Grammar police

[chattychattyboomba]

there is no such word as 'Et' as in 'I et spaghetti for dinner, I et the lot!'
If you want to say 'eat' as in past tense, the word, my friends is 'ate' ATE! Do you hear me!!!!???

Also 'i were sat there' NO! Wrong!
I was sitting there... OR I sat there.
Got it? Good.

[NotTreadingGrapes]

//ET// is NOT WRONG.

The Queen, I bet a zillion dollars, says //et//. It's the more old-fashioned (ie traditional) pronunciation of "ate".

Like she says 'otel.

I love the "are you coming with?" (though I am East Midlands and don't use it)

My linguistics teacher once amazed us (group of 100 or so in a big lecture) by asking us to finish this sentence "I ought to do it, I?" He said he could tell within a 30 mile radius where we were from depending on the word we inserted.

Two of us inserted the same word, just the 2 of us, and discovered I was Nottingham, and she was Chesterfield.

[StealthOfficialCrispTester]

The thing thTs really annoying me at the mome t is "st" pronounced "sht"

Shtupid shudents

Really irritates me are people scared of the s sound?

I have a new pbone can not type or punctuate and do nkt belong here I know

[LRDtheFeministDragon]

May I be a massive pedant? Please, please?

Ok then.

We don't really know what dialect Chaucer spoke. We know some of his scribes spoke Type II standard English, but we don't have a holograph. Retrospectively, some of his books ended up shaping what standard English is today.

He could've said 'et' though.

[LRDtheFeministDragon]

nottreading that is immensely cool (that he knew exactly where you were from). I love that sort of thing.

[MadBusLady]

It's the more old-fashioned (ie traditional) pronunciation of "ate".

Ah, that makes sense, that must be why I do it, I am quaite queeny. In that link somebody gave to the Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary, the sound file for //et// is definitely in an RP accent.

[StealthOfficialCrispTester]

My students comme t was a illustration not an opinikn btw

[TheThickPlottens]

[Grin] for UsualSuspect being the Thread police. That had crossed my mind too.

I would have thought people saying "et" still wrote it as "ate". I wouldn't have thought that regional dialects or accents were wrong. Like people from Liverpool pronouncing their 'ing' differently.

[LRDtheFeministDragon]

Are we talking 'et' with a nice crisp 't' sound or 'et' with a glottal stop, as my brother does it when he is trying to pretend he is down with the kids?

[NotTreadingGrapes]

It's the same sort of thing when people criticise US English grammar and spelling. Most differences come about because US English still uses the original English that the first settlers took over with them, whereas English English has changed, US English hasn't.

So we could say that US English is more correct in a way, except we don't, because that would be a knobby thing to say.

If language didn't evolve we'd all be walking round thee-ing and thou-ing. (and my Grandad, north Derbyshire, still did!)

[NotTreadingGrapes]

LRD- me too, fascinates me.

The word we inserted by the way was "didn't".

I ought to do it, didn't I?

Completely left field usage. Everyone else in the room said wtf?

[MadBusLady]

Why is it some people are sort of behind the curve of linguistic change then, do we know? There's no real reason why I should pronounce "ate" the same way as the Queen, my parents aren't particularly old or posh. But I'm obviously a throwback

[LRDtheFeministDragon]

My dad says 'I didn't ought to'. It drives my mum round the bend. It's one of the very few things he says that must've survived his childhood and rigorous correction by teachers who tried to get him to speak RP.

[LRDtheFeministDragon]

mad - I always wonder. I suppose some people find it hard to lose an accent, so preserve what they spoke in childhood? There was some really interesting research that'd been carried out recording the same people over the years, and it found that accents really do modify quite a lot, though they typically retain the same connotations, so we don't notice that they've changed. I mean, you can see that listening to radio announcers in the 1930s who are speaking RP, but a very different kind of RP from what we would identify as that now.

[NotTreadingGrapes]

I say "didn't ought to" as well! (apart from when I'm teaching )

Must be another East Midlands thing.

I read an article about the royals, and how even their accents have been watered down to be less posh over the years. Apparently, the Queen speaks just like me and my Grandad when compared to her parents, and the whippersnappers are virtually the underclass.

[LRDtheFeministDragon]

The underclass, you say?

[HesterShaw]

Don't upper class poshos say et rather than ate? I seem to remember reading it in Snobs...

[Dawndonna]

I say et. Spell it ate. I et my lunch, yesterday. I ate my lunch yesterday.

[boxershorts]

you cannot lay GRAMMAR down on tablets of stone. Some great writer write differently and punctuate different. Michael Gove is being silly

[boxershorts]

A comedia called ALEXANDER says he is being prejudiced for being posh. (come off it mate) You are all over TV (prejudiced?)

[SPsCliffingAllOverMN]

I was the one who taught the Queen to speak. She now says 'shes off t' see t' corgi's' and I'm off t' loo Charlie' and also 'Kate looks bang tidy mate'

[CogitoErgoSometimes]

"Upper class poshos" definitely say the following...

Creche.... a collision between two cars
Rind..... circular in shape
Shah.... light rain

[HesterShaw]

And

Tine....a large settlement consisting of houses, businesses and eateries.
Hellair...a greeting

[PeppermintPasty]

I'm confused. I read the OP and thought people were spelling "ate" as "et" .

I am a pedant, although clearly not a very attentive one, and I agree that saying "ate" as "et" is perfectly correct.

[CheesyPoofs]

dyslexicdespot you spectacularly missed my point.

[Peevish]

Jane Austen pronounced 'joined' to rhyme with 'pined', judging by how she used it in a poem written for her family. Irrelevant but interesting.

I do worry when my students increasingly spell from their own (mis)pronunciation of words, though. I notice a growing inability to distinguish between 'been' and 'being'. So they write 'Jane Eyre was been badly treated by her aunt' because that's how they say it.