Grammar, spelling and the decline of the English language

[SoupDragon]

Moving from the Weird Habits thread, I thought I'd share my favourite typo, spotted only last week in Tescos where they were advertising Winnie the Poo play mats. This was both on the big print sign and the smaller shelf label.

My, how I sniggered in a puerile fashion!

ks - a dialect doesn't have to have an entire vocabulary all of its own - it just has to have some words of its own and some grammatical forms. Yorkshire English is a dialect, where it sounds line Milanese is close to being a separate language because it is not understandable by ordinary Italian speakers.

The line can be a fine one - the various "dialects" of Chinese are really separate languages because they are mutually unintelligable. People just call them dialects because they share a written language. Also Serbs will now say they speak "Serbian" and Croats "Croatian" even though they can often understand each other and there was one language called "Serbo-croatian" only 15 years ago.

But I maintain that Yorkshire English, West Country, East Anglian English etc are all dialects.

thee / thou? Not an expert on Yorkshire I must admit, but do remember reading some very odd grammar in Wuthering Heights.

linguisticians?

yes, I prefer linguaroonians. Where is that The Linguist site? (or are you a subscriber?)

I almsot feel inspired to apply for that post-grad course now ! '

Oh something in Linguistics. That was my degree and the reason I moved to Spain (to learn another language)

Speaking of which, if you think English dialects/accents can be strange you should hear the Andalucian accent. Completely incomprehensable (to me) and reviled by other Spanish speakers - much more so than any English accent I think.

ks, my dh's mother's family are all from a small mining village outside Hartlepool and they definitely speak a dialect. It's not just me who can't understand them, Londoners can't either. They use different words as well as having a strong accent.
As far as Italy goes, dialect may be dying in Milan, but you'll be happy to know it definitely isn't further south. Where we go for our summer seaside holiday is just 45 min. north of Naples and I can't understand much of what the locals are saying young and old. And when I went to Sicily a few years ago, it was the same thing.

Apparently, according to my friend in Southern Ireland, us Northerners are hard t'understand, dunt know y tho

This is a link I got from mumsnet:
Leader of the Free World (if you're using Safari, unfortunately the site won't work). I don't mean it as a political thing, but if you click on the second square you'll get some funny, um, management phrases? Things that could be used as management phrases? The whole management phrase thing made me remember the site, at any rate.

Anais, the "loose" vs "lose" thing deserved to be repeated. It's my and my husband's pet peeve also.

On the discussion of email: I think it should be more like speech than the formal written language, if you know the people to whom you are writing. (Sorry, still can't end a sentence with a preposition when writing I don't mean that you shouldn't; I mean that I can't. As you can see, grammatical errors are part of my life. It's just that I can't do the dangling particle (?) thing without the invisible aunt coming down.... oh, you don't want me to go on.) Anyway, I think email flows better when written more like people actually speak (ie, I think it conveys more meaning). Again, this is if the people know each other; if they don't, there's no end to misunderstandings and misreadings. My letter writing was also like that very personal and assuming the person to whom I had written knew me well. If it was personal.. in business cases people should be businesslike.

Mebbe? I'm definitely all for losing the people who use "loose" incorrectly. And I'm trying to wean myself from parentheses, but that's just me and I don't mind it in others. I do overuse them, though. Not now, only three times. Sadly that's an improvement.

ps.. I'm living in CH in the Swiss German speaking bit. It's supposedly an entirely different language to German. Does anyone know the origins? Swiss German is definitely an oral language and not generally written. It's all so interesting.

I hate it when people get the use of off/of incorrect. What is so hard to understand? My friend always gets them wrong, and she is a fully qualified surveyor. She also says 'pacific' for 'specific'. Oh yes, her husband says 'I done that'. Just goes to show that you can do well, even without the basics of grammer. As long as you have a secretary with better skills in the English language

On the regional dialect note, I hate it in the 'Fimbles', when the bird says at the end 'That's right, it were Florrie.' Surely, although she has a Northern accent, she could say 'was'?

One of the worst (and most common) examples of misuse of the English language has to be 'I could of done it earlier' when what someone really wants/means to say is 'I could HAVE done it earlier'. Once you start hearing it, it pops up EVERYWHERE and it really sets my teeth on edge.

The other thing that irritates the crap out of me (elegant form of expression, I know!) is the London Underground poster that says 'Please do not leave unattended luggage'. How can you leave unattended luggage?????? It's only unattended AFTER you've left it!!!!!! Arrrrgh! Obviously, what LU mean is please do not leave luggage unattended but they were evidently too mean to pay an editor £15 an hour to check their swanky new ad campaign.

The apostrophe thing also gets me going. My dh thinks I'm a nightmare and says I'm like a nitpicking old schoolmarm. So I'm very glad to find some fellow spirits here.

Quick moan about the decline of Spelling, we take on a few 17/18yr olds at work , every year, and also have some work experience students. It is amazing how bad their spelling is, even the bright, well motivated ones. worst cases are clients names, anything other than jones/smith seems to be spelt phonetically, but even simple words are frequently mis-spelled (?SP!). DS also frequently does not have his spelling corrected properly in his school work. Yes I know creativity is important but so is spelling, surely?

Fascinating thread! London Underground are useless at spelling and grammar - there was a directions sign at East Putney tube (and maybe still is) listing "Edgeware Road" instead of "Edgware Road"; it can't even get its own stations spelled properly. And they always have signs and announcements declaring "trains are not running in both directions" instead of "in either direction".

I don't expect everyone to be able to spell and use language correctly but agree that companies should pay people to check what they print. Funnily enough, I've just finished a proofreading course and am noting all potential clients...!

Accents and dialects are a different case IMO, but if you're teaching English to foreigners it does make some sense to have a standard. The traditional standard of Received Pronunciation (RP) is how English is spoken by a (now very small) minority of middle- and upper-class white people from SE England. That's where the snobbery comes from, and the ridiculous accents of supposedly working-class characters in films before they started using real working-class actors. When I taught EFL in Spain I had a very articulate and educated Scottish colleague who taught a class of Spanish children the question tag (the "innit" that www talks about) of the verb "to be" in the first person as "I am, amn't I?" as that was how he spoke. My Irish grandad used to say "He do be here every day". Both very logical, but "incorrect".

You can't compare cases like that with wrong apostrophes etc. Or the letter I got from my son's school advertising a book fair where "books and stationary" would be sold. OK, so not all teachers can spell (though I do find that a bit worrying!) but I think it's terrible that standards have dropped so low that people don't think it important to check any more. And that probably was put through a spell checker, but as "stationary" is a word, it wouldn't have picked it up. Spell checkers are next to useless if you don't also check a document for sense. In fact they've probably hastened the decline of standards as people assume they're infallible.

Thanks aloha.

Re office jargon - I had an Editor at the BBC who used to come out with the most ridiculous phrases regarding potential programme ideas:

Let's run it up the flag pole and see who salutes.

Let's put it in the fridge and see who snacks on it.

Etc etc. An ideal candidate for a bullshit bingo game of his very own.

willow - ROFLMTO

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