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PostPosted: Sun Oct 29, 2006 1:19 am 
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kerberos wrote:
Zenith wrote:
kerberos wrote:
Zenith wrote:
how about to the roots of all this? to the fundimentals that rule all english? i see subject, i see predicate, nouns, verbs, i see a sugject and predicate that are in aggrement, i see a gramatically correct string of words.

http://faculty.washington.edu/ezent/imsc.htm#PARA

correct me if i am wrong about this, but i for one am not seeing it.

Perhaps it's just me, but I think there's something mildly amusing, about a post about proper grammar (I think) being practically unintelligible. :P


beautiful isn't it? :roll: i had a long drawn out post concerning your intelligents and my typing habits, however i'm trying to cut back on being an asshole. besides, you probably wouldn't be able to understand it anyways (despite it being in english, generally okay spelling, thought process, breaks indicated by commas, etc.)

I see somebody got the wrong leg out of bed today. But (yes, I'm starting a sentence with a conjunction) the problem is neither you punctuation (much better than mine I'm sure), your spelling (though you really should use spell control, in any post where you claim to spell properly), nor, I think, your though process. It's not even the fact that you seem to have some deep seated aversion to capitalisation. There just seems to be words missing, which makes it difficult to read.

Edited for an amusing mistake of my own.


Nah, he's a Unix Sys Admin. :wink:

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PostPosted: Sun Oct 29, 2006 1:28 am 
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drunk wrote:
It's still generally not alright to start sentences with conjunctions in formal writing, but in most common english use it's perfectly acceptable. I've even seen it done in grammar books ("Doing Grammar," most recently). The rule is that the conjunction must be followed by an independant clause. It is one of those examples of the use of language evolving, with the rules of grammar not keeping up. In the past, the vast majority (all that I have, or have heard of) taught that it was unacceptable. Some English classes still teach that it's unacceptable, some teach that it's acceptable.

I know that (well I had to look up independent clause, but except for that..). I just though I'd pre-emptively point it out, in case some grammar Nazi felt like objecting, which considering that this has evolved into "The official grammar Nazi" thread, didn't seem unlikely. :P


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PostPosted: Sun Oct 29, 2006 2:12 am 
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Prine wrote:
Gambit3le wrote:
I get the feeling that you were taught that Grammar is PROSCRIPTIVE, and thus a total be all and end all for the formulation of language.

I was taught grammar by editors who would've hit me with a stick if I'd told them that it didn't matter and was wholly subjective. I don't know what word you're looking for, but grammar isn't it. Grammar is the rules-of-use that give a language that structure which makes it a language, as opposed to a bunch of meaningless gibberish. If it wasn't necessary then languages would be much easier to learn. Grammar evolves over time, but English grammar hasn't yet evolved to the point where using a perfect tense verb as an imperative is acceptable. If it was acceptable we wouldn't be having this discussion, because it wouldn't have looked and sounded wrong to so many people, even people who don't know or care what a perfect tense verb or imperative mood are.

:o :o :-?

That's one good reason to eliminate rulers of all sorts from the classroom. :)

Your argument is not only circular, it is recursive ... kinda like flying up your own ass. :D

FYI, the grammar is correct there. It is an archaic form that has been proscribed by some acadamian grammar nazis', of which, thou art one, methinks. I was only briefly confused when I made my original post. The parser error has been corrected, the syntax analyser reconfigured, the LALR resolver now has an acceptable exit case, and it all makes perfect sense to me. This was only caused by a brief confuddlement. ;)

Gambit is actually correct, as is Yoda-speak. You would be amazed at how unintelligible you can make a basic statement whilst remaining within the bounds of academically acceptable grammar. Read any Master's Thesis of the past 30 years for proof of the foregoing. The art is in both the telling and the listening.

BTW, quoting external sources in PHBB is best done thusly;
James Nicoll wrote:
“The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that the English language is as pure as a crib-house whore. It not only borrows words from other languages; it has on occasion chased other languages down dark alley-ways, clubbed them unconscious and rifled their pockets for new vocabulary. “


Note in particular that Shakespear would flunk those modern grammar classes and we would mutually incomprehensible on a verbal level.

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PostPosted: Sun Oct 29, 2006 2:35 am 
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If you fall in love with the words, you'll forget about what they describe.

English is a fucked up language, and we all know it. It has rules that get broken throughout it's teaching. Why? Because the people who "invented" English didn't exactly consider where it would end up a few thousands of years later.

Trying to "learn" English, I think, is a failed mission before you even begin it. Read it, speak it, know it. You don't 'learn' english.

For us native speakers, how did you learn it? My parents sat me down every couple of nights and read books with me until I could read them myself, until I could recognise words, and how the letters made sounds within those words.

Only once I got to school did I get told those retarded rules like "i before e except after c, unless it sounds like an 'a' like in neighbour and weigh" because as far as I'm concerned you're always wrong no matter what you say!

Where's the inspiration for learning a new language come from? Hearing someone else talk it, I reckon. How did I learn English? By hearing the words.

I learnt what limited German I know from talking to a Russian friend, and from there I started to learn some Russian too.

I don't give a toss about the words themselves, I speak the language and that is sufficient to me. I before E.


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PostPosted: Sun Oct 29, 2006 3:44 am 
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I'm thinking of learning Spanish.

Actor.

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PostPosted: Sun Oct 29, 2006 4:09 am 
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actor_au wrote:
I'm thinking of learning Spanish.

Actor.


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 Post subject: Veo lo que usted lo hizo allí
PostPosted: Sun Oct 29, 2006 6:18 am 
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¡Romperé su cara en una pared del ladrillo hasta pozos de la sangre bajo sus pies como los rasgones de la muerte y del dolor!

Agente.

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 Post subject: Re: Veo lo que usted lo hizo allí
PostPosted: Sun Oct 29, 2006 7:48 am 
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actor_au wrote:
¡Romperé su cara en una pared del ladrillo hasta pozos de la sangre bajo sus pies como los rasgones de la muerte y del dolor!

Agente.

:o Dude, he only wanted to take a leak! He wasn't involving your sister in any way.

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PostPosted: Sun Oct 29, 2006 11:14 am 
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Zherical wrote:
For us native speakers, how did you learn it? My parents sat me down every couple of nights and read books with me until I could read them myself, until I could recognise words, and how the letters made sounds within those words.

Only once I got to school did I get told those retarded rules like "i before e except after c, unless it sounds like an 'a' like in neighbour and weigh" because as far as I'm concerned you're always wrong no matter what you say!

Where's the inspiration for learning a new language come from? Hearing someone else talk it, I reckon. How did I learn English? By hearing the words.

I learnt what limited German I know from talking to a Russian friend, and from there I started to learn some Russian too.

I don't give a toss about the words themselves, I speak the language and that is sufficient to me. I before E.


... and a note from the complete other side of the spectrum ...

Geez, english is a second language for me but I know it at least as well as you do. :wink: I also speak Dutch (my first language), German, Spanish, and am learning French. Unlettered learning is commendable but not recommended.

Kids have this little language learning switch inside their heads that goes to 'off' by the time they're about seven, unless they have to learn yet another language first. That's what makes native speakers, native speakers. I am actually native in both Dutch and English.

Now, "Where am I going with this?" he asks. It's simple, basic conversation is easier than professional speech and you will never be at a professional level without some formal education, in any language.

just a [very] few thoughts.

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 Post subject: Re: Veo lo que usted lo hizo allí
PostPosted: Sun Oct 29, 2006 12:32 pm 
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Well, this has been declared by someone the official grammar nazi thread, so I'm guessing any grammar is applicable for... nazism? Even spanish. Anyway, onwards!

actor_au wrote:
¡Romperé su cara en una pared del ladrillo hasta pozos de la sangre bajo sus pies como los rasgones de la muerte y del dolor!

Agente.


Nice, but there are some mistakes. "¡Romperé su cara en una pared de ladrillo[...]", 'del' is a contraction of 'de el'.

Stilisticaly, you could go with "¡Romperé su cara contra una pared de ladrillo," and it would evoke more strongly bashing someone's face against a brick wall.

"[...]de ladrillo hasta que pozos de la sangre," you have to put a 'que' there after the 'hasta'.

The next bit is fairly mangled, and depending on how you want to describe the pools of blood it could be arranged in a couple different ways. I'd advise revising it. Nice imagery though.

Finally, Actor is translated 'Actor', not 'Agente'. 'Agente' means Agent.

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PostPosted: Sun Oct 29, 2006 4:53 pm 
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I understood a suprising amount of that considering how little attention I payed in Spanish class.

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PostPosted: Sun Oct 29, 2006 5:11 pm 
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Oh... my... god...

:ianrock:

SIX PAGES of grammar discussion, in multiple languages, all because of ONE LINE of dialogue?!

Wow. Sometimes I forget why I love you people... and then there's a thread like this, and I remember it's because you're all fucking insane.

^-^'

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 Post subject: Thanks again for uploading them, Rince.
PostPosted: Sun Oct 29, 2006 5:35 pm 
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By the way, like the new emoticons?

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PostPosted: Sun Oct 29, 2006 5:47 pm 
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kerberos wrote:
Zenith wrote:
kerberos wrote:
Zenith wrote:
how about to the roots of all this? to the fundimentals that rule all english? i see subject, i see predicate, nouns, verbs, i see a sugject and predicate that are in aggrement, i see a gramatically correct string of words.

http://faculty.washington.edu/ezent/imsc.htm#PARA

correct me if i am wrong about this, but i for one am not seeing it.

Perhaps it's just me, but I think there's something mildly amusing, about a post about proper grammar (I think) being practically unintelligible. :P


beautiful isn't it? :roll: i had a long drawn out post concerning your intelligents and my typing habits, however i'm trying to cut back on being an asshole. besides, you probably wouldn't be able to understand it anyways (despite it being in english, generally okay spelling, thought process, breaks indicated by commas, etc.)

I see somebody got the wrong leg out of bed today. But (yes, I'm starting a sentence with a conjunction) the problem is neither you punctuation (much better than mine I'm sure), your spelling (though you really should use spell control, in any post where you claim to spell properly), nor, I think, your though process. It's not even the fact that you seem to have some deep seated aversion to capitalisation. There just seems to be words missing, which makes it difficult to read.

Edited for an amusing mistake of my own.


i'll be the first to admit sometimes their are (words missing). most of that post was venting frusteration though.

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PostPosted: Sun Oct 29, 2006 8:05 pm 
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Imp-Chan wrote:
Oh... my... god...

:ianrock:

SIX PAGES of grammar discussion, in multiple languages, all because of ONE LINE of dialogue?!

Wow. Sometimes I forget why I love you people... and then there's a thread like this, and I remember it's because you're all fucking insane.

^-^'


Hey! I resemble that remark!

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PostPosted: Sun Oct 29, 2006 9:55 pm 
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I just love that no one has been able to produce an effective response without a grammar or spelling mistake.

LOL, not so easy, is it? Gramma' Bitches! :wink:

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PostPosted: Mon Oct 30, 2006 1:48 am 
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Coming in late to this discussion again, but I'd like to share a helpful analogy.

English (like all natural languages) is a lot like HTML. Technically, there's a standard of syntax and vocabulary. It would be wonderful if everybody could agree to and conform to the standard, cause it would make use of the language to get the desired results much, much easier. What exactly that standard is also has an impact on the ease of learning and using the language, and arguments can be made during standard-setting discussions that a syntax should be simplified in such a way and a vocabulary should be consolidated thusly because such changes to the standard would make the language better (more simpler, more consistent, easier to learn and to use to get the desired results).

But at the end of the day, every browser renders code slightly differently (or something significantly differently), none of them actually conforming exactly to the standard, and what matters to the person writing the code is that the browsers they are targeting receive code that will make them render how the author of that code intends for it to render. Likewise, nobody learns Universal Standard English - heck, we don't even have one standard of English, we have several competing, mostly compatible language standards that all call themselves English - so what matters to the speaker is just encoding his thoughts into the right words in the right sequences such that his intended listener will unpack the meaning that the speaker intended.

So the standard that most speakers / authors should be concerned with is the <i>de facto</i> standard, whatever is most commonly used, and thus we have the descriptive study of linguistics. But when people are writing new browsers / training new speakers, normative instruction is important because we want people to adhere to a <i>de jure</i> standard for the sake of compatibility and to make sure that when you say a sentence or write a line of code, it does what you meant it to do, and not something else entirely different. Those new browsers/speakers will also have to be error-tolerant in order to understand the vast amounts of code/speech out there that doesn't conform to any standard at all, but that will come naturally for self-interested reasons in the development/education of the browse/student. Nevertheless, for the sake of compatibility, a de jure (normative) language standard is desirable and ought to be encouraged.

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PostPosted: Tue Oct 31, 2006 12:22 am 
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What you say of HTML goes true for almost all programming languages (arguably all, Java was supposed to be platform independant though...) as well. It's more accurate to say that the programming languages resemble real languages than the other way around, however. Languages came before programming.

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PostPosted: Tue Oct 31, 2006 6:02 pm 
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drunk wrote:
What you say of HTML goes true for almost all programming languages (arguably all, Java was supposed to be platform independant though...) as well. It's more accurate to say that the programming languages resemble real languages than the other way around, however. Languages came before programming.


I picked HTML specifically because it's a particularly poignant problem. Most proper programming languages really ought to compile the same in any compiler (given the same libraries available and all that stuff); though compiler-tailored optimisations may not optimise like you had planned, the resulting binary really should be the same thing. If it's not, we'd like to say that compiler is broken somehow.

With HTML, no browser renders the same thing exactly the same way and while ostensibly this is a problem (i.e. we give lip service to "grr why can't people stick to standards"), in practice it's just taken for granted and worked around. You can't just write standard HTML perfectly to spec and trust that it will work as it should, cause no two browsers will treat it the same way. But we don't go off about "wtf web browsers are broken" and raise a big noise about it, we just say "browsers render things differently, deal with it".

So English (in particular; other languages like French less so) makes a nice analogy to HTML. Some people pay lip service to "grr why can't people all speak proper English!" (setting aside for the moment the issue that there's no one standards body for English), but in general we just say "that's how you say thins in yer fancy high-falutin' Oxferd talk, but down here we say sheit like 'mah brutha from Jawjaw bard mah truck n drove it inta the crick'." In other words, increasingly we just accept that people use English very roughly, and we've (mostly) given up on trying to set standards for it. At least, so it seems. I'm just saying that, like HTML, it's true that you have to deal with the fact that nobody speaks the same "English" as you do, but it would be good for all of us if we pushed for the adoption of standards.

Other programming languages would be more like French. Sure, there are regional differences and things (compiler differences, by analogy), but when someone really starts garbling things, someone complains and says "no, that's wrong - the proper standard usage is like this..."

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PostPosted: Tue Oct 31, 2006 7:45 pm 
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HAY! That shore sounds lak mah Mama an' dem! Down hare in'da Sawth, we do talk lak that.

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