Here's an "ask me anything" topic with a twist. Ever wonder why people say the things they do? Those little grammatical quirks that remain a mystery to you? For instance, what's up with "could care less" and "couldn't care less," and why on earth do they mean the same thing? Or just what is that "it" in "It's raining"? Sometimes, an auxiliary verb will unexpectedly come before the subject: "Only then did I realize what was wrong." How come? We can say "I should go" and tack on "should I not?" or "shouldn't I?" but not "should not I?" And what's the deal with "stamp-collecting"...shouldn't it be "collecting-stamp"?
I'll do my best to explain what years of research has led us to understand about these phenomena. The answers may surprise you.
---
Seth: What are you making?
Evan: I'm just drilling holes. Last two weeks, **** it.
"Could care less" means exactly the opposite of what most people think it means. Though that doesn't annoy me as much as lay/lie misuse...
---
CSBE FTW!
DarthMarth - Better than a bowl of Cheerios.
Actually, people use "could care less" to mean "couldn't care less," not its opposite. That is, they use it to mean, "I care very little," not "I care somewhat." They do this because that's how it is be interpreted by both them and their listeners. Thus, they mean the same thing. Welcome to linguistics.
The important part here is that "could care less" can mean "couldn't care less." This requirement is crucial. This is why no one says "I don't know" to mean "I know," because unlike in the previous case, there is no way syntactically for the former to be interpreted as the latter.
---
Seth: What are you making?
Evan: I'm just drilling holes. Last two weeks, **** it.
i think darthmarth was implying that he isn't a fan of that particular ambiguity.
do you do dialects? i'm curious as to when-ish Americans started losing their British accents.
---
"I'm not great at farewells, so uh... that'll do, pig."
Natalie Portman was here
I do. Really, Americans started losing their "British" accent beginning with when they first set foot here (though keep in mind that there's no such thing as a unified "British accent"). Even Charles Dickens reported the sounds he heard here being "not English." Think of it as a gradual continuum; if you listen to radio broadcasts from the 1930s, it will sound much more "British," but still distinctly American. The accents are still diverging, but note that the advances that technology has brought to bringing speech communities from small areas to basically the entire country has led to a significant decline in the strength of regional dialects. Give it 50 years and 90% of the country will be speaking the same dialect that has diverged even further from British English.
So there's your when-ish. Why-ish is a different story...
---
Seth: What are you making?
Evan: I'm just drilling holes. Last two weeks, **** it.
well, go on, then!
---
"I'm not great at farewells, so uh... that'll do, pig."
Natalie Portman was here
Is there any compelling reason not to call modern English a creole other than its wide usage? Like, is it useful to take that position from the perspective of scholarship?
---
Willis, it seems like every other time you post, I need to look up a word that's in the OED or Urban Dictionary but not both.
-Mimir
A creole by definition must have started as a pidgin, so...no.
---
Seth: What are you making?
Evan: I'm just drilling holes. Last two weeks, **** it.
The important part here is that "could care less" can mean "couldn't care less."
How is that?
Without getting into much syntax, I'll do a brief semantic description. Let's do this interactively. First, think about the word "less" in this case. More or less, it has the same functions as the following:
a. I don't give a damn about linguistics.
b. She doesn't know crap about linguistics.
c. He didn't lift a finger to help.
d. Je ne parle pas français. = I don't speak (a step) of French.
What do the italicized words all have in common? (The italicized word in b. is ****).
---
Seth: What are you making?
Evan: I'm just drilling holes. Last two weeks, **** it.
Right, but Middle English comes out of speakers of Anglo-Saxon dialects adopting elements of prestige languages (Anglo-Norman and Latin). The change resulted in a greatly simplified grammar and easy assimilation of loan words, so what makes a non-pidgin of, say, the language spoken by speakers of West Saxon who were employed by Anglo-Normans in 1067? Is it that we don't have any written records of such a language until we get firmly established Early Middle English? Or is it because Anglo-Norman was the prestige language, so that the Anglo-Saxon speakers were accommodating the other language exclusively?
PS I don't actually know anything about Anglo-Norman, so I could be making a couple of invalid assumptions.
---
Willis, it seems like every other time you post, I need to look up a word that's in the OED or Urban Dictionary but not both.
-Mimir
What language does English share the most words with?
What are some commonalities that all languages share?
---
I thought I saw upon the stair a little man who wasn't there.
He wasn't there again today. Oh how I wish he'd go away.
What language does English share the most words with?
Not sure on a global scale, but on a local scale, Afrikaans. "My hand is in warm water" means the same in both.
What are some commonalities that all languages share?
Everything except their words. Everything else follows from that.
---
Seth: What are you making?
Evan: I'm just drilling holes. Last two weeks, **** it.
So differences in grammar originate in differences in words? How does this process work?
---
I thought I saw upon the stair a little man who wasn't there.
He wasn't there again today. Oh how I wish he'd go away.
Mark: Yep, that's the idea. More accurately, words have more features associated with them than just what they sound like. In addition, they may have features such as number, gender, person, tense, definiteness...etc. It is the distribution of these features and their relative strength that contribute to the grammatical variation you see, which even then is not much. In order for a child to learn a language, it must conform to properties true of every language. That way, the child can deduce what is possible and what could not be. It's pretty easy to think of a sentence that would be impossible in any language, since a child could never learn it.
Give me a sentence in another languge that seems grammatically different from English, and I'll tell you how its difference in words and features (words are just feature bundles) leads to the defvance.
Alex: Think harder.
---
Seth: What are you making?
Evan: I'm just drilling holes. Last two weeks, **** it.
Right, but Middle English comes out of speakers of Anglo-Saxon dialects adopting elements of prestige languages (Anglo-Norman and Latin). The change resulted in a greatly simplified grammar and easy assimilation of loan words, so what makes a non-pidgin of, say, the language spoken by speakers of West Saxon who were employed by Anglo-Normans in 1067? Is it that we don't have any written records of such a language until we get firmly established Early Middle English? Or is it because Anglo-Norman was the prestige language, so that the Anglo-Saxon speakers were accommodating the other language exclusively?
If I may take a shot at this one -- it's my understanding that Middle English was not simplified for the purpose of communication between the ruling class and the lower classes. For the most part the ruling class became fully bilingual over time, and by the time they started phasing out Norman French for English there would have been no need for pidginizaton. For the most part, the prestige languages' influence over English is expressed in a host of loanwords and in writing conventions.
...and it looks like Wikipedia has a whole page on this subject so I'll cut this short unless there are other questions (which I don't guarantee I can answer):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middle_English_creole_hypothesis
---
Shake your windows and rattle your walls.
I may take you up on that later, but for the moment, I'll ask another question:
What must be true of a stimuli for a child to be able to pick it up as a language?
---
I thought I saw upon the stair a little man who wasn't there.
He wasn't there again today. Oh how I wish he'd go away.
How did the familiar curse words acquire their extraordinary offensiveness? How clearly established is the hierarchy of offensiveness, and how stable is it over time? I mean the hierarchy that dictates, for example, that the F-word is more offensive than the S-word.
---
The Albino Formerly Known as Mimir
@Jordan: Thought about it quite a bit, but I'm coming up with nothing.
Aren't they all semantically empty?
---
The Albino Formerly Known as Mimir
Oh, thanks DIM.
---
Willis, it seems like every other time you post, I need to look up a word that's in the OED or Urban Dictionary but not both.
-Mimir
Aren't they all semantically empty?
You're on the right track.
---
Seth: What are you making?
Evan: I'm just drilling holes. Last two weeks, **** it.
a. What was the first known irregular expression?
b. To what extent is language predicted to converge as the world "gets smaller"?
c. Can we end the guessing game and have you tell us about the "couldn't care less" thing?
I had others but I can't remember them.
I could care less about the 'couldnt care less' thing.
---
"...you should try reading my posts being getting all emo." --FoxMetal
On the subject of double negatives that aren't: yesterday, an oral surgeon, while describing what needed to be done to my wisdom teeth, used the word "irregardless" without a hint of irony.
---
The Albino Formerly Known as Mimir
That word-thing drives me crazy. When I hear someone say it, I only hear the word and the rest just comes out as "blah blah blah." It just devours my attention.
---
Holy **** we're in the Matrix? - Willis