I done the same

[beanaseireann]

Jesus wept...
I just saw on a thread "....... I done the same for her...."
Aghhhhh
I done
I seen
I think it's an Irish thing.
I'm Irish living in Ireland.
We have free education up to third level.
Why do people not know that it's incorrect?

As a friend from Ely would say. “Why is her waving at we when us don’t know she.”
All the right words just in a different order.

Some interesting examples of non-pedants on Pedants' Corner hmm

It came up in active and I find the discussion interesting.

@AndItStillSaidFourOfTwo Fair point. 🙂

Grammar pedant here! Written grammatical errors make me itch.

However, I do say 'We was' without even thinking about it. I would NEVER write it in a sentence though. It's a dialectical 'thing'.

I love the English language and all its intricacies. I find it fascinating that each word has a name and a job to do, those jobs and word classes being interchangeable depending on word order in a sentence.

Yes, I'm a grammar geek and proud of it!

I heard a conversation at work not long ago. It was between a colleague and her manager. Colleague asked which was correct for the sentence she was writing, could have or could of? The manager replied that both were equally fine to use.

The same manager sends emails to me and to our clients with ‘could of’, plurals with apostrophes, and many other mistakes.

Ordinary Girl

I definitely think 'geek' describes me better than 'pedant'.

If you scroll back (say 5+ years ago),
you'll see PC was a very different beast. We used to discuss language, not point fingers at other posters on MN.
(Morning missmouse! I see my comment yesterday is still smarting )
Since the dumbing down generally of the site, it's been fairly quiet on here, as many misconstrue its original intention.
Never mind, times change. Y' know, like language.
It is amusing though, that back in the day on here, none of the regulars would have not known about historic irregular past tenses, or that need+pp is a perfectly correct variation of a semi-modal, or that gobbling off about haitch is actually, in some areas of academia, considered a racist slur.

'Could of' etc does come into the category of 'wrong' to me - it's an incorrect extrapolation from the very similar pronunciation of unstressed 'of' and ''ve' in speech. I think anyone stopping to think about it will realise quickly that it doesn't make sense. (Although that manager's belief about 'could of' being an acceptable alternative to could have' is puzzling).

Cylindraceous: /l/ is a notorious difficult phoneme to pronounce with variations depending on where the letter L falls in the word.
If you say the word "film" very slowly and in front of a mirror, then in the word "ball", and, finally, the word "love" you should see a marked difference in the position of your tongue.
Habitually, and more often regionally, that first /l/, in the middle of a word (milk, trouble etc) for speed and ease of communication, gets lost, which is why it sounds like a /w/.
In terms of phonology, production of /w/ and /l/ are not a million miles apart. Some phonologists think that /l/ should be re-classified (along with /r/) as a semi-vowel as they are definitely nearer to vowels, in terms of how they are produced, than to consonants. Of course, that wouldn't be the same for non-English /r/, or indeed, regional /r/ which is often rhotic.

Motheroffeminists
There are lots of different Irish accents depending on what part of Ireland you're from.

"could of" is wrong, grammatically. Of course it is. It's also very very common.
I had to rewrite one of my NQT's set of reports because she had written "could of" throughout. An English language teacher.
Says more about the education she, as a 20 something in the UK, had received at primary and secondary school where for great swathes of the 80s and 90s, the English language was not taught.

The UK must have been, at the time, one of few countries in the world not to teach the nuts and bolts of its own language.

That is being remedied now, but for some- those people we see on MN whose posts are littered with errors, it's too late. A school inspector I know who was inspecting in the late 80s now says "we failed a generation in our own language". And he is right.

The "could of" mistake obviously also stems from the pronunciation being transformed into the written word. English grammar is pretty easy, (though it needs to be taught) while pronunciation, and intrinsically linked to pron, spelling, are not.

@beanaseireann of course, and I find them all lovely. Well all the ones I've heard anyway I had a Scottish boyfriend at uni and I could listen to him talk for hours. He was from Edinburgh and he used to read me poetry so I could bask in his dulcet tones.
My family on my maternal grandfather's side are Irish but I don't know where they were from. I must do my family tree at some point.

Italian accents set off my misophonia with the little sound at the end of some words. There might be a name for that sound. One of the dads at school used to have me twitching all the way back from the school run. Lovely man but those bits at the end 😣

Cylindraceous: /l/ is a notorious difficult phoneme to pronounce with variations depending on where the letter L falls in the word.
If you say the word "film" very slowly and in front of a mirror, then in the word "ball", and, finally, the word "love" you should see a marked difference in the position of your tongue.

I have an Estuary accent; when I say "film" slowly, there is no L sound, when I say "ball" there is no "L" sound. The only one that produces any tongue touching-something L sound, is "love". I say "Fiwm" and "Baw". In fact, my "ball" sounds exactly the same as I would pronounce "bull"... The baw has a baw.

Mother-in-law when Italians speak English?

We have an executive PA at work who sends emails requesting us to take action that start with ' Dear Cortex, Please may you do xyz next week for the director...'. I find it baffling as she doesn't speak like that.

TheCanterburyWhales yes I think so. His Italian was probably lovely but I only caught snippets of it when he was talking to daughters telling them to hurry up and get to school.

I was sat.

Italian ends in vowels, our language doesn't. When Italians speak English they find it hard not to make vowe-like sounds on the end of words, and it does make a distinct sound, not quite a vowel because they are trying not to.

Cylindraceous- exactly!
It's fascinating- my northern Irish friend says "fillum" almost, because in her accent the /l/ of "film" (tongue touching palate much further back if at all) doesn't exist, and you need a lot of mouth gymnastics to move from the /l/ of "love" (which is what she's using) to the /m/ in "film". It's far easier to slip in a little vowel between the two, hence "fillum"

I'm not sure if hers is a widespread northern Irish variation or her own particular area.

It's fascinating- my northern Irish friend says "fillum" almost, because in her accent the /l/ of "film" (tongue touching palate much further back if at all) doesn't exist, and you need a lot of mouth gymnastics to move from the /l/ of "love" (which is what she's using) to the /m/ in "film". It's far easier to slip in a little vowel between the two, hence "fillum

Ok, so I have now tried "film" and "love" while actually forcing myself to do the /l/, and I see what you mean about the different in tongue position. Isn't that called dark /l/?

*difference

There has also been an influx in MN of 'his' instead of 'he's'.

I think his going out.

More Italian words end in consonants tbh (I'm in Italy) but the reason there is that extra sound at the end when they speak English, is that Italian pron is totally regular- each sound (and letter) given its full "force" and equal emphasis. Unlike English where we have, weak and strong vowels, where a diphthong has 75% of its force on the first sound, and variations of consonants- like the /l/. So, an Italian speaker automatically gives that full oomph (technical term ) to whatever the final sound is in an English word. If it finishes with a consonant, an English speaker's pitch will tail off (language maxim tending to be "important things at the beginning) - take "film" again, juxtaposed with "mother". Two very different /m/ sounds from a native speaker, but not from an Italian. So, that /m/ in "film" receives a big vocal clout and sounds to native speakers as if the Italian were adding a vowel on the end. "Filma" sort of thing.
It's why they think we "eat sounds"

Yes, dark /l/

Sorry TAAT, I find the thread about idioms and phrases really depressing
People are applying logic to some of the beautiful expressions we use, some of them from Shakespeare or the Bible, or from the days when We were a naval nation.

There’s no joy in the language, no pleasure in that connection to those before us

It’s very sad.

‘Needs gone’ makes me feel so irritable. I congratulated someone commenting on a Guardian post for saying needs to be done and they were incredulous that there was any other way to speak or write!