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Discussion Groups / English Usage / May 2010Elements of Style in English
a little ditty of mine: • Elements of Style in English http://xahlee.org/Periodic_dosage_dir/bangu/elements_of_style.html plain text version follows. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Elements of Style in English Xah Lee, 2010-05-02 Was reading Wikipedia on The Elements of Style. Here's a interesting quote: « Edinburgh University linguistics professor Geoffrey Pullum has criticized The Elements of Style, saying: The book’s toxic mix of purism, atavism, and personal eccentricity is not underpinned by a proper grounding in English grammar. It is often so misguided that the authors appear not to notice their own egregious flouting of its own rules . . . It’s sad. Several generations of college students learned their grammar from the uninformed bossiness of Strunk and White, and the result is a nation of educated people who know they feel vaguely anxious and insecure whenever they write 'however' or 'than me' or 'was' or 'which,' but can’t tell you why.[9] Specifically, Pullum says Strunk and White were misguided in identifying the passive voice as incorrect, and in proscribing established usages such as the split infinitive and the use of "which" in a restrictive relative clause.[9] He also frequently criticizes Elements on Language Log, a linguists' blog focusing on portrayals of language in the popular media, for promoting linguistic prescriptivism and hypercorrection among English speakers,[10] referring to it as "the book that ate America's brain".[11] The Boston Globe's review of the 2005 illustrated edition describes it as an "aging zombie of a book ... a hodgepodge, its now- antiquated pet peeves jostling for space with 1970s taboos and 1990s computer advice."[12] » Quite funny, and i'd agree. Much of the mouthings of the writing establishment is sh.t. But also, from this i learned the word Atavism. Also, the term Hypercorrection. It is great to know the word hypercorrection, because that gives me another embellished artillery against the grammarian and pendant sophomorons. Also, from Wikipedia's citation and references, i learned of Language Log. Yay. A blog dedicated to f.cking with pedantic idiots, which i've been doing for the past decade. The blog itself is here: http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/. I kept on reading a bit on Wikipedia about the various style guides. Fowler's Modern English Usage, seems like one i can endorse. There's also The Chicago Manual of Style, AP Stylebook, MLA. Actually, i think most of these so-called style “guides” are much ado about nothing. The only firm advice i can give about writing, besides knowing basic grammar and spelling, is: Study logic and critical thinking, obtain a analytical mind. This, will improve your writing by far, than a writing “style” per se. As to a writing guide, the only i can firmly recommend is: Simplified English. This is far more effective than any established style guides. Of course, all these style talk about how to form your words and punctuations into cogent sentences are in the context of formal writing, in science, journal, reports, documentations, tutorials, textbooks, as opposed to literary tomfoolery as in essaying, novels, poetry, of which, pigs fly. Xah ∑ http://xahlee.org/ ☄ > The > only firm advice i can give about writing, besides knowing basic > grammar and spelling, is What you don't seem to realize, or possibly wilfully ignore, is that no native speaker would want your advice on writing because almost every post of yours betrays a faulty grasp of elementary english grammar. You have to know the rules before you can creatively break them, and you don't know the rules yet. For example, your final verbal eruction, which I hesitate to call a sentence, approaches word salad in its infelicitous disregard of elementary grammar. "Of course, all these style talk about how to form your words and punctuations into cogent sentences are in the context of formal writing, in science, journal, reports, documentations, tutorials, textbooks, as opposed to literary tomfoolery as in essaying, novels, poetry, of which, pigs fly." Specifically: two incorrect uses of the singular-plural distinction ("these style" should be "these sytles" and "punctuations" shoud be "punctuation"), and two verbs without a relative pronoun in: "all these style talk about how to form your words and punctuations into cogent sentences are in the context of formal writing" This is not a set of powerpoint bullet items: "all of these styles: * talk about how to form your words and punctuation into cogent sentences * are in the context of formal writing" This is a prose sentece, so of course it should be: "all of these styles, which talk about how to form your words and punctuation into cogent sentences, are in the context of formal writing..." and the final, nearly incomprehensible: "of which, pigs fly." where the only possible formal grammatical and stylistic critique is: WTF?!? Simple things like this are a red flag to readers that you yourself haven't mastered english, which is why no native speaker would seek your advice on writing style. At the end of the day, methinks the poster doth protest too much. If you really feel that standard grammar and usage are an unnecessary restriction on your expressive freedom, then write in your own non-standard poetic style without feeling the need to justify it. The fact that you simultaneously decry existing standards, while advising others to learn "basic grammar" suggests that you recognize your own failings in this regard, and rather that deal with the problem at its source (i.e., your own failure to learn english grammar) you lash out at some straw man of unnecessaryily restrictive style guides. I, and others here, bend and break the rules all the time, but that is because we already know the rules to begin with. warmest regards, Ralph  SignatureRaffael Cavallaro > rather that deal with the problem at its source (i.e., your own > failure to learn english grammar) you lash out at some straw man of > unnecessaryily restrictive style guides. This sums up Xah very well. It's no different from his behavior on the Macosx mailing list he used to frequent where he painted himself as an OS X expert despite demonstrating over and over that he had no grasp of even the basics of the operating system. And, as we discovered long ago, there is no point talking to him, his ignorance is willful and intractable. > I, and others here, bend and break the rules all the time, but that is > because we already know the rules to begin with. "That's what rules are for, so that you *think* before you break them." The trick to that is, you have to be able to actually think. SignatureHow soon after the U.S. Postal Service issues the Calvin stamp will you send a letter with one on the envelope? Watterson: Immediately. I'm going to get in my horse and buggy and snail-mail a check for my newspaper subscription. On May 2, 9:06 am, Raffael Cavallaro <raffaelcavall...@pas.espam.s.il.vous.plait.mac.com> wrote: > > The > > only firm advice i can give about writing, besides knowing basic [quoted text clipped - 5 lines] > have to know the rules before you can creatively break them, and you > don't know the rules yet. What you don't seem to realize, as with most pedants, is that writing serves a purpose, a purpose of communication, and when a piece of writing, communicated exactly what the writer wants the reader to feel, understand, with no hiccups in the reading process, that writing is successful. More over, if the style per se, persuaded the reader, tickled his mind, hit her brain, or boiled his blood, that writing is great. now, my little ditty of “Elements of Style in English” is a little essay. As you can see, the target audience are people concerned about writing and have read one or two of the mentioned styled guides. In general, they are college graduates, or involved in the writing profession. Now, consider the sentence you criticized: «Of course, all these style talk about how to form your words and punctuations into cogent sentences are in the context of formal writing, in science, journal, reports, documentations, tutorials, textbooks, as opposed to literary tomfoolery as in essaying, novels, poetry, of which, pigs fly.» would any in the audience have problem understanding the above perfectly and fluently? In particular, when the “pigs fly” part hits them? you not only understood it perfectly, so well, in fact, you took the time to criticize how it is ungrammatical, and accuse me of no basic understanding of grammar. This, is the communicative success of my little piece. Xah ∑ http://xahlee.org/ ☄ > What you don't seem to realize, as with most pedants, is that writing > serves a purpose, a purpose of communication, and when a piece of > writing, communicated exactly what the writer wants the reader to > feel, understand, with no hiccups in the reading process, that writing > is successful. To the ear of a native speaker, your writing is filled with hiccups. You don't realize this because you haven't internalized english grammar and usage sufficiently to hear it. You think you're communicating in an unimpeded flow, but a native speaker cringes when reading your posts because of the numerous gaffes, errors that one would never hear from a native speaker. If you don't want to adhere to english grammar because it's too much of an effort for you to learn its byzantine norms (and they are in large part arbitrary and irregular), fine. There are thousands of posters on the internet whose english is far from perfect. > would any in the audience have problem understanding the above > perfectly and fluently? In particular, when the "pigs fly" part hits > them? It isn't at all clear what you mean. "When pigs fly" means "that will never happen." Do you mean that essays and novels will never happen? Do you mean that poetic license makes the impossible happen? Your usage of the phrase makes no sense in the context in which you use it. You can't repurpose long accepted idioms and expect that readers will magically read your mind and intuit your intended meaning. We don't live in your head. One problem with english being widespread is that it is a language in which is easy to attain understandability, but very difficult to attain comprehensive mastery of the huge laundry list of often arbitrary grammatical and usage norms. As a result, non-native speakers often fall into the trap of believing that it is easy to master. It is not. Such people my go for years repeating errors without realizing it because native speakers will understand their intended meaning, but not correct their grammar and/or usage. Please stop trumpeting your broken english as some sort of stylistic choice. It's not. It's obvious to native speakers that it's not. You don't *choose* to write "punctuations" instead of "punctuation," or write sentences with two verbs and no relative pronoun. You just don't know any better. Spanish is a language with relatively few phonemes. As a result, spanish speakers often speak other languages that have phonemes absent from spanish with a quite noticeable accent. My brother was acquainted with a spanish diplomat who, because of his profession, needed to be proficient in a number of languages. He once told my brother "I espeak eseven languages - all of them in espanish!" There is no shame in not having mastered english grammar and usage (or pronunciation) - I speak some spanish, french and german, but I would never claim to have mastery of the grammar and usage of any of these. At the same time, I don't write screeds condemning the authorities on the standard grammar and usage of these languages. Just be yourself without apology. At the same time, stop trying to denigrate accepted, widely used, english grammar and style just because you haven't mastered it. It just makes you look foolish. warmest regards, Ralph SignatureRaffael Cavallaro you see Raffael, your reply is not atypical of pedantic idiots. There are a sea of them. But is there a way to resolve our argument in a definitive way? Yes. One simple way, is to ask expert writers, say, those who are widely recognized as expert writers, make a judgment of my writings. Say, my very little essay here, or others on my website. Ask them, is these writings, clear, conveys the writer's thoughts well, fluent, creative, and in short, rather expertly done? You see, we can even carry this out. The question, of whether my writings are above average among professional writers, is absolutely a question that can be answered with a definitive yes or no. But the question is, as with most arguments in online forums, there is no incentive to actually resolve arguments. In the past years, i've suggested concrete and practical ways to raise funds by both parties to resolve questions about computer language debates. Wrote at least twice with some 500 or so words on this that describes how this can be done. (search google group of my post with terms paypal, argument, expert, you'll probably find them) The closest case is someone paid me $20 usd to resolve a argument i had with another guy. (documented here: http://xahlee.org/UnixResource_dir/writ/Mathematica_optimization.html ) So, what am i gonna do with u? what CAN i do with another online netizen who i barely know? do i, honestly, spend the next 4 hours digging my heart out with sincerity about a proposal to resolve a argument, that i know, will result in nothing other than another bout of word fight? And consider you as a person, do i really, want to go to all this trouble that effectively in the end makes you look bad? hum? y'know, my persona, isn't the type to be kind with words about matters of truth or the size of my cock. Xah ∑ http://xahlee.org/ ☄ On May 2, 7:31 pm, Raffael Cavallaro <raffaelcavall...@pas.espam.s.il.vous.plait.mac.com> wrote: > > What you don't seem to realize, as with most pedants, is that writing > > serves a purpose, a purpose of communication, and when a piece of [quoted text clipped - 64 lines] > -- > Raffael Cavallaro > The question, of whether my > writings are above average among professional writers, is absolutely a > question that can be answered with a definitive yes or no OK then, definitively no; they're quite amateurish, and well below the quality produced by most professional writers. warmest regards, Ralph P.S. I don't have time to keep up with your seemingly endless outpourings of inchoate verbiage, so I'll likely make this my last response. SignatureRaffael Cavallaro Raffael Cavallaro <raffaelcavallaro@pas.espam.s.il.vous.plait.mac.com> writes: >> The question, of whether my >> writings are above average among professional writers, is absolutely a >> question that can be answered with a definitive yes or no > > OK then, definitively no; they're quite amateurish, and well below the > quality produced by most professional writers. Agreed. OTOH if he's the same Xah Lee who wrote the web pages about adding new major modes to Emacs, they are more than good enough to make his pages entirely comprehensible and very useful. > warmest regards, > [quoted text clipped - 3 lines] > outpourings of inchoate verbiage, so I'll likely make this my last > response. If "seemingly endless outpourings of inchoate verbiage" are your warmest regards, I'd hate to be frozen out by you. SignatureOnline waterways route planner | http://canalplan.eu Plan trips, see photos, check facilities | http://canalplan.org.uk > If "seemingly endless outpourings of inchoate verbiage" are your warmest > regards, I'd hate to be frozen out by you. Not wishing you to feel frozen out by my silence, I'll reply. ;^) He's a craftsman much of whose output is complaints about his primary tool, complaints he wouldn't have if he took the time to master that tool first. These frequent, ill-conceived complaints are what I characterized, perhaps a bit uncharitably, as "seemingly endless outpourings of inchoate verbiage." I think he would be happier, his screeds fewer, and these fora more pleasant if he dropped his defensiveness about his imperfect english and accepted that established grammar and usage are facilitators of clear communication, not impediments. I don't hate him. I think he's creative and bright in his own way. If I didn't care about him at all, if I thought he were beyond hope, I wouldn't take the time to try to get him to see how he's sabotaging himself and to change. warmest regards, Ralph SignatureRaffael Cavallaro On May 2, 10:59 pm, Raffael Cavallaro <raffaelcavall...@pas.espam.s.il.vous.plait.mac.com> wrote: > > The question, of whether my > > writings are above average among professional writers, is absolutely a [quoted text clipped - 10 lines] > outpourings of inchoate verbiage, so I'll likely make this my last > response. Thanks for visiting Xah's Edu Corner. Xah ∑ http://xahlee.org/ ☄ Sun, 2 May 2010 22:31:36 -0400 from Raffael Cavallaro <raffaelcavallaro@pas.espam.s.il.vous.plait.mac.com>: [addressing Xah Lee] > Please stop trumpeting your broken english as some sort of stylistic > choice. It's not. It's obvious to native speakers that it's not. You > don't *choose* to write "punctuations" instead of "punctuation," or > write sentences with two verbs and no relative pronoun. You just don't > know any better. I think you're being too charitable. These kinds of errors are not matters of idiom or failing to master strange exceptions; they are failure to master basic grammar. The difference between singular ad plural, and the need for a verb to have a subject, are first-semester stuff in any European language. SignatureStan Brown, Oak Road Systems, Tompkins County, New York, USA http://OakRoadSystems.com Shikata ga nai... > Sun, 2 May 2010 22:31:36 -0400 from Raffael Cavallaro > <raffaelcavallaro@pas.espam.s.il.vous.plait.mac.com>: [quoted text clipped - 10 lines] > plural, and the need for a verb to have a subject, are first-semester > stuff in any European language. And in later semesters, students go on to learn that many languages have subjectless verbs. SignatureJames > the need for a verb to have a subject, are first-semester > stuff in any European language. Obviously, you don't know European languages. Let's see. Search engine brings this: http://learningrussian.net/ Lessons are here: http://learningrussian.net/russian-lessons/ First lesson is about alphabet and pronounciation, nothing to look there, the second one is about greetings: http://learningrussian.net/hello_in_russian_greetings.php Let's skip first trivial greetings and jump to "how are you?" section. "Как дела?" Surprise! A sentence without verb. "Что нового?" Surprise! Another sentence without verb. "Как поживаете?" Surprise! The verb without subject. Do you think this is exception? Alright, let's go on and find another chapter with sentences. The next one is this: http://learningrussian.net/hello_in_russian_greetings_grammar2.php "Ольга преподаватель?" - No verb. "Как вас зовут?" - Verb without subject. "Как дела?" - No verb. "Что нового?" - No verb. "Всё хорошо." - No verb. Maybe that's because they propose simplified language for beginners. Alright, let's see what they propose in literature section: http://learningrussian.net/russian-literature/ "Notes from the Underground." "Я человек больной..." - No verb. "Я злой человек." - Again no verb. "Непривлекательный я человек." - And again no verb. "Я думаю, что у меня болит печень." - Only the fourth sentence brings subject and verb you expect. Oh, "Anna Karenina." This one you don't need to read at all since the first sentence is known by heart: "Все счастливые семьи похожи друг на друга..." - No verb. "...каждая несчастливая семья несчастлива по-своему." - No verb again. SignatureHE CE3OH... > > the need for a verb to have a subject, are first-semester > > stuff in any European language. [quoted text clipped - 12 lines] > > Surprise! A sentence without verb. You may have misunderstood modern English linguistics, which starts with the basic distinction between (1) Sentences = Grammatical constructions with verbs (2) Other things written or said, which have no verb and need no verb. Greetings are obvious instances of class 2. As currently used, "Merry Christmas!" has no verb (although this may be etymologically a shortened version of "We wish you a merry Christmas") and is not a sentence. "How do you do?" looks like a sentence, but English grammar treats it as a greeting i.e. distinct from a sentence and not a functional question despite the formal resemblance. The Russian language web site says the exchange of information is normal in Russian greetings (because "Russians have a very strong community feeling.") This phenomenon does not occur in modern English (which is one reason greetings are not treated as questions or communications of information.) SignatureDon Phillipson Carlsbad Springs (Ottawa, Canada) >> the need for a verb to have a subject, are first-semester >> stuff in any European language. > > Obviously, you don't know European languages. In fact, Stan's claim is easily refuted [*] by translating the English "It's raining" into a few other languages. *In the traditional meaning of "refuted". I haven't yet caught up with our news reporters, who believe that "refute" means "deny". Still, we have to remember that Stan was addressing Xah Lee's claim to be fluent in English. In that context, he makes sense. > Alright, let's see what they propose in literature section: > [quoted text clipped - 3 lines] > > "Я человек больной..." - No verb. Although I take the rest of your point, I don't think this is a good example. It doesn't take long for the learner of any second language to discover that his/her intuition about the verb "to be" can never be transported from one language to another. It's an exception to the rules about verbs in just about any language. SignaturePeter Moylan, Newcastle, NSW, Australia. http://www.pmoylan.org For an e-mail address, see my web page. Thu, 13 May 2010 08:56:59 +1000 from Peter Moylan <gro.nalyomp@retep>: > >> the need for a verb to have a subject, are first-semester > >> stuff in any European language. [quoted text clipped - 6 lines] > *In the traditional meaning of "refuted". I haven't yet caught up with > our news reporters, who believe that "refute" means "deny". :-) Granted, I oversimplified. Out of curiosity, though, which languages are you thinking of? > Still, we have to remember that Stan was addressing Xah Lee's claim to > be fluent in English. In that context, he makes sense. [quoted text clipped - 12 lines] > transported from one language to another. It's an exception to the rules > about verbs in just about any language. It seems other people can see actual text -- all I see is a series of question marks. It may be my newsreader, which occasionally shows its age. SignatureStan Brown, Oak Road Systems, Tompkins County, New York, USA http://OakRoadSystems.com Shikata ga nai... > It seems other people can see actual text -- all I see is a series of > question marks. It may be my newsreader, which occasionally shows > its age. Your newsreader shows Xah's posts as ???'s? That would be a feature worth encouraging. SignatureBecause you can't cotton to evil. No Sir. You have to smack evil on the nose with the rolled-up newspaper of justice and say, 'Bad evil. Bad BAD evil"' > Thu, 13 May 2010 08:56:59 +1000 from Peter Moylan > <gro.nalyomp@retep>: ... Some text in English and Russian > It seems other people can see actual text -- all I see is a series of > question marks. It may be my newsreader, which occasionally shows > its age. Aleksej's post has Mime headers: Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=koi8-r Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit The followups respected that. Your reader is apparently unable to cope, since it uses 7bit us-ascii. I suggest you try Thunderbird, for example. (followups to alt.usenet.offline-reader only) Thu, 13 May 2010 16:47:16 +0200 from Lars Enderin <lars.enderin@telia.com>: > > Thu, 13 May 2010 08:56:59 +1000 from Peter Moylan > > <gro.nalyomp@retep>: [quoted text clipped - 14 lines] > Your reader is apparently unable to cope, since it uses 7bit us-ascii. I > suggest you try Thunderbird, for example. I have Gravity 2.8.1. Can I change some settings so that it will be able to display those characters properly? I looked in View » Global Options but couldn't find anything that seemed relevant. SignatureStan Brown, Oak Road Systems, Tompkins County, New York, USA http://OakRoadSystems.com Shikata ga nai... [Added back <alt.usage.english>] > (followups to alt.usenet.offline-reader only) Why? This thread ("Elements of Style in English") is certainly more interesting than most of the crap in AUE nowadays, particularly all that endless fuckin' "Céline" sh.t and that long idiotic "Happy Birthday, Mr. T.C." suck-up thread started (of course) by a dizzy dame. Signature~~~ Reinhold {Rey} Aman ~~~ "El hombre es tantas veces hombre cuanto es el número de lenguas que ha aprendido". -- Carlos I (Rey de España) >[Added back <alt.usage.english>] > [quoted text clipped - 4 lines] >endless fuckin' "Céline" sh.t and that long idiotic "Happy Birthday, Mr. >T.C." suck-up thread started (of course) by a dizzy dame. All threads have the potential of being of interest to aue people because they can turn into a usage discussion at any time. Some readers might agree with me that a comma between "long" and "idiotic" would be appropriate. Keep following the "Happy Birthday, Mr. T.C." thread. You may enjoy it. Someone may use, or fail to use, a hyphen and get your celice-by-Depends all in a twist. SignatureTony Cooper - Orlando, Florida > Thu, 13 May 2010 08:56:59 +1000 from Peter Moylan > <gro.nalyomp@retep>: [quoted text clipped - 12 lines] > Granted, I oversimplified. Out of curiosity, though, which languages > are you thinking of? To be honest, I made the comment without thinking very hard. It's possible that I was thinking of Esperanto, with Russian as a close second. >>> Alright, let's see what they propose in literature section: >>> [quoted text clipped - 12 lines] > question marks. It may be my newsreader, which occasionally shows > its age. I see that you are using Microplanet Gravity, about which I know almost nothing. It seems to be using a 7-bit character encoding, which rules out just about everything except US-ASCII. Aleksej was using Gnus, which Windows users tend to dismiss as hopelessly old-fashioned, but which does a much better job of understanding MIME encoding. For some reason, the popular Windows newsreaders don't seem to be good at handling non-USA traffic. (The question marks were actually Cyrillic text, but I guess you've already figured that out from Alexey's address.) SignaturePeter Moylan, Newcastle, NSW, Australia. http://www.pmoylan.org For an e-mail address, see my web page. > > Granted, I oversimplified. Out of curiosity, though, which languages > > are you thinking of? > > To be honest, I made the comment without thinking very hard. It's > possible that I was thinking of Esperanto, with Russian as a close second. Finnish belongs to this group, too. In Finnish you could say "Sataa.", which literally is "Rains." (there's no progressive tense in Finnish). Normally it's used with some kind of a qualifier (outside; water, snow; again; etc.), but a bare "Sataa." is also possible in some situations. Omitting the subject makes sense at least to me - what is this "it" that's raining anyway? > Thu, 13 May 2010 08:56:59 +1000 from Peter Moylan > <gro.nalyomp@retep>: [quoted text clipped - 14 lines] > Granted, I oversimplified. Out of curiosity, though, which languages > are you thinking of? ... "It's raining" in Spanish is "Llueve" (literally "Rains") or "Esta lloviendo" (literally "Is raining"). Personal-pronoun subjects are optional in Spanish, and more often than not are suppressed, but in expressions for weather, there's no optional subject you can put in. Unless you hear differently from one of the many people around who know Spanish better than I do. -- Jerry Friedman >> Thu, 13 May 2010 08:56:59 +1000 from Peter Moylan >> <gro.nalyomp@retep>: [quoted text clipped - 23 lines] > optional subject you can put in. Unless you hear differently from one > of the many people around who know Spanish better than I do. The fact that you don't write the subject doesn't mean it doesn't exist. It's the water droplets who are raining. Signature__Pascal Bourguignon__ On May 13, 12:28 pm, p...@informatimago.com (Pascal J. Bourguignon) wrote: > >> Thu, 13 May 2010 08:56:59 +1000 from Peter Moylan > >> <gro.nalyomp@retep>: [quoted text clipped - 27 lines] > > It's the water droplets who are raining. The verb is singular. For another example, when the Spanish verb "haber" corresponds to English "there is", it has no subject, at least in standard Spanish. The thing whose existence is exerted is the direct object. However, it's common but non-standard to conjugate the verb to agree in number with the thing, as if were the subject. I'm hoping to meet a bilingual person here in New Mexico who uses the opposite non-standard forms--"There was five frogs" and "Hubieron cinco ranas." (Plural "hubieron" would be singular "hubo" in standard Spanish.) -- Jerry Friedman On May 13, 8:28 pm, p...@informatimago.com (Pascal J. Bourguignon) wrote: > The fact that you don't write the subject doesn't mean it doesn't exist. > > It's the water droplets who are raining. Well, no. In Spanish, "llueve" is strictly "impersonal", a non-subject verb. There's no implicit subject in that sentence. Even if you said "llueven gotas" (it's raining water droplets), the water droplets wouldn't be the subject, but the object. It's not that "water droplets are raining", but that "water droplets are being rained" (sorry about mangling English for informative purposes ;-) > > > >> the need for a verb to have a subject, are first-semester > > > >> stuff in any European language. [quoted text clipped - 6 lines] > "It's raining" in Spanish is "Llueve" (literally "Rains") or "Esta > lloviendo" (literally "Is raining"). In French, where personal-pronoun subjects are NOT optional, this is "il pleut", with a dummy subject, just like English "it rains" or German "es regnet". However, German offers at least two non-elliptical sentence types where there really is no subject. The first kind is encountered early by beginning language learners in expressions such as "mir ist kalt" (I'm cold). You have a dative noun phrase, the copula, and a predicative adjective. The seconds kind are advanced passives. In German, as in English, when you put a sentence in the passive voice, the old (accusative) object is promoted to subject. In German, Dative and genitive objects remain as objects and keep their case. (No equivalent in English.) Contrary to English, German can also put sentences into the passive voice that do not have an (accusative) object. In that case, there simply is no subject. Heute arbeiten wir. (Today we work.) => Heute wird gearbeitet. (*Today, is worked. ~ Today work is done.) There is no hidden subject that could be recovered. If you have such a sentence without subject, turning it into active voice requires a bit of imagination since you need to invent a subject that fits the context. SignatureChristian "naddy" Weisgerber naddy@mips.inka.de >> > > >> the need for a verb to have a subject, are first-semester >> > > >> stuff in any European language. [quoted text clipped - 13 lines] > However, German offers at least two non-elliptical sentence types > where there really is no subject. All right. I'll admit that there may be sentences with verbs without subjects. My question really is whether this is a bug or a feature? That is, ontologically, is it possible to have an action without a subject? Or is it merely quirks in the languages, because of some laziness in finding the subjects? Water droplets are falling. In the action described by "it rains", there is clearly a 'ontological' subject: the water droplets. Water droplets exists. In the action described by "there are water droplets", there is again a clear ontological subject to the action of existing. So I would argue, and this was the meaning of my objection, that these are "bugs" or irregularities of these languages. Can anybody exibit an action without a subject? Signature__Pascal Bourguignon__ > Can anybody exibit an action without a subject? Masturbating (_se branler_). No subject needed. :) Signature~~~ Reinhold {Rey} Aman ~~~ "El hombre es tantas veces hombre cuanto es el número de lenguas que ha aprendido". -- Carlos I (Rey de España) > Water droplets are falling. In the action described by "it rains", there > is clearly a 'ontological' subject: the water droplets. Consider expressions like "it is raining cats and dogs" or "it was raining soup". It's clear that the things that are falling from the sky are the objects of the verb, not the subjects. SignaturePeter Moylan, Newcastle, NSW, Australia. http://www.pmoylan.org For an e-mail address, see my web page. >> Water droplets are falling. In the action described by "it rains", there >> is clearly a 'ontological' subject: the water droplets. > > Consider expressions like "it is raining cats and dogs" or "it was > raining soup". It's clear that the things that are falling from the sky > are the objects of the verb, not the subjects. Yes, that's my point. There is a thing that falls. There is no action without something that does this action, AFAIK. Signature__Pascal Bourguignon__ >>> Water droplets are falling. In the action described by "it rains", there >>> is clearly a 'ontological' subject: the water droplets. [quoted text clipped - 4 lines] > Yes, that's my point. There is a thing that falls. There is no action > without something that does this action, AFAIK. That sounds like something Isaac Newton might have said. On second thoughts, it sounds like something Bishop Berkeley might have said. Water is falling down. There is no action without something that does this action. That is, water cannot fall down unless something makes it fall down. Therefore there must be a god to throw down the water. QED. Perhaps I'm being too subtle here. My point is that we need to distinguish between the subject and the object of the verb. Or, in ontological terms, the doer and the doee. The raindrops do not throw themselves down. They are the things acted upon. The actor is the rain god, or gravity, or whatever other thing you think to be the cause. But, in any case, the things falling out of the sky are not the subject of the "is raining" verb. Certainly you can say "rain is falling". That's a different verb, though; one that usually does have a subject. SignaturePeter Moylan, Newcastle, NSW, Australia. http://www.pmoylan.org For an e-mail address, see my web page. On 14 Mag, 11:34, p...@informatimago.com (Pascal J. Bourguignon) wrote: > >> Water droplets are falling. In the action described by "it rains", there > >> is clearly a 'ontological' subject: the water droplets. [quoted text clipped - 5 lines] > Yes, that's my point. There is a thing that falls. There is no action > without something that does this action, AFAIK. But in the phrase "it is raining", which could be considered an abbreviation of "it is raining water", "water" is the object of the verb, not the subject. In fact, the phrase doesn't really have a subject, "it" is merely a syntatic placeholder. However, in Italian that phrase becomes "piove", which could be considered an abbreviation of "piove acqua", where "acqua" (water) is the subject of "piove" (rains). In other languages (Hindi?) the same phrase becomes something equivalent to "rain is happening". Vend filted: >On 14 Mag, 11:34, p...@informatimago.com (Pascal J. Bourguignon) >wrote: [quoted text clipped - 22 lines] >In other languages (Hindi?) the same phrase becomes something >equivalent to "rain is happening". Two monks were arguing about a flag...one said "the flag is moving".... The other said "the wind is moving".... The sixth patriarch happened to be passing by...he told them "not the wind, not the flag; mind is moving"....r Signature"Oy! A cat made of lead cannot fly." - Mark Brader declaims a basic scientific principle Fri, 14 May 2010 09:23:47 -0700 (PDT) from Vend <vend82@virgilio.it>: > But in the phrase "it is raining", which could be considered an > abbreviation of "it is raining water", "water" is the object of the > verb, not the subject. In fact, the phrase doesn't really have a > subject, "it" is merely a syntatic placeholder. I've always thought that, and a moment ago posted something to that effect. But maybe "it" really is a pronoun, whose antecedent is "the current condition" or "the weather". "What's the weather?" "It's raining." SignatureStan Brown, Oak Road Systems, Tompkins County, New York, USA http://OakRoadSystems.com Shikata ga nai... > That is, ontologically, is it possible to have an action without a subject? Ontologically, a buddhist would say that it is not possible to have an action *with* a subject. i.e., the supposed subject is an arbitrary delineation within a completely interconnected continuum of phenomena: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indra's_net> "It is raining," without any real subject, is, in this view, one of the few ontologically correct utterances one can make in english. It is the other "normal" sentences with their putative subjects which are ontological fictions. Everything that happens, just happens, just as rain just falls, and the wind just blows, without any single causal agent, other than the universe as a whole, that makes it happen. The need for a supposed subject to be the author of an action is just a linguistic fiction arising from the perceptual fiction of free will: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuroscience_of_free_will> Presumably this perceptual fiction arose in support of the theory of mind: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_mind> which has obvious adaptive advantages for social primates, as it allows partial prediction of the actions of others. People who think that subjects actually exist often believe that the past and the future exist as well; that the present is an infinitesimally small, effectively non-existent junction between them. In fact, it's the other way round - there is only the present; the past is just a fragmentary and distorted recollection, not even universally agreed upon, and the future is just an imaginal creation of even less consensus. warmest regards, Ralph SignatureRaffael Cavallaro Raffael Cavallaro <raffaelcavallaro@pas.espam.s.il.vous.plait.mac.com> writes: >> That is, ontologically, is it possible to have an action without a subject? > [quoted text clipped - 27 lines] > > warmest regards, Indeed, an ontology opposite to mine. Signature__Pascal Bourguignon__ On May 13, 10:46 pm, Raffael Cavallaro <raffaelcavall...@pas.espam.s.il.vous.plait.mac.com> wrote: > > That is, ontologically, is it possible to have an action without a subject? I'm going to leave that to the ontologists. > Ontologically, a buddhist would say that it is not possible to have an > action *with* a subject. i.e., the supposed subject is an arbitrary [quoted text clipped - 10 lines] > linguistic fiction arising from the perceptual fiction of free will: > <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuroscience_of_free_will> ... I don't think we see the subject as the /author/ of an action. When we say "the rain falls" or "the wind blows", I don't see that we're imputing any free will to the rain or the wind or anything else, or implying a single causal agent, even though those sentences have subjects. -- Jerry Friedman > I don't think we see the subject as the /author/ of an action. When > we say "the rain falls" or "the wind blows", I don't see that we're > imputing any free will to the rain or the wind or anything else, or > implying a single causal agent, even though those sentences have > subjects. My point was not about these types of degenerate sentences considered separately. My point was that the pervasive agency seen in human languages - the near universal grammatical division of the world into agents, actions, and the objects of those actions - flows from the cognitive illusion of our own agency or subjecthood. Our languages have a grammatical notion of "subject" "verb" and "object" because of the perceptual illusion of free will, the illusion of our own agency. Once this became the linguistic norm, it is only logical that expressions would arise that appear to follow this norm grammatically (e.g., "it is raining") but obviously don't conform to this grammatical norm semantically (i.e., there is no "it" that "does" the raining when it rains). Because the grammatical norm is based on a perceptual falsehood, it is, in fact the exeptions to the grammatical norm that are more scientifically accurate. Everything that you think you choose to do, in fact merely happens, without your illusory agency, much as it just rains without there being a "rainer."[1] warmest regards, Ralph [1] for those reading on c.l.l., I'm not talking about Rainer Joswig here! ;^) SignatureRaffael Cavallaro On May 14, 8:53 am, Raffael Cavallaro <raffaelcavall...@pas.espam.s.il.vous.plait.mac.com> wrote: > > I don't think we see the subject as the /author/ of an action. When > > we say "the rain falls" or "the wind blows", I don't see that we're [quoted text clipped - 7 lines] > agents, actions, and the objects of those actions - flows from the > cognitive illusion of our own agency or subjecthood. Or more precisely, from the whole universe, since it's an illusion that the cognitive illusion of our own agency is distinct from anything else? > Our languages have a grammatical notion of "subject" "verb" and > "object" because of the perceptual illusion of free will, the illusion > of our own agency. How would we say "The snow covered the rock" if we didn't have that illusion? (Assuming it's an illusion. I do not choose to, or I cannot, argue with you about free will.) And is there any support for your claim about language? > Once this became the linguistic norm, it is only > logical that expressions would arise that appear to follow this norm [quoted text clipped - 13 lines] > > [1] for those reading on c.l.l., I'm not talking about Rainer Joswig here! ;^) Or the illusion of him. -- Jerry Friedman > How would we say "The snow covered the rock" if we didn't have that > illusion? "Snow on rock," (note the absence of any active agent "doing" the "covering.") > (Assuming it's an illusion. I do not choose to, or I > cannot, argue with you about free will.) > > And is there any support for your claim about language? The claim that the subject-object distinction arises from the perceptual fiction of free will? Hard to see what would constitute support - hard evidence would require that we observe the evolution of the human theory of mind and human language, and both of these things happened a very long time ago (millions of years ago for the theory of mind, tens if not hundreds of thousands of years ago for human language). I simply note that: 1. theory of mind predates language because it is present to a limited extent in chimpanzees, and was therefore presumably present in the most recent common ancestor of homo and pan. This most recent common ancestor did not have either the vocal apparatus or the brain development necessary for anything remotely approaching human language. 2. it follows that human language evolved in a cognitive context where our ancestors believed, as we do, and chimpanzees appear to do, that they were/are the agents/originators/causes of their actions, and others are, by extrapolation, the agents of their actions. 3. we know from experiments in neuroscience that this perception of free will/agency is false. 4. there are no known human languages that fail to distinguish between what we would call verbs and nouns, or that lack any notion of agency whatsoever (i.e., there is some notion of a "doer" or "subject" in all languages, even if not every utterance requires an agent or subject). 5. it follows that there is a universal human cognitive base that consists of a world of a. relatively long lived entities corresponding to nouns b. relatively short lived entities (i.e., actions) corresponding to verbs c. a subset of nouns which are thought of as agents capable of initiating actions/free will. 6. This cognitive base is scientifically false, but extremely useful nevertheless, because it allows partial prediction of the actions of others. 7. finally, to bring this back on topic for c.l.l., nouns correspond to state and/or objects in programming languages, verbs correspond to functions which *mutate* state. I say mutate, because no human language conceives of verbs as "returning" a freshly consed noun object, but rather, they conceive of verbs mutating existing noun objects. E.g., in the sentence "John Wilkes Booth killed Lincoln," no one understands this to mean that the "kill" function took a live "Lincoln" as an argument, and "returned" a separate and distinct "dead Lincoln" as a return value. It is understood to mean that Booth, by way of the verb "kill," mutated, changed the live Lincoln into a dead Lincoln. This is of interest because it suggests that human beings have natural cognitive biases in favor of state and mutation, and that programming languages that eschew mutation deprive themselves of our obvious facility for thinking about and dealing with mutation, likely hard wired into our brains, and trained and refined by millennia of evolution and lifetimes of experience. The argument that pure functional languages are mathematically more "correct" is analogous to the statement that our perception of free will is scientifically false, that it is an illusion. The point is, it doesn't matter too much what is scientifically or mathematically correct when dealing with cognition and communication, whether we're talking about human natural language or computer languages. What matters is what is useful. In both cases, the "broken" conception (as judged from the standpoint of science and mathematics), whether it be free will in the case of natural language, or mutation of state in the case of computer languages, is the more useful.[1] Finally, knowing that these naive perceptions are convenient fictions allows us to avoid scratching our heads endlessly over utterances like "it is raining," wondering what the "it" is that is "doing" the raining. warmest regards, Ralph [1] to be clear, I'm not suggesting that we jettison functional programming altogether - it has obvious benefits for program decomposition and analysis that I don't need to detail here - but rather that pure functional languages are a bad idea because they deprive us of a native cognitive skill at which we are very well versed, and substitute a novel cognitive model (pure functions and monads) for which our intuition is poor. SignatureRaffael Cavallaro Sat, 15 May 2010 10:52:40 -0400 from Raffael Cavallaro <raffaelcavallaro@pas.espam.s.il.vous.plait.mac.com>: > > How would we say "The snow covered the rock" if we didn't have that > > illusion? > > "Snow on rock," (note the absence of any active agent "doing" the "covering.") But those aren't the same thing. "Snow on rock" could indeed mean "the snow covered the rock". But it could equally well mean "the snow is covering the rock", "the snow is falling onto the rock", "there is a patch of snow covering part of the rock", and so forth. SignatureStan Brown, Oak Road Systems, Tompkins County, New York, USA http://OakRoadSystems.com Shikata ga nai... > But those aren't the same thing. > > "Snow on rock" could indeed mean "the snow covered the rock". But it > could equally well mean "the snow is covering the rock", "the snow is > falling onto the rock", "there is a patch of snow covering part of > the rock", and so forth. "Snow covered the rock," can mean: "At that time, the rock was already covered with snow." "At that very moment, snow was falling, covering the rock." The fact that various forms of expression are often semantically ambiguous is orthogonal to the question of the cognitive model underlying grammatical norms. Hypothetically, if we had a language where the grammatical norm were one without subjects, we could still establish semantic and grammatical norms to allow the expression of both these meanings: "snow on rock in progress" "snow on rock already." warmest regards, Ralph SignatureRaffael Cavallaro > Sat, 15 May 2010 10:52:40 -0400 from Raffael Cavallaro > <raffaelcavallaro@pas.espam.s.il.vous.plait.mac.com>: [quoted text clipped - 11 lines] > falling onto the rock", "there is a patch of snow covering part of > the rock", and so forth. Rock under snow. ;-) rg On May 15, 8:52 am, Raffael Cavallaro <raffaelcavall...@pas.espam.s.il.vous.plait.mac.com> wrote: > > How would we say "The snow covered the rock" if we didn't have that > > illusion? > > "Snow on rock," (note the absence of any active agent "doing" the "covering.") ... Sorry, bad example. How about "The river has eroded the rock" or "The wind blew the pollen toward me"? > > And is there any support for your claim about language? > [quoted text clipped - 5 lines] > mind, tens if not hundreds of thousands of years ago for human > language). Exactly. > I simply note that: > > 1. theory of mind predates language because it is present to a limited > extent in chimpanzees, and was therefore presumably present in the most > recent common ancestor of homo and pan. (It could have been parallel evolution, but that's not relevant to the argument.) > This most recent common > ancestor did not have either the vocal apparatus or the brain [quoted text clipped - 4 lines] > they were/are the agents/originators/causes of their actions, and > others are, by extrapolation, the agents of their actions. I rather think some idea of agency must have predated any idea of free will. That is, our ancestors must have distinguished a fellow hominid who did something from the others who didn't do it (an illusion, in your view) before having a "theory" that the other hominid had a mind. At least it's a possibility. > 3. we know from experiments in neuroscience that this perception of > free will/agency is false. If the experiments show anything, it's that perception of free will is false. They don't show anything about agency. Indeed, they assume that people are individual agents. > 4. there are no known human languages that fail to distinguish between > what we would call verbs and nouns, or that lack any notion of agency [quoted text clipped - 8 lines] > c. a subset of nouns which are thought of as agents capable of > initiating actions/free will. The distinction isn't length of life--there are nouns that refer to things with very short lives ("lightning", "intermediate vector boson") and verbs that refer to actions of very long duration ("the universe is expanding"). Right at the moment I'm not going to come up with or look up definitions of "entity" and "action". Anyway, I'll accept that we have such a cognitive base. However, I suspect your origin story is backwards. First we perceived in terms of agents and actions, then we perceived in terms of free will. I don't see a way to settle it, though. > 6. This cognitive base is scientifically false, The only part you've offered scientific evidence against is free will, that is, part of "c". > but extremely useful > nevertheless, because it allows partial prediction of the actions of others. Or of arbitrarily delineated illusions of others, though delineating them seems to have some pragmatic value. > 7. finally, to bring this back on topic for c.l.l., nouns correspond to > state and/or objects in programming languages, verbs correspond to [quoted text clipped - 24 lines] > whether it be free will in the case of natural language, or mutation of > state in the case of computer languages, is the more useful.[1] Certainly I find the concept of changing things extremely useful in my inept attempts at programming, which don't include lisp. > Finally, knowing that these naive perceptions are convenient fictions > allows us to avoid scratching our heads endlessly over utterances like > "it is raining," wondering what the "it" is that is "doing" the raining. I think most people don't scratch their heads too much over that-- certainly not endlessly. > warmest regards, > > Ralph ... > -- > Raffael Cavallaro The name "Ralph Cavallaro" is sounding more and more familiar. Is there any chance you and I were in a class on human evolution in about 1981? You would have been the student who knew what was going on. Or am I suffering from an illusion of an all too familiar type? -- Jerry Friedman On 15 May, 15:52, Raffael Cavallaro <raffaelcavall...@pas.espam.s.il.vous.plait.mac.com> wrote: > > How would we say "The snow covered the rock" if we didn't have that > > illusion? [quoted text clipped - 29 lines] > 3. we know from experiments in neuroscience that this perception of > free will/agency is false. I'm not convinced that this has been shown. I assume you're referring to experiments that show brain activity of intent to do something before the subject claims to have made the decision to act. The brain/ mind is still deciding. > 4. there are no known human languages that fail to distinguish between > what we would call verbs and nouns, or that lack any notion of agency [quoted text clipped - 12 lines] > nevertheless, because it allows partial prediction of the actions of > others. I'd say that indicated it wasn't false > 7. finally, to bring this back on topic for c.l.l., nouns correspond to > state and/or objects in programming languages, verbs correspond to [quoted text clipped - 9 lines] > This is of interest because it suggests that human beings have natural > cognitive biases in favor of state and mutation, since the world is full of mutating object isn't this reasonable? or is it just those live Lincoln's become inaccessible immediatly after the Booth kill function executes? and presumably the garbage collector eventually returns the live Lincoln to the freestore. > and that programming > languages that eschew mutation deprive themselves of our obvious > facility for thinking about and dealing with mutation, likely hard > wired into our brains, and trained and refined by millennia of > evolution and lifetimes of experience. The argument that pure > functional languages are mathematically more "correct" are they "more correct"? Isn't mathematical correctness a predicate? > is analogous to > the statement that our perception of free will is scientifically false, > that it is an illusion. and equally false > The point is, it doesn't matter too much what is scientifically or > mathematically correct when dealing with cognition and communication, [quoted text clipped - 17 lines] > versed, and substitute a novel cognitive model (pure functions and > monads) for which our intuition is poor. nick keighley Raffael Cavallaro <raffaelcavallaro@pas.espam.s.il.vous.plait.mac.com> wrote: [...] > People who think that subjects actually exist often believe that the > past and the future exist as well; that the present is an [quoted text clipped - 3 lines] > agreed upon, and the future is just an imaginal creation of even less > consensus. There's actually a recent article which claims to show experimental support for the future influencing the past, but I can't find it at the moment. I'll ping the friend who originally sent it to me. > There's actually a recent article which claims to show experimental > support for the future influencing the past, but I can't find it at the > moment. Just wait a bit. By then the future will have influenced the past, and you will have found it. ;^) warmest regards, Ralph SignatureRaffael Cavallaro Raffael Cavallaro <raffaelcavallaro@pas.espam.s.il.vous.plait.mac.com> wrote: > > There's actually a recent article which claims to show experimental > > support for the future influencing the past, but I can't find it at the [quoted text clipped - 4 lines] > > ;^) My friend hasn't yet responded to my ping (I suspect he's headed out for vacation already) but, of course, Google has several pointers, e.g. http://chapmannews.wordpress.com/2010/03/18/chapman-professor-lands-disc over-cover-story/ Fri, 14 May 2010 11:18:41 -0400 from Bob Felts <wrf3 @stablecross.com>: > There's actually a recent article which claims to show experimental > support for the future influencing the past, but I can't find it at the > moment. I'll ping the friend who originally sent it to me. Won't you have to wait till he sends it? :-) SignatureStan Brown, Oak Road Systems, Tompkins County, New York, USA http://OakRoadSystems.com Shikata ga nai... Fri, 14 May 2010 04:00:21 +0200 from Pascal J. Bourguignon <pjb@informatimago.com>: > That is, ontologically, is it possible to have an action without a subject? A good question. "Il pleut" and "it's raining" *look* like subject- verb, but they're not really. More accurate would be "La pluie see tombe"(*) or "Rain is occurring". (*) I'm sure there's a better way to say that. But I know very little of modern grammar. SignatureStan Brown, Oak Road Systems, Tompkins County, New York, USA http://OakRoadSystems.com Shikata ga nai... >Fri, 14 May 2010 04:00:21 +0200 from Pascal J. Bourguignon ><pjb@informatimago.com>: [quoted text clipped - 7 lines] > >But I know very little of modern grammar. Me neither. With sentences such as "It is raining" and "It is sunny" it is possible to describe them as ways of saying "Rain is falling" and "The sun is shining" or something similar. How about "It is dry" and "It is dark"? They describe a condition in the same way as the other sentences. Sun and rain can be thought of as "substances", physical entities, which come from somewhere. "Dry" and "dark are not "substances". SignaturePeter Duncanson, UK (in alt.usage.english) >>Fri, 14 May 2010 04:00:21 +0200 from Pascal J. Bourguignon >><pjb@informatimago.com>: [quoted text clipped - 16 lines] > and rain can be thought of as "substances", physical entities, which > come from somewhere. "Dry" and "dark are not "substances". Ask yourself who or what is dry or dark. Signature__Pascal Bourguignon__ >>> Fri, 14 May 2010 04:00:21 +0200 from Pascal J. Bourguignon >>> <pjb@informatimago.com>: [quoted text clipped - 16 lines] > > Ask yourself who or what is dry or dark. For "it is dry" you could say "the weather is dry". For "it is dark" I would have to say something like "the lighting is dark". The "it" in these sentences could be interpreted as meaning "the general environment". It's ugly, though. Would you really be willing to accept "the general environment is raining"? It makes more sense, to me, to say that "It is raining" is a hypercorrection for "Is raining", and likewise for the other examples. The sentence "Is raining" (which is grammatical in several European languages) has a meaning that everyone can understand. Requiring that the verb must have a subject is an artificial constraint that, while possibly satisfying someone's ideas about how an artificial language should work, is entirely a grammatical constraint rather than a semantic constraint. In this connection, it is worth mentioning that Esperanto - an artificial language, therefore a language supposedly free of at least some constraints - translates "it is raining" by "pluvas": a verb without any subject. Several other languages do the same thing, which I think is sufficient to demonstrate that verbs without subjects are possible. If you want to respond that something is doing the raining, I would reply that that is a question of theology rather than language. SignaturePeter Moylan, Newcastle, NSW, Australia. http://www.pmoylan.org For an e-mail address, see my web page. Some entity, AKA Peter Moylan <gro.nalyomp@retep>, wrote this mindboggling stuff: (selectively-snipped-or-not-p) > In this connection, it is worth mentioning that Esperanto - an > artificial language, therefore a language supposedly free of at least > some constraints - translates "it is raining" by "pluvas": a verb > without any subject. Several other languages do the same thing, which I > think is sufficient to demonstrate that verbs without subjects are possible. But do not forget that esperanto, being 'artificial', it does lean heavily on latin and the romanic-language-family heritage as to its choice of its vocabulary and other 'rules'. It was born in a time where any 'scolar//educated person' had a working knowledge of latin. Cor SignatureJoin us and live in peace or face obliteration If you hate to see my gun consider a non criminal line of work I never threathen but merely state the consequences of your choice Geavanceerde politieke correctheid is niet te onderscheiden van sarcasme >>>Fri, 14 May 2010 04:00:21 +0200 from Pascal J. Bourguignon >>><pjb@informatimago.com>: [quoted text clipped - 18 lines] > > Ask yourself who or what is dry or dark. Alright. "Сухо." What is dry here? The air? No, it isn't the only thing that's dry, the usage doesn't align with it, you can have dry air after rainy week, and as long as one can find puddles or mud, it may not be called "сухо." "Сухо" happens when not only the air is dry, it is when it is dry overall, universally. You can imagine fictional unversum that is dry, but this exists only because you insist on it. In the real life there's no subject "being actively dry." Even if you restrict it to a specific weather context. Same applies to "темно." All this is similar to theist view on the world. When it is hard to believe that something can happen itself, one invents fictional deity to make it happen. SignatureHE CE3OH... Thu, 13 May 2010 20:38:05 +0000 (UTC) from Christian Weisgerber <naddy@mips.inka.de>: > > [quoted text muted] > > > > "It's raining" into a few other languages. [quoted text clipped - 5 lines] > is "il pleut", with a dummy subject, just like English "it rains" > or German "es regnet". And in French we have "il y a une maison", again with the dummy subject "il". But the corresponding English is "there's a house". What is the grammatical function of "there"? SignatureStan Brown, Oak Road Systems, Tompkins County, New York, USA http://OakRoadSystems.com Shikata ga nai... > Thu, 13 May 2010 20:38:05 +0000 (UTC) from Christian Weisgerber > <naddy@mips.inka.de>: [quoted text clipped - 10 lines] > subject "il". But the corresponding English is "there's a house". > What is the grammatical function of "there"? In meaning, it's the same as the "y" in the French sentence: at that place [1]. Grammatically, though, it's a little different, because "y" is a dative pronoun while "there" is an adverb. Translate back into French again, and you get "Voilà une maison". I don't know what part of speech "voilà" is considered to be these days, but historically it must have been an imperative. ("See there".) All of which seems to mean that these existential expressions can occupy any grammatical niche, depending on which language you choose and which exact wording. [1] That is, in the phrase "il y a", the "il" is a dummy subject, but the "y" is not a dummy; so the informal form "Y'a une maison" is actually more logical. SignaturePeter Moylan, Newcastle, NSW, Australia. http://www.pmoylan.org For an e-mail address, see my web page. Sat, 15 May 2010 12:56:16 +1000 from Peter Moylan <gro.nalyomp@retep>: > > And in French we have "il y a une maison", again with the dummy > > subject "il". But the corresponding English is "there's a house". [quoted text clipped - 3 lines] > place [1]. Grammatically, though, it's a little different, because "y" > is a dative pronoun while "there" is an adverb. Yes, but ... "There" is indubitably an adverb in "A house is there". But is it really in "there is a house"? The two sentences don't mean the same thing: one is about location and the other about existence. We can say "there is a good reason for granting clemency" but not "a good reason for granting clemency is there". In sentences of the form "there is X", what is the subject of the sentence? If "there" is an adverb then X must be the subject, but that seems strange to me because of the placement. I know that sentences can be inverted, but this doesn't feel like inversion to me, because of the difference of meanings. Maybe I'm trying to pigeonhole something unclassifiable. When I was in school, we diagrammed sentences, and I got the idea that every sentence is diagrammable. "How do you do?" is, even though it would be pretty hard to glean the actual meaning of the sentence from that diagram. But maybe "there is a house" isn't diagrammable. > Translate back into French again, and you get "Voilà une maison". I > don't know what part of speech "voilà" is considered to be these days, [quoted text clipped - 3 lines] > any grammatical niche, depending on which language you choose and which > exact wording. It would seem so. Or should we say "any grammatical niche, or none"? SignatureStan Brown, Oak Road Systems, Tompkins County, New York, USA http://OakRoadSystems.com Shikata ga nai... > Sat, 15 May 2010 12:56:16 +1000 from Peter Moylan > <gro.nalyomp@retep>: [quoted text clipped - 13 lines] > say "there is a good reason for granting clemency" but not "a good > reason for granting clemency is there". Let us paraphrase, then. In such sentences "there is" is a way of saying "exists". So "there is a house" is another way of saying "exists a house". Some purists, I suppose, would insist that this should be "It exists a house" - I have seen that suggestion in a forum I once inhabited - but they end up admitting that the "it" is a dummy subject. The only reason for introducing dummy subjects is to satisfy the rule that - in some languages, but not in others - every verb must have a subject. This is a particularly strong rule in French, where "il y a" definitely requires the dummy subject "il". (A subject that is omitted in at least some examples of "street French". L'Académie might rule on what gets into the dictionaries, but not on what is spoken.) It is a slightly weaker rule in English; most of the time we require a dummy subject, but I suspect that we could find counterexamples. It is not at all a rule in Spanish, to name just one example. I have wondered at times whether this is because English has only one "be" verb, where some other Indo-European languages have two verbs. I doubt that I'll ever find the answer. SignaturePeter Moylan, Newcastle, NSW, Australia. http://www.pmoylan.org For an e-mail address, see my web page. Some entity, AKA Aleksej Saushev <asau@inbox.ru>, wrote this mindboggling stuff: (selectively-snipped-or-not-p) >> the need for a verb to have a subject, are first-semester >> stuff in any European language. [quoted text clipped - 12 lines] > > Surprise! A sentence without verb. oooops .... Just to pick a nit : делаetb : is doing something, which surely is a verb. ;-) The standard translation is often "how are you", but "How do you do" would be a good translation too, but I think it depends on social surrounding and tradition etc. But let us not forget that russian & polish are slavic languages which do not compare with western-european like german, english and dutch from anglo-germanic descent. And that the southern-european like french, spanish and italian are from a romanic descent. All this makes europe a real heaven for multiple luanguage afficionados (as I am), plays havoc with your style and grammar. So, all in all, not all european languages are equal .. some are more equal than others. ;-) But on a lighter note, as a student in the russian-for-beginners course once said: I read two books , War and Peace ... Cor SignatureJoin us and live in peace or face obliteration If you hate to see my gun consider a non criminal line of work I never threathen but merely state the consequences of your choice Geavanceerde politieke correctheid is niet te onderscheiden van sarcasme > But on a lighter note, as a student in the russian-for-beginners > course once said: > I read two books , War and Peace ... I like both kinds of music. SignaturePeter Moylan, Newcastle, NSW, Australia. http://www.pmoylan.org For an e-mail address, see my web page. > Some entity, AKA Aleksej Saushev <asau@inbox.ru>, > wrote this mindboggling stuff: [quoted text clipped - 19 lines] > Just to pick a nit : делаetb : is doing something, > which surely is a verb. ;-) Just to pick an even bigger nit: The word дела is a neuter plural noun meaning "affairs". The question means "How [are] things?" SignatureJames Some entity, AKA James Hogg <Jas.Hogg@gOUTmail.com>, wrote this mindboggling stuff: (selectively-snipped-or-not-p) >>> "Как дела ?" >>> [quoted text clipped - 7 lines] > The word дела is a neuter plural noun meaning "affairs". The question > means "How [are] things?" Yes, that too. or, how are your 'affairs' doing ? but which type of affair is it now ? with te lady nextdoor, the state of your bankaccount or in general. Like in some 'circles' in france one says: 'ca boule ?' one responds with 'en frites', and it really has nothing to do with throwing steel balls while munching on freedom fries. ;-) It's context and idioms etc that drives true meaning of words in any language wich makes translations a real hassle to get it right. Just look at the funny/poor results of computer-translations even we people can not get a simple greeting right in one go. ;-) Cor SignatureJoin us and live in peace or face obliteration If you hate to see my gun consider a non criminal line of work I never threathen but merely state the consequences of your choice Geavanceerde politieke correctheid is niet te onderscheiden van sarcasme +--------------- | One problem with english being widespread is that it is a language in | which is easy to attain understandability, but very difficult to attain [quoted text clipped - 4 lines] | because native speakers will understand their intended meaning, but not | correct their grammar and/or usage. +--------------- Heh. Sounds a lot like Common Lisp... ;-} ;-} -Rob ----- Rob Warnock <rpw3@rpw3.org> 627 26th Avenue <URL:http://rpw3.org/> San Mateo, CA 94403 (650)572-2607 >On May 2, 9:06 am, Raffael Cavallaro ><raffaelcavall...@pas.espam.s.il.vous.plait.mac.com> wrote: [quoted text clipped - 16 lines] >tickled his mind, hit her brain, or boiled his blood, that writing is >great. By that definition, you fail. >> On May 2, 9:06 am, Raffael Cavallaro >> <raffaelcavall...@pas.espam.s.il.vous.plait.mac.com> wrote: [quoted text clipped - 16 lines] > > By that definition, you fail. Who gets more attention than The Mighty Xah, wherever his pen treads? hth, kxo Some entity, AKA His kennyness <kentilton@gmail.com>, wrote this mindboggling stuff: (selectively-snipped-or-not-p) (snipped .....much) >>> tickled his mind, hit her brain, or boiled his blood, that writing is >>> great. >> >> By that definition, you fail. > > Who gets more attention than The Mighty Xah, wherever his pen treads? To boldy re-pen what other penned before. Cor SignatureJoin us and live in peace or face obliteration If you hate to see my gun consider a non criminal line of work I never threathen but merely state the consequences of your choice Geavanceerde politieke correctheid is niet te onderscheiden van sarcasme > More over, if the style per se, persuaded the reader, > tickled his mind, hit her brain, or boiled his blood, that writing is > great. At Google Books: 410 on "that made his blood boil". 28 on "that boiled his blood" is the 2nd strange only to me? Marius Hancu >> More over, if the style per se, persuaded the reader, >> tickled his mind, hit her brain, or boiled his blood, that writing is [quoted text clipped - 6 lines] > >is the 2nd strange only to me? It is strange to me. It appears that the standard indomatic phrase has been rearranged to mimic the structure of "tickled his mind" - <verb>ed <personal adjective[1]> <noun>. [1] Or whatever the technical term is. SignaturePeter Duncanson, UK (in alt.usage.english) >> More over, if the style per se, persuaded the reader, >> tickled his mind, hit her brain, or boiled his blood, that writing is >> great. > At Google Books: > 410 on "that made his blood boil". > 28 on "that boiled his blood" > is the 2nd strange only to me? It is strange, but I would not characterise it as wrong. In the hands of a competent writer it would be a reworking of the idiom to suit a particular cadence or give a certain feel. In Xah's writing, coupled with all his other errors it is simply his screwing up the idiom because he was too lazy to get get it right. And that is the heart of Xah's issues with everything in my experience going back way too many years. He is driven enough to learn quite a bit about a topic, but at the point where most people have an epiphany that this is something they really want to know well, Xah has a moment where he decides he is now an expert and doesn't need to learn anything else. At that point he starts scrabbling about trying to 'correct' the deficiencies in whatever it is rather than continuing to learn. Also at that point he becomes intractable because he is, only in his delusion, and expert an therefore knows more than you do. Short version: yall are wasting your time. SignatureCogito cogito, ergo cogito sum, cogito > More over, if the style per se, persuaded the reader, > tickled his mind, hit her brain, or boiled his blood, that writing is > great. Also, I think that: - "more over" should be "Moreover" - there definitely shouldn't be a comma after "per se," as it definitely breaks the communication Marius Hancu > «Of course, all these style talk about how to form your words and > punctuations into cogent sentences are in the context of formal > writing, in science, journal, reports, documentations, tutorials, > textbooks, as opposed to literary tomfoolery as in essaying, novels, > poetry, of which, pigs fly.» I think one should use instead: "all this style talk ... is/exists in the context" as "talk" is singular. Or: "all these style fights/conversation/disputes/(even "talks") ... exist/ take place in the context" if a plural is wanted. Marius Hancu > when a piece of > writing, communicated exactly what the writer wants the reader to > feel, understand, with no hiccups in the reading process, that writing > is successful. No comma after "writing," IMO, as it breaks the flow. Also, "communicated" should be changed to the present perfect "has communicated," as the reference is made to events leading to the present. Marius Hancu >As you can see, the target audience are people concerned about > writing and have read one or two of the mentioned styled guides. A relative "who" is needed: "and _who_ have read" or in a non-restrictive format: ", who have read ..." > In > general, they are college graduates, or involved in the writing > profession. Lack of symmetry: "or _people_ involved in the writing profession," is what is needed, IMO. "styles guides mentioned" would flow better. Marius Hancu > «Of course, all these style talk about how to form your words and > punctuations into cogent sentences are in the context of formal [quoted text clipped - 5 lines] > perfectly and fluently? In particular, when the “pigs fly” part hits > them? I do, in fact, have a problem with that part. Normally, one would expect: "of/about which one could say "pigs fly." Your phrasing is confusing. The quotation marks are important in order to indicate a popular saying. The even more confusing part is that you're using an inappropriate idiom: "when pigs fly" means "never" as shown here: --- Alice's adventures in Wonderland: and, Through the looking-glass and what ... - Page 316 Lewis Carroll - Fiction - 2003 - 356 pages 'When pigs fly' is a slang idiom meaning 'never', just as 'pigs might fly' means 'perhaps' (Partridge, A Dictionary of Historical Slang, London, 1937). http://tinyurl.com/24z89qt --- One can't pop in any idiom, without regard to its recognized meaning, in a context, and expect that it would fly, that is that it would be accepted or understood, by readers. Marius Hancu . . . > Was reading Wikipedia on The Elements of Style. Here's a interesting quote: > « Edinburgh University linguistics professor Geoffrey Pullum has > criticized The Elements of Style, saying: > The book's toxic mix of purism, atavism, and personal > eccentricity is not underpinned by a proper grounding in English grammar. Pullum's polemic appeared a year ago, perhaps more, and was then discussed in some detail. His main complaint is that American colleges use Strunk & White as a source for grammar (despite the title's indicating that it is about style, not grammar.) Prof. Pullum taught linguistics in US colleges for 20 years before returning to Britain but has no special reputation in his professional field (says my brother, who has some eminence in the same field.) SignatureDon Phillipson Carlsbad Springs (Ottawa, Canada) > Prof. Pullum taught linguistics in US colleges for 20 years before > returning to Britain but has no special reputation in his professional > field (says my brother, who has some eminence in the same field.) Are you sure about that? I think he's quite a prominent git. Or is that not the professional field you were referring to? SignatureWhen someone is impatient and says, "I haven't got all day," I always wonder, How can that be? How can you not have all day? > a little ditty of mine: > [quoted text clipped - 37 lines] > antiquated pet peeves jostling for space with 1970s taboos and 1990s > computer advice."[12] Ah, Boston, that pinnacle of wicked shahhhp eleocution. Forest. Trees. Please note order. All I remember from S&W was that it was well-written itself and the bit about simplify, simplify, simplify. Good advice for writing code, think to come of it. > » > [quoted text clipped - 13 lines] > I kept on reading a bit on Wikipedia about the various style guides. > Fowler's Modern English Usage, seems like one i can endorse. "[Fowler] opposed all pedantry, and notably ridiculed artificial grammatical rules without warrant in natural English usage — such as bans on split infinitives and ending a sentence with a preposition, rules on the placement of the word only, and distinctions between which and that. " Ewwww. Wrong, wrong, and wronger. kt |
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