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

From: devil (devil_at_attglobal.net)
Date: 08/20/04 

Date: Fri, 20 Aug 2004 01:39:04 GMT

On Fri, 20 Aug 2004 01:54:37 +0100, Neeraj Mathur wrote:

>
> "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.

It's not written, so the point is more or less moot.
 
>> 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.

When the pronounciation rule is that the final s is not pronounced, then
written and spoken language are absolutely consistent from a grammatical
standpoint. In contrast with your example with past tenses. Which I am
arguing is just one of very few discrepancies.

> 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.

That may be true in English but, bringing in cultural differences, in
french one is more or less taught that the written and spoken language are
one and the same. Which acts as a powerful brake with respect to rate of
change of the spoken language.
 
>> 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.

To the extent that French grammar is more or less enforced on the spoken
language, what you see as a difference in definition isn't really one.
There is no big difference between spoken and written French
grammatically. Kids are being taught that proper spoken French is just
the same as proper written French.

> 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.

The pronounciation rule (i.e. grammar) does not provide for any
difference. Incidentally, one area in which French is very consistent is
pronunciation: written language fully determines how it's pronounced.

> 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.

Perhaps, but this will be perceived by most French native speakers as an
exercise of semantics on your part.

>> 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.

Obviously :-).

And yes, we had figured that out. :-)

> 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;

That is particularly true of people whose cultural background is either
French or Chinese. Not as much otherwise, but still often true.

> 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.

Undoubtably true. When you were a kid, you first learned your mother
language by speaking, didn't you?

In other words, the explanation is quite simple: if you try to teach
people to read and write before they can speak, the result you get is that
they get influenced too much by the written stuff and they end up
mislearning the spoken language. Lerning to pronounce the written stuff
based upon their often wrong understanding of pronounciation rules.

Typically people are being taught languages at school at a point in life
when it's already much easier to learn to read and write than it is to
learn to speak a new language. Often the damage is irreversible.

> 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.

That fits the English model well. Based upon a pragmatic attitude with
respect to language. Which contrats with the French prescriptive
approach.
 
> 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.

How will a non-native English speaker ever learn that the plural of "deer"
is normally "deer?" I thought "grouses" looked funny; apparently is not
quite incorrect but surely the same form as the singular "grouse" is OK,
what a relief.

The bottom line remains that English is replete with idiomatic
expressions, that the list of things that one needs to learn on a one by
one basis is endless.

> 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.

Point is, in French, what the rules are supposed to be carries much more
weight than in English. (Although it's possible that this might be slowly
changing. I have been living for too long in a non-French speaking
environment to make a stronger statement about that.)
 
>> Should be :-). I still occasionally hear TV news programs where they
>> do it right.
>>
> 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.

I am pretty sure I still see the proper form on French newspaper web
sites, which as far as French is concerned is what I am most exposed to
these days.

>> 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!).

I remain unconvinced. Bringing up a different issue, however, what is
difficult about English, and not so hard in most other languages I have
been exposed to in comparison, is processing the sounds of the spokin
language and translate them into identifiable sequences of sounds and
ultimately words.

For most languages, it's harder to learn to speak than to understand.
Which is not unexpected since speaking is active wile understanding is
reactive. But in English the opposite is true.
 
> Thanks again for the discussion.

My pleasure.