Re: Let's talk about langages (Advice/Help)

From: Neeraj Mathur (neeraj.mathur_at_chch.ox.ac.uk)
Date: 08/20/04 

Date: Fri, 20 Aug 2004 01:54:37 +0100

"devil" <devil@attglobal.net> wrote in message
news:pan.2004.08.20.00.00.51.869637@attglobal.net...
> But was there really such a thing as "French" in the 12th century? There
> were a bunch of local dialects, from which modern French would eventually
> emerge, but I would not call these "French."

That's up to you. Do you not, then, see the Chanson de Roland as French of
any sort? Anyway, the particular point I mentioned would be valid for all of
the dialects.

> And when modern French
> eventually starts settling down, this thing has already more or less
> happened.

Now I understand what you meant by 'born that way'.

Alright, that's fine - but the difference still exists. For example, written
French indicates the plurals of nouns, while spoken French (often) does
not - mot, mots are distinguished on paper only. Therefore, there is a
difference of the grammar of the two forms of the language: the oral
language has few plural nouns, the written language has many.

It can be seen, of course, that all this amounts to a question of 'how does
one pronounce the words of a given language'. But this is not the best
approach, since children learn to speak their language before they learn to
pronounce its written equivalent; the spoken language changes quickly, but
the written only slowly.

> None of this is particularly true, I am afraid.

Lol - thanks! :-)

> People whose mother
> tongue is french don't seem to have much of an issue with plurals, most
> likely because they get taught early on, more or less together with
> discovering written language.
>
> I would also take exception with your statement that written and spoken
> languages have different grammar. What you are talking about is people
> who take liberties with grammar when seaking. Who make mistakes when
> speaking, technically. But you are not going to see people in the
> grammar business recognizing it's OK to speak that way.

You and I are using different definitions of grammar. I mean grammar from a
linguistic point of view - the set of rules which describes what speakers
actually do when they produce their language. I suppose this is kind of a
Chomsky-esque definition. From this definition of grammar, it is necessarily
accepted that a native speaker, when speaking 'honestly' (ie, is not
consciously affecting his speech for some purpose), cannot make a mistake.
When a southern American says 'I done caught me a fish', the role of the
linguist (as I see it) is to find the grammar rules that that person has
used to create the sentence. I realise that this is different from what we
learn as 'grammar' in schools, and I apologise for not clarifying my usage
in the first instance.

Viewed from this angle, most people's spoken French allows them to count [a~
mo], [du mo] etc. (apologies again for my poor IPA approximations) - in
other words, their grammar does not realise any difference between singular
and plural. On the other hand, the same person when writing produces 'un
mot, deux mots' - thus using a grammar that does distinguish singular and
plural.

Thus, from the descriptive linguistic grammar perspective, different rules
are used for the spoken and written language, and thus there are different
grammars for the spoken and written language.

> You have a choice between either (1) everything is determined by rules or
> (2) there are few rules and most of the language is made of of special
> cases. French or german are more like (1) and English is more like (2).
>
> Although I was first explained this point by a mative English speaker, I
> suspect it may not be all that obvious to most native speakers.
> Presumably because they learned most of the stuff in their infancy, so
> they never rationalize it. But one result is that non-native speakers
> will have a hell of a time learning, except if they get immersed for a
> signifcant time in the language.

I actually arrived at my 'different grammar' approach by considering
English. I noticed that: 1) people who had never lived in Anglophone society
often had no problem producing idiomatic written English, but had great oral
difficulty; and 2) people who came to live in Canada with no English
background and were put into English schools were very quickly able to
communicate orally with their peers, but struggled endlessly with the
written language.

>From this, and from my studies of linguistics as a Classicist and as a
historical linguist, I decided that this situation could be best accounted
for by considering written English and spoken English as essentially
independent languages. The rules that govern written English (in other
words, the grammars that English writers use to generate their language when
writing in a non-affected way) are different from the rules that govern
spoken English in any given situation. This is complicated by the fact that
sometimes people speak aloud in what are essentially written idioms (like
academic lectures) and sometimes people write down spoken idioms (the most
extreme example is the the poem ygUDuh by E.E. Cummings - read it here
http://members.tripod.com/arlindo_correia/210800.html if you can; it took me
a while!) but the principle essentially holds.

For example, compare these two English sentences (from Michael Coulson's
_Teach Yourself Sanskrit_): 'An unexpected arrival will admittedly affect
our numbers'; 'It's true that how many we're going to be will depend on
whether anyone turns up that we aren't expecting'. The grammar of the first
is based on a simple SVO- type sentence; the second is replete with
subordinate clauses. Yet both are typical sentences - the first of written,
the second of spoken English.

What I was hoping is that you would tell me what sort of 'special cases' you
think English grammar is made up of. If you mean simply the confusing
orthography of the language, of the sort of 'through / though / cough /
enough' etc, then what you are talking about is exactly what I am getting
at: that the main difficulty in learning English is correlating its spoken
and written languages. Other than that, there are always rules that govern
the grammar of a language; apparent exceptions simply mean that the stated
'rule' was incomplete or overhastily drawn.

So where you see the two types of language as 1) those which have rules
governing their grammar, and 2) those which have no rules but are made up of
'special cases', I prefer to see a sliding continuum from 1) those languages
whose spoken and written forms are closely connected, in phonology,
morphology and syntax, to 2) those languages whose spoken and written forms
are quite divergent in these regards. I place Spanish and German rather
close to the first extreme, and Welsh, Middle Persian and, from the
discussion of another thread, Chinese rather close to the second extreme. I
think both French and English are closer to the middle, with English being
further towards the second than French. I would also contend that placement
on this line is linked to the difficulty associated with learning the
language, or at least one source of difficulty.

> I understood exactly what you meant, thank you. I was merely saying that
> the familiar oral expression is just grammatically wrong. Or at least
> from a pedantic standpoint.

You sound a bit miffed - I did not mean to insult you, and I'm sorry if my
words came across that way.

Yes, that is what I meant above: 'pedants' are usually those who recognise
language change - meaning that the grammars of native speakers are shifting
from the grammars of earlier generations - and then proceed to insist that
the earlier rules be used. From the linguistic perspective that I talked
about above, of course, this doesn't matter - the grammars of all native
speakers must be accepted and the job of the linguist is descriptive, not
prescriptive. Thus the fact that you call it 'the familiar oral expression'
is support for that the language change is more or less complete in the
spoken language.

> Should be :-). I still occasionally hear TV news programs where they do
> it right.
>
> There is a difference in meaning.

Yes, I know the difference: in je fis, the reference point is in the past
and is synchronous with the event; with j'ai fait the reference point is
synchronous with the speech act but comes after the event.

You say that you hear it in news programs - what is the norm for newspapers?
What about fiction authors and school textbooks? I'm interested in the
statistics.

> So then you think English is the hardest?
>
> I am not convinced this is as big an issue as you seem to make it. Is it
> harder for an English-speaker to learn French than the opposite? I
> suspect it's very hard to give a one-size fits all answer to this
> question.

I do think that English is harder to learn, both spoken and written, than
French, for the reasons I outlined above. If I haven't convinced you, I'm
not surprised - my argument and my thought are still in their infancy. I
will be studying more general linguistics over the next two years, and am
grateful for any input I can get from anybody here while I learn so that my
theories can be developed within an academic framework so that I can make
them more convincing (if I still believe them after two years of course!).

Thanks again for the discussion.

Neeraj Mathur

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