No way stylistics takes you years to figure out. We did a year on that - over the normal Russian classes. ...and another one in the university...
To kind of piggyback off of kleinbl00's example and some of the ground he's already covered, English has "rules" in the sense of "ideally speaking, this is what you're supposed to do." Unfortunately, the rules are more like guidelines and because we borrow elements from Latin and Germanic languages, culturally entrenched coloquialisms, and academic fads and trends, the rules are all muddled up. Combined that with the fact that it's very easy to be ambiguous in English, both intentionally and unintentionally, for some degrees and studies, a heavy focus on grammar is necessary. Edit: Personal anecdote, I collect antique books. There's a noticeable difference in editing styles starting in books from the '50s. The further back you go, the more noticeable the differences become. Punctuation becomes weird. Syntax gets weird. Shit, even something that you take for granted like indentation and spacing gets weird.
To the best of my knowledge, English is the only language where "inflammable" meant "can catch fire" but fifty years later, meant "cannot catch fire" because of colloquial use. Mark my words. Fifty years from now, "literally" will mean "figuratively."
There are TONS of words like that, I'm frustrated I can't think of any off the top of my head other than "terrific." What's amazing is that there are English linguists who track when words first came into use, how their popularity and use fluctuates over time, etc. I'm sure they're doing a very necessary job, but at first glance, it seems trivial.
My favorite example is "nimrod." Nimrod in the Old Testament was a great hunter archetype. Fast forward to the 1960s, and Bugs Bunny uses it to insult Elmer Fudd--basically calling him a great hunter sarcastically. Too few people understood the reference, but gleaned the idea Bugs was going for, i.e. to make fun of Elmer. From this, nimrod came to mean "dummy."
I'm still dumbfounded over how you (not any singular "you") consider this worthy of keeping the subject up for twelve years. School English sounds more lazy to me the more you talk about it. Then again, I'm aggrivated over being "too late with your advice" despite never having seen the situation coming or at the moment right now, so my perception is skewed.the rules are more like guidelines and because we borrow elements from Latin and Germanic languages, culturally entrenched coloquialisms, and academic fads and trends
None of us do. We universally hate it. It is the drabbest, least interesting shit in all of pedagogy. I was in honors English pretty much from the moment I learned to read (shocker). My friends were not. So when I'd long since stopped having to bother with what the fuck a gerund is, my friends were still diagramming sentences. I observed how stupid it was that they had to put up with this shit. That instruction in grammar was effectively codifying yesterday's language, not today's. That English, being so heavily reliant on borrow words and assimilation, needed to careen through the bumper cars of colloquialism in order to achieve efficiency and that in teaching grammar, their teacher was effectively stagnating the language along the lines of the Spanish Academy whose labors over the past 400 years have effectively rendered Castilian a different dialect than the Spanish spoken by the majority of the world. One of my buddies took that tirade and related it back to his teacher. For several years afterward, the teacher referred to grammar studies as "stagnating" when he taught it. But he still taught it.
The argument my Grammar teacher in the uni replied with was that we study "the language of the educated", and "as soon as the changes of the language [using past simple where past perfect is due, e.g. I just found it] are incorporated by the majority, we will study them as well". What are your thoughts on that? Do you think it encourages stagnation? Do you think it encourages grammar nazism?
Dante chose to write The Divine Comedy in Florentine rather than Latin so it would be more accessible to the masses. Petrarch, Bocaccio and Macchiavelli followed suit and before too long, Florentine was Italian and nobody spoke Latin anymore. It is the people of a language that speak it, not just its scholars and when scholars are allowed to codify language, the language dies. Europe had a mother tongue uniting scholars from Sweden to Sicily but by keeping it inaccessible to all but scholars, it became nothing more than a pompous, elaborate system of taxonomy. I'm "the educated" and I find the quickest way to provoke a stranger into antagonism is to talk like it.
Ignorance is one of the easiest things in the world to correct. But I get what you're saying. If I were to provide my own counterargument, it's that the "language of the educated" is far more likely to extend and buttress the beauty and utility of a language than the "language of the personal ads" and that Latin died out because it wasn't being taught to the people. Now that we're teaching people "the language of the educated" we're making it available to the masses. Here's the problem: it takes scholars a generation or two in order to reach consensus about anything literary. Nobody is a genius while they're alive; you will never see a literature class pulling anything off the NYT Bestsellers' list to teach. From the perspective of the student, the only examples of literature and language held in high regard are old and dead and therefore irrelevant. From the perspective of the teacher, exposing students to old, dead but brilliant works of literature helps them appreciate it more than if they didn't get it at all and hopefully that appreciation will rub off on them as they create tomorrow's literature. Really, one side is saying "I hate peas" while the other side is saying "peas build a healthy body." Neither are wrong. I'm more of an "I hate peas" guy because my mom's parents were Harvard/Radcliffe while my dad's parents were blown off their farm by the Dust Bowl and never finished 8th grade. I can still imitate my mom's parents' inflection and manner of speech; it's an extremely pompous dialect that offends anyone who isn't monied East Coast. I can imitate my dad's parents inflection and manner of speech, too, but I also remember their wisdom, their simplicity, and their insight into the world. And lemme tell ya - there's a reason I tend to deliver my hardest truths with cuss words and misappropriations of language. People pay closer attention. If you say something smart while sounding like you went to Harvard, people tune you out. If you say something smart while sounding like you just got off a tractor, people think you're sagacious. Not just because they assume you should be stupid - but because they understand you. It is the easiest fucking thing in the world to put together a well-constructed, erudite sentence that says fuckall. When forced to take an English class in college I would often construct words and arguments in such a way that they actually said the opposite of their face value to see if the TA would notice. He never did. When you can stack words like a legal briefing you can get away with murder; there's a reason graduate theses tend to be written like a build-your-own thesaurus kit. It's harder to hide your ignorance in simple language, which makes your knowledge come across more clearly. But the art of using simple language well? Yeah, they don't teach that. They teach you how to navigate byzantine jargon so that you can snow undergraduates with it.
What kind of language did you write your thesis in? Did you follow the high consensus because that was required of you, or did you simplify it somewhat? Can you tell me more about this? I'm curious but can't find a sufficiently specific question.But the art of using simple language well? Yeah, they don't teach that. They teach you how to navigate byzantine jargon so that you can snow undergraduates with it.
I have an engineering degree. My thesis was in engineering english, which means strunk'n'white with lots of jargon and equations. It was also only like 20 pages because they don't require theses of undergraduate engineering students. So really, it was more of a sales brochure for a device Procter & Gamble asked me design. With way more equations. -I would have written a shorter letter, but I did not have the time. Blaise Pascal So the above paragraph is five run on sentences. It is literally how I speak conversationally, rendered as type. As is this paragraph. The way we speak is different from the way we communicate formally using the written word, however, and the art of writing is the art of knowing (and exploiting) the difference. If I were writing the above for an editor, or for anything other than the ephemera of the Internet, I would write Engineers don't write theses. My capstone design project involved a presentation of the device I created for Proctor & Gamble, but it was a brief, not a thesis. It was written in English, with lots of jargon, figures and tables. If you write that way in technical English you will be graded down. They make you start sentences with participles and bury it in jargon and if you don't do that, you're an idiot. My Finite Element Analysis TA graded our assignments based on how much they weighed.Can you tell me more about this? I'm curious but can't find a sufficiently specific question.
I think this varies from place to place. I learned what was "correct" as a kid like most people do, namely listening to older people and reading a lot. They taught us spelling through fifth grade (so about age 10-11), although obviously not everyone needed it that long while others never got it...plenty of adults still can't spell for shit. But I think some of the problem, as others have alluded to, is that there's very different "versions" of English. I know you and I have talked about this before. I grew up middle class, white, and with well-educated parents, so what I heard from my family (and friends, who tended to come from similar backgrounds) was the more educated register, which is usually what someone means when they talk about "correct" English. For someone growing up in an inner city, at best they may've heard that kind of English on the news or something, but it's not what they're used to day-to-day. So in many respects they come to school having to almost learn a foreign language, but I don't think this fact gets quite enough recognition (or at least didn't when I was in school). Instead, they're told that what they and everyone they love is speaking is "wrong," and then we're surprised when they push back or refuse to learn it out of pique. This remains something we have to deal with: a huge part of my job is explaining complicated legal and medical concepts in ways that can be understood by someone who never made it out of 8th grade. But it would sound really condescending if I were to switch into, say, AAVE in a formal court decision, and that's without getting into the problem of how much profanity is an integral part of that way of speaking. But for my part, I've never diagrammed a sentence in my life. English classes were mostly just learning by doing, whether it was reading or writing. Over the course of the next couple of years "English class" transitioned to be strictly about literature, which I also hated. It wasn't until I started learning foreign languages that I began learning linguistic terminology. But certainly by 9th grade (so age 14) our English classes were exclusively focused on reading "great" works and writing the occasional paper. Thinking back to when I first started learning Russian, I really didn't find the grammar to be that hard. (My problem is that I suck at learning vocabulary, so that was always far harder.) But putting the pieces together correctly (with the correct endings and what-not) never really caused me any trouble. I actually came to enjoy Russian's pith, like the way you could use дательный падеж for so much, and how many incredibly versatile words Russian has (вот is one of my personal favorites). Random anecdote. I was in the dining hall one summer (taking summer classes), and the guy next to me was evidently Russian. He saw a cute girl across the way, and said under his breath: вот эта такая. That was the whole expression, and it expressed his feelings perfectly. But putting it into English is surprisingly difficult...we just don't have constructions like that. Now you're making me miss Russian :(
That's an interesting way of looking at it. Alfred the Great, I've learned recently, was praised for pushing for education as well as making English out of all the tribal languages spread across the British Isles. Now, what's praised is the extreme diversity of the human language. I wonder if it's because of the increased historical awareness of humanity, because people don't like things to die or because there isn't such an urge to join forces anymore. Just tried it. Best I came up with is "there she goes". That being said, I have difficulty translating "So it is" into Russian, or doing so straight-forwardly with "It's raining". "Дождит"? Ни в коем случае. Of, course, the correct version would be "Идёт дождь", but the semantic structure is obviously different in the translation. My rate is 20 USD per academic hour. Instead, they're told that what they and everyone they love is speaking is "wrong," and then we're surprised when they push back or refuse to learn it out of pique.
He saw a cute girl across the way, and said under his breath: вот эта такая. That was the whole expression, and it expressed his feelings perfectly. But putting it into English is surprisingly difficult...we just don't have constructions like that.
Now you're making me miss Russian :(
If I had to guess, I'd say that it's because it didn't happen to us. So since we got the benefits of it without having to give anything up ourselves, we tend to overvalue that aspect while undervaluing the damage done to people who didn't speak that way. But I think you're right in terms of increased historical awareness too, or at least a sense that maybe cultural Darwinism isn't all that it's cracked up to be. I think many people on the political left particularly appreciate a kind of cultural hybrid vigor. I certainly do, which is part of what got me into languages to begin with. Yeah, it's tough, 'cause to me at least that loses a lot of what he was conveying :) For "so it is," I guess the hard part is the connotation of surprise? Because otherwise couldn't you just say да and/or правильно? I also struggled with conveying the idea of "what if x?" I tried translating the lyrics to this song into Russian as a practice exercise when I was getting tutored a few years ago. The chorus was hard to get across without it being super awkward. But that's just the nature of language, i.e. that some are going to be able to convey ideas that others have a hard time with. I'm still working on translating the prologue to Don Quijote for the next literary thread on here, but it is super fucking hard. I have every intention of taking you up on that one of these days. But don't want to over-extend myself!I wonder if it's because of the increased historical awareness of humanity, because people don't like things to die or because there isn't such an urge to join forces anymore.
Just tried it. Best I came up with is "there she goes".
My rate is 20 USD per academic hour.
Imma dummy. "В самом деле" does the trick. "Что, если" or, in this context, "Вдруг" should do the trick. Горящий шелом? Что, если знакомые изгибы Оказались сном? The "горящий шелом" is the reference to the Russian saying "На воре и шапка горит", "шелом" being the old Slavic spelling of "шлем", 'helmet'. It's a convoluted outcry to the English "liar, liar, pants on fire" from my tired brain.For "so it is,"
I also struggled with conveying the idea of "what if x?"
Что, если вещи вокруг тебя
Eh. English/Grammar is like math. Most of us are gonna learn more than we need to, then only remember what we need to get by. However, just like rocket engineers need really good math, there are some professions such as lawyers who need really good english.