

I've often wondered if French will go this way, their written language shows signs of falling behind their spoken language. English, on the other hand, seems to have a pretty good track record of altering the written word to match the spoken work. Personally I'm all for altering the written word. Writing is about communicating ideas and the simpler that is the better. That's not an excuse for ambiguity but I struggle to see where you would confuse wether, weather and whether when talking to someone so likewise you wouldn't confuse them when reading. To my mind that is a good reason for having just a single spelling of that sound.

 

[Benchwayze]

I thought punctuation was a Chinese form of medicine?

 

[Chems]

The forums are littered with mistakes such as:
your when it should be you're
wrong use of there, their and they're
advice for advise
advise for advice
whether, weather
its for it's (and the opposite)
effect and affect

... the list is endless.

BUT there are many people who have difficulty with the written word whilst being excellent craftsmen. Many times it's best to ignore the mistakes and pay attention to the message.

Your just pointing out all my errors, if I want your advise on my grammar I will be sure to ask you, until then your just going to have to whether my bad grammar. Your correct though, I am a skilled craftsman.

 

[Digit]

keep prodding

I was gently poking fun! If I had of wanted to be nasty it would have been obvious, to all.

Roy.

 

[Phil Pascoe]

Wobblycogs- I think borrowed words such as schadenfreude and mission creep are great additions to English : we haven't better descriptive words.
However, the ones that irritate me intensely are things like "reduce down" "extend out" "for free" "added bonus"- why add words unneccessarily?

 

[Jonzjob]

I've often wondered if French will go this way, their written language shows signs of falling behind their spoken language.

Please, please don't bring written French into this. I have just been looking at my next load of homework, passé composie and l'imrepfait combined :shock: :shock:

I have problems spelling in English and stand NO chance in French, but if I could persuade them to adopt the logic of printing/writing only what they pronounce it would save them a fortune in ink!

There is always this old chestnut

The European Union commissioners have announced that agreement has been reached to adopt English as the preferred language for European communications, rather than German, which was the other possibility. As part of the negotiations, Her Majesty's Government conceded that English spelling had some room for improvement and has accepted a five-year phased plan for what will be known as EuroEnglish (Euro for short).

In the first year, "s" will be used instead of the soft "c." Sertainly, sivil servants will resieve this news with joy. Also, the hard "c" will be replaced with "k". Not only will this klear up konfusion, but typewriters kan have one less letter.

There will be growing publik emthusiasm in the sekond year, when the troublesome "ph" will be replaced by "f". This will make words like fotograf" 20 persent shorter.

In the third year, publik akseptanse of the new spelling kan be expekted to reach the stage where more komplikated changes are possible. Governments will enkorage the removal of double letters, which have always ben a deterent to akurate speling. Also, al wil agre that the horible mes of silent "e"s in the languag is disgrasful, and they would go.

By the fourth year, peopl wil be reseptiv to steps such as replasing "th" by "z" and "w" by " v".

During ze fifz year, ze unesesary "o" kan be dropd from vords kontaining "ou", and similar changes vud of kors be aplid to ozer kombinations of leters.

After zis fifz yer, ve vil hav a reli sensibl riten styl. Zer vil be no mor trubls or difikultis and evrivun vil find it ezi tu understand ech ozer.

Ze drem vil finali kum tru.

 

[wobblycogs]

Phil, going to get a bit geeky here, sorry....

I agree, they are poor additions to the language and I think it's interesting how most additions like this don't tend to stick around for long. While human language has a lot of redundancy in it there seems to be a natural limit to how much is acceptable. My suspicion is that if it was studied we would find most languages have roughly the same amount of redundancy in them. E.g the ratio between the minimum words necessary to express something compared to the average used to express the same thing would be constant across languages. My guess is the redundancy is used as an error checking / correcting system since human speech is easy to misunderstand and a few extra words can easily indicate a "receiving" error.

At an abstract level this is very similar to the systems used in computers and computer networks. Most programming languages tend to have a little redundancy in them which aids in reading, verbose languages with a lot of redundancy don't tend to do well. Computer networks include error checking and correcting bits although in this case it's the bare minimum required to ensure problems can be detected.

 

[whiskywill]

O lny srmat poelpe can raed tihs.

I cdnuolt blveiee taht I cluod aulaclty uesdnatnrd waht I was rdanieg. The phaonmneal pweor of the hmuan mnid, aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoatnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be in the rghit pclae. The rset can be a taotl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit a porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe. Amzanig huh? yaeh and I awlyas tghuhot slpeling was ipmorantt!

 

[wobblycogs]

Sorry, it's (mostly) a trick. He's a link that debunks it: http://scienceavenger.blogspot.com/2007/12/cambridge-word-scramble-study-its-fake.html

 

[JMcK]

I've often wondered if French will go this way, their written language shows signs of falling behind their spoken language. English, on the other hand, seems to have a pretty good track record of altering the written word to match the spoken work.

L'Académie française, set up in 1635, has as part of its remit to defend the French language. It has been fighting a drawn out battle to preserve the language but, for everyday use, it often gets overtaken by imported words. One of the main sources is English as it has been adopted as an international language in a number of spheres e.g. Aviation and technology.

Sometimes the attempts to retain a French description can be quite amusing as they introduce a clumsiness which an imported expression does not have so they may appear in writing but the imported word is used in speech. Supportive of what you say regarding the written vis à vis the spoken word.

Many English words are in everyday use, particularly on signage e.g. parking,camping. Sometimes local friends are rather surprised if it is pointed out to them that such words are English.

One result of the acceptance of words from other languages is that, IMO, English tends to be a richer language than French in the sense of the vocabulary available. There are many instances in French where the context is required to clarify which meaning of the word is intended. Having said that, the same does occur in English but to a lesser extent.

I still find French an interesting language with a strong poetical turn.

 

[wobblycogs]

I like the French language and I've been trying (with only a little success) to learn it for a while. I can't see how L'Académie Française can maintain the language long term with very high levels of literacy in the general population. It will get to a point where there will simply be be too many dissenters to for the official language to mean much outside academic circles.

I agree, English does seem to be particularly expressive and it's interesting that English tends to adopt words from other languages more readily than most. I wonder if it's because of the languages history. It's already a hotch-potch of Old English, Norse, German, Latin and French so new words from other languages don't sound so out of place. Can you imagine a German word in the middle of a French sentence?

 

[Benchwayze]

Wobblycogs- I think borrowed words such as schadenfreude and mission creep are great additions to English : we haven't better descriptive words.
However, the ones that irritate me intensely are things like "reduce down" "extend out" "for free" "added bonus"- why add words unneccessarily?

My favourite 'non-English' word is Krankenhaus (Krankenhouse) ... When used in context most English people know what it means. 8)

To be pedantic Phil, I think you are referring to redundancy; unnecessary words. Or maybe tautology? I might be correct, or I might not be! :lol:

I'm going to do some woodwork! 8)