The surprising thing to me is that there's no pain for the historical "singular they" (for a generic person, often preceded by "each" or similar words), only for the modern one (for a specific person).
It’s all fun and games till “they” become part of a group and the antecedent is complete guesswork. I use they/them pronouns, but there is a slightly different effort for different usages, and I wish we had something else that was more natural.
I've spoken Australian|British English for six decades and never had issue with singular 'they', it's a natural part of day to day discussion.
FWiW I've been on internet forums on a near daily basis since before WWW (original Usenet and !bang!bang addressing) and have nearly always used "they" in discussions when referring to the work or comments of anybody that I've not met personally.
For that matter I mostly use 'they' |'them' | 'their' when referring to people whose gender I know on public forums.
I think this is generational, my parents (regional Australia, no in 70's) only use "They" when referring to a group. I need to be mindful when using this term as it can lead to confusion.
I accept both usages of the term, but choose the term carefully depending on who I am talking to.
I'd be inclined to ask your parents, in referece to (say) Australian Sign Language Recognition a paper principally by E.J. Holden on the mathematics behind the use of computer vision to recognise Australian sign language from video feed, what they think of the author's work.
Do they have an opinion on their choice of invariant transforms, etc.
Would they (your parents) have to look up a biography of E.J.Holden to first determine gender before commenting on his or her work?
In the early 1980s I was surrounded by women in mathematics and computer science at the university I attended so I rapidly fell into the habit of not assuming anything about individuals known only by mail or by journal papers.
No, these are typical everyday people who make judgements based on the information they know. It will be "some mathmatician" or "the doctor" not "they".
They do not know or care about invariant transforms, math or sexuality because they are farmers. Offending people they will never meet is on the bottom of their list of priorities.
The question is how would they refer to singuler people whose gender they don't know.
> They do not know or care about invariant transforms, math or sexuality because they are farmers.
You do make some odd assumptions; I was raised on a Kimberley cattle station, am now farming in the Western Australian wheatbelt, and once worked on a sheep shearing robot.
There are a number of farmers that care about math, GIS resource mapping, drone operation, optical laser wool grading, etc. etc. etc.
That your parents do not is not a universal attribute of farmers.
Maybe they was intending to say that “they” is painful when paired with singular verbs like “is”, “are”, and “was”? I, at least, find that previous sentence painful.
True, but I'd say that's a "bad grammar" problem, not a "singular they" problem.
SA is not a naive word-swap of "he/she" with "they (and "him/her" with "them") while keeping everything else the same, but a style which demands a certain internal consistency. You use various words which cover the "one or more" case even when broader context establishes it's just one.
It would be another story if English had an option that covered the case of (people_count==1 && gender==null), but instead we have to make do with either "it" (which denies personhood) or "they" (which is open-ended on count.)
If used properly they/them sounds perfectly natural to me. Certainly moreso than the old pronouns some keep trying to reintroduce into "modern" English.
One could just use "person", "one", or alternate genders... Seeing singular "them", "zhe", "Xe" just distracts me into thinking about the author's political orientation.
If I'm reading something, and there's bad grammar or a misspelling, it immediately drops me out of the "zone" of following the narrative back into the world. It just makes reading unpleasant.
That would be unpleasant. For me, if I'm engaged in the narrative my brain will often just "error correct" the bad grammar or ignore the misspelling as long as it's not too egregious.
It depends, but I tend to be the same way. However, there's plenty of times when proof reading something and typos get overlooked. The brain is pretty good at filling in gaps and fixing things when it's a random typo type of mistake. When it's done by the authoer for style and effect to convey the character's personality, it can be cumbersome to read.
The grammar issues that do cause me to stumble are news with piss poor editing. Maybe it's just a pet peeve so when I'm reading news with those issues, it bothers me more than other forms. But the current state of first to post, edit later really irritates me
>When it's done by the author for style and effect to convey the character's personality, it can be cumbersome to read.
Indeed. But in the hands of a great writer like Russell Hoban, what results is a sense of being on a post-nuclear apocalyptic Earth that's so vivid and powerful, it's like mind transport once you get used to the weird grammar, crazy spelling and neologisms, and their ilk.
> The new study from the University of Birmingham reveals a statistically significant reduction in HRV in response to grammatical violations. This reduction reflects the extent of the grammatical violations, suggesting that the more errors a person hears, the more regular their heartbeat becomes – a sign of stress.
Interesting that a more regular heartbeat is a sign of stress. Wonder why that is...
AFAICT it's because your heart-rate comes from overlapping systems, and for whatever reason raising the influence of stress-triggered systems makes it more regular. (In the absence of other disorders.)
Perhaps the ready-for-action regularity comes at a cost, and when everything is calm and safe there's no need for your body to incur that cost, it can afford a less-strict clock.
I wonder if this hints at an evolutionary adaptation at dealing with people outside of the in-group — could it be that there was an advantage to subconsciously perceiving non-native speech as a threat, or at least something worth being on guard for?
> seems like a missed opportunity to evolve the 'native' speech to something new
I like this. A missed opportunity to be conquered. I'm going to keep that one in my back pocket on account of I bet that sooner or later I'll be able to trot it out for some poignant drollery.
IME (as someone quite easily annoyed by bad grammar; yes, feel free to correct mine, I do actually appreciate that if it’s not a typo), it’s actually the native speakers that are an issue. Non-natives either use proper grammar, or tend to make so many mistakes it usually triggers no reaction (besides wanting to help them) for me. But confusing there/their/they’re and using "would of" are very much native speaker mistakes.
There was one thing, "the worse of them" and "worst than" that I think is a non-native error, that is so common, that it made me think it might even be some grammatical construct I never heard of.
Bad grammar only bothers me when it's from somebody who is a native speaker. An initial habit I had, and many have the same, when moving abroad and speaking with non-native speakers is to gradually let your own grammar slip into their habits - gradually starting to speak some sort of pidgin English. Somehow, to me, English spoken poorly by a native speaker just sounds grating. By contrast I never had this feeling with non-native speakers. Well there is one exception, when somebody is a non-native but speaks English near flawlessly, then suddenly their mistakes start to become somewhat unpleasant again!
Maybe it's like music in some way. A cacophony is not unpleasant at all, when that's the majority of everything (tell me you're a death metal fan, without telling me you're a death metal fan), but when an otherwise clean and smooth rhythm or harmony is disrupted, it sounds extremely unpleasant. For a specific example, the intro to the song Cemetery Gates [1] practically ruins the song for me. It's such a beautiful and pleasant first 1:32, but then the dirty bit hits, and it's just too much. By contrast the transition at 2:31 is smooth, and so it sounds great and pleasant.
Sometimes people, including my younger self, disdain and even ridicule expert 'rules' and knowledge, from grammar to art appreciation. "Dogs bark at those whom they do not know." [0]
They say / I said: I don't need to know those things; they are arbitrary and useless; I can do it fine without them (and when I can't, it's the art, etc., not me that has failed). But in my life it has turned out that those things arose from challenges and subtleties that have real impact but that my naive self - not an insult; I came by it honestly, from inexperience - hadn't yet noticed.
Now when there is miscommunication I can often attribute it to grammatical error, and it turned out that the English grammar is a handy, powerful abstraction that works well. Now it seems that when I disdained certain art as offering nothing to understand, I was unwittingly disdaining my lack of understanding.
I think what Heraclitus meant was, "Dogs bark at those whom they do not know." Now when people speak, I listen.
> Now when there is miscommunication I can often attribute it to grammatical error, and it turned out that the English grammar is a handy, powerful abstraction that works well.
There's the English grammar as it exists in the actual language, and then there's the English grammar as it is insisted upon by self-appointed arbiters of proper speech. The first is indeed quite handy and productive, the second is mostly a tool for reinforcing hierarchies: like the Mid-Atlantic accent, the rules are useful precisely because no one speaks or writes that way naturally. You have to spend time learning and practicing them, and spending that time sets you apart from the plebians who only speak their native tongue.
Human languages in general is very good at introducing the right amount of redundancy to avoid miscommunication, even as the languages evolve. We don't need artificial rules to help with that.
> There's the English grammar as it exists in the actual language, and then there's the English grammar as it is insisted upon by self-appointed arbiters of proper speech.
Who are you referring to as the latter? The grammar I know arose from the language, and from centuries of study of both descriptive and optimal use of it. That's the grammar I learned in school though, as I said in the GP, I didn't understand it at the time.
> Human languages in general is very good at introducing the right amount of redundancy to avoid miscommunication, even as the languages evolve. We don't need artificial rules to help with that.
Do you mean to imply that humans naturally communicate well. My experience is that humans are poor communicators, and effective communication takes skill and work. As more objective evidence, lots of very smart people, for centuries, have worked very hard at it. If you can write well, you can make good money doing it. (I don't agree that the rules are 'artificial'; at least the ones I know arose from usage.)
It's actually rather hard to separate the two. "I done told you" is a grammatical sentence in the South but not in other forms of English. Most "accents" are actually a full dialect.
> The grammar I know arose from the language, and from centuries of study of both descriptive and optimal use of it.
No, not really. Most of the classic grammatical rules taught in schools were never rules in the English language in the first place: they were borrowed from Latin because Latin was perceived as being "better". That's why they have to be taught—they're not naturally part of spoken English.
Split infinitives are the classic example of this: a totally normal part of English, they're impossible in Latin (since Latin infinitives are a single word), so the grammarians insisted we must keep them together in English. Francis Bacon, Edmund Burke, and the King James Bible all used coordinating conjunctions at the start of a sentence. Double negatives had to be rooted out by force (again, because Latin doesn't allow them) and still persist in most non-standard dialects because they're a natural part of English speech.
> (I don't agree that the rules are 'artificial'; at least the ones I know arose from usage.)
Can you give concrete examples? Which rules arose from usage but have to be explicitly taught?
See our other conversation too; I won't repeat those things here (my fault for starting two threads).
> Most of the classic grammatical rules taught in schools were never rules in the English language in the first place: they were borrowed from Latin because Latin was perceived as being "better". That's why they have to be taught—they're not naturally part of spoken English.
I'm aware that rhetoric in the Early Modern period (~16th-17th centuries) was based at least partly on Latin and Greek rhetoric. Rhetoric isn't grammar - rhetoric is about style and persuasion - and I wasn't taught rhetoric in school. I don't recall any Latin-style grammar in school either, and Latin grammar is much different - no set word order and word endings, not order, determine parts of speech (e.g., in a Latin sentence the subject could be anywhere; you find it by word endings. English lacks word endings so the example is missing something, but the Latin word order 'dog bites person' could mean 'person bites dog', depending on the endings of 'person' and 'dog', and 'person dog bites' or any other combinatoric possibility could mean the same), much more genderized, etc. How could that be taught as English grammar?
> Double negatives had to be rooted out by force (again, because Latin doesn't allow them) and still persist in most non-standard dialects because they're a natural part of English speech.
They're instinctive but confusing, IME and IMHO. That's at least one reason - the only reason I know - that they are disliked. E.g., 'did you not fail to eat the apple?' 'Yes.' People don't communicate very well without some training and skill.
"Professor Dagmar Divjak explained: “Your knowledge about your first language is largely implicit, i.e., learning your mother tongue did not require you to sit and study, and using it does not require much, if any, thought. This also means that you will find it hard to pin down what exactly is right or wrong about a sentence and, even worse, explain why that is so, especially if you’ve not had formal language training."
I beg to disagree. Maybe this explanation is English-specific, i.e. many languages have a much stricter grammar that children learn for a decade or so?
> I beg to disagree. Maybe this explanation is English-specific, i.e. many languages have a much stricter grammar that children learn for a decade or so?
Divjak sounds like a slavic last name. English probably wasn’t their first language.
That said, in Slovenia we get about a decade of formal grammar training for our native language because it’s so complicated. But we learn it descriptively more than prescriptively. Yes it helps you write and speak formal Slovenian but we are always thought that “When in doubt, do what feels right and you’ll probably get it right”.
When learning a second language, you’re learning grammar so you can use the rules instead of the gut feel you don’t yet have.
edit: looks like she did undergrad in Poland so likely intimately familiar with non-english first languages
I was taught some English grammar in American schools, but not nearly as much time was spent on formal grammar in my English classes as in foreign language classes. Certainly not a decade.
Children are compelled to learn but adults are not compelled to apply the learning. Many adults will tell you, 'nothing I learned in school/college/etc. was really valuable'. What they mean is, 'I don't apply it.'
Grammar is a powerful, mature abstraction that applies widely and well. When I miscommunicate, I think about why and how to prevent it. Often the problem has already been solved in English grammar.
I agree that “learning your mother tongue did not require you to sit and study” is an exaggeration – my schooling included years of sitting and studying grammar during the English class for native speakers, and I probably learned to speak better as a result.
However, I think at least a significant subset of grammar is only learned implicitly, never taught in school. The classic example of this is adjective order (https://www.grammarly.com/blog/adjective-order/): native English speakers know that “the nice orange cat” sounds better than “the orange nice cat”, but most can’t explain why.
I'm a linguist, let me try to explain. It's true that in some cultures, especially very economically developed ones, it's common for adults like parents or schoolteachers to teach kids "language". But this is more about familiarizing them with spelling, literature, writing style, and prescriptive norms (e.g. don't split your infinitives), which are all from a linguist's perspective on the periphery of "language" in the narrow sense, which consists just of core grammar. And when it comes to this sense of "language", kids learn it all pretty much with no explicit instruction: the order that adjectives go in, how to form relative clauses, etc.
Consider these sentences:
1. The angry man complained to the manager.
2. The angry about his food man complained to his manager.
3. The man angry about his food complained to the manager.
I won't get into the details of everything that's going on here, but (3) is much "better" than (2), and kids naturally learn that you need to move "angry" or any other adjective to the other side of its noun when it gets a prepositional phrase complement. No parent is ever telling their kid (except a linguist parent, maybe, since they love making their kids subjects), "Remember, Jon, when the adjective has a _complement_, it needs to come _after_ the noun rather than before it."
Interestingly enough (to me, anyway) is the second example is approaching the grammar of Japanese, and it's taken me so long to become comfortable with it, and in many ways that was an emotional or attitudinal change within me of acceptance.
It's making me wonder if language learning ability might be linked to this grammar-annoyance effect, that those who can be more accepting of (for them, internally or naturally) "wrong" grammar in other contexts (i.e. other languages) will learn quicker than those who stubbornly refuse to drop the innate grammar rules they know even when the context changes and they're no longer correct.
Note that the grammatical errors in question in this research were specifically "grammatical errors against articles (e.g., a/an, the)" [0], meaning that they were studying a class of grammatical error that is uncontroversially incorrect across most English dialects.
When most native English speakers think about "bad grammar", what they actually are referring to are a combination of dialectical differences and archaic rules that rarely were ever true grammatical rules—more of stylistic preferences that have to be taught precisely because they aren't a part of colloquial speech.
Hence what the researcher says: "Your knowledge about your first language is largely implicit, i.e., learning your mother tongue did not require you to sit and study, and using it does not require much, if any, thought." She's referring to the actual grammatical rules of English, like when to use "a" vs "an", not the myriad style-guide preferences that are taught in school.
I suspect that a similar study done with the more artificial rules would have a weaker effect, because most people wouldn't notice violations in speech (though they might in writing).
Are there people who speak like that? The a/an rules exist because they make it easier to speak. "I went to get an burger" is more like brain damage than bad grammar.
Non-native speakers can take a while to pick up rules like that, since the whole language feels thick on their tongues. "I went to get an burger" doesn't necessarily sound much worse to someone who already struggles with "I went to get a burger".
In written English, getting a/an wrong is usually a typo or an editing error. In spoken English, it means somebody is a non-native speaker with a beginner's level of fluency in the language.
That's an oversimplified (and therefore unfair) dismissal. There are 'correct' ways of performing muscle kinematics that stem from nature, and not nurture.[0]
For a trite example, consider the golf swing. There is a right way to do it, and the correctness of 'good golf form' does not derive from golfing pedagogy, but physiology. A competent golfer, I would presume, would also experience physical signs of stress from having to watch an amateur at the driving range.
[0]I am not enough of a language nerd to attest to a-consonant vs. an-vowel but it seems plausible enough.
Yes, learning the correct technique (the rules) gets you a more effective result than not.
You have to learn to speak english correctly, you have to learn to do a golf swing correctly. The beginner speaker/golfer uses the incorrect form most likely because they haven't learned the correct form. The rules don't exist because it's the easiest way to do it, they exist because it's the correct way to do it.
> "An burger" sounds like a abomination to you and is more difficult for you to say than "a burger" because that's how you learned to say it.
I could understand someone wondering whether that was true, but what evidence supports that claim? As a wild guess, maybe putting two consonents together, as in 'an burger', is too hard to say and one is eventually dropped.
It's plainly obvious that not every person speaking english uses an identical grammar. It seems reasonable to assume that at least some people don't notice the difference/s. The incorrect form must not be significantly more difficult to use because it's being used. They haven't learned that it's incorrect or can't see why it matters.
I'm a bit confused about what point you're making. Are you talking about individuals "naturally" preferring the correct grammar -- as opposed to learning it? Or the grammar has developing over time?
> not every person speaking english uses an identical grammar. It seems reasonable to assume that at least some people don't notice the difference/s. The incorrect form must not be significantly more difficult to use because it's being used.
Not every variation of grammar is equally possible or usable. It's a philosophical argument, a fantasy of (rebellion?), to reject all practices and rules and preferences as arbitrary and therefore to be ignored. Some are arbitrary, some are obsolete, but many have real reasons, value, and impact.
From David Adger, professor of linguistics, Queen Mary University of London:
"People have a notion of grammar as being a set of rules that someone tells you to do. ... I want to say, 'No, look at the amazing complexity of languages around the world, and look at how unified it all is.'"
"There's an unlimited number of even numbers but obviously they’re limited, right? Because 3s and 7s aren't in there. Language is like that. There's an unlimited number of possible things we can say, of sentence structures, but not anything can be a sentence structure. ... Language is unlimited, but it’s unlimited in a limited way."
> I'm a bit confused about what point you're making. Are you talking about individuals "naturally" preferring the correct grammar -- as opposed to learning it? Or the grammar has developing over time?
I'm saying the great majority of explicitly learned/taught grammar is not arbitrary or obsolete, but has developed from study and practical experience of what is used and what works well (and what doesn't).
I was responding to this part of the parent comment:
> The a/an rules exist because they make it easier to speak.
I disagree with that. I can understand how an english native speaker would feel that that's a natural conclusion though -- because they learned how to follow the rules at a very young age. The correct form is easier to a native speaker, because that's what they know.
I'm not judging the rules / grammar. The rules are learned, but that doesn't assign a value to them.
It makes sense to study such an effect on the more widely accepted rules though, especially if the effect hasn't been well studied before. It makes it easier to find participants, for one thing.
Also, not sure if you used "myriad [(not) of]" referring to style-guide "rules" for entertainment purposes but I appreciated it, nonetheless.
Oh, I agree 100%. This is actually more interesting to me than it would be if it were about the classroom rules, because a stress response to the classroom rules could be attributable to residual stress from being graded on them. This is a purer result because most people don't have to be penalized for mixing up "a/an", they already have it sorted before school.
> When most native English speakers think about "bad grammar", what they actually are referring to are a combination of dialectical differences and archaic rules that rarely were ever true grammatical rules—more of stylistic preferences that have to be taught precisely because they aren't a part of colloquial speech.
You've said this in a couple of comments, at least, but what is it based on? To my knowledge and in my experience, the 'rules' of grammar arose from the study of language as it is used.
Could you give some examples of artificial rules?
Edit: Also there are universal aspects to grammar, found in completely disconnected cultures, strongly implying an inherited foundation to them. Here's a non-exhaustive list based on Donald Brown's Human Universals, the seminal book on such things, language and otherwise. Unfortunately, not much detail here on grammar, but my point is more about the inherited, not learned or created, nature of much language. (The categorization is by me, not Brown.)
* Grammar
* Semantics
* Semantic category of affecting things and people
* Semantic category of dimension
* Semantic category of giving
* Semantic category of location
* Semantic category of motion
* Semantic category of other physical properties
* Semantic components
* Semantic components, generation
* Semantic components, sex
* Vowel contrasts
* Nouns
* Personal names
* Pronouns
* Pronouns, minimum two numbers
* Pronouns, minimum three persons
* Proper names
* Verbs
* Numerals (counting)
* Antonyms
* Metonym
* Morphemes
* Polysemy (one word has several meanings)
* Phonemes
* Phonemes defined by set of minimally constrasting features
* Phonemes, merging of
* Phonemes, range from 10 to 70 in number
* Phonemic change, inevitability of
* Phonemic change, rules of
* Phonemic system
* Vocalic/nonvocalic contrasts in phonemes
* Contrasting marked and nonmarked sememes meaningful elements in language)
* Markedness
* Onomatopoeia
* Synonyms
* Sememes, commonly used ones are short, infrequently used ones Are longer
* Possessive, intimate
* Possessive, loose
* Translatable
* Stop/nonstop contrasts (in speech sounds)
* Words
* Age terms
* Black (color term)
* Face (word for)
* Father and mother, separate kin terms for
* Hand (word for)
* One (numeral)
* Two (numeral)
* Units of time
* White (color term)
* Techniques
* Abstraction in speech & thought
* Baby talk
* Figurative speech
* Linguistic redundancy
* Marking at phonemic, syntactic, and lexical levels
* Metaphor
* Synesthetic metaphors
* Not a simple reflection of reality
* Symbolism
* Symbolic speech
EDIT2: For those wondering, a 'marked' word is the non-default one in a binary pair of words. For example, for author & authoress, 'author' could mean any gender and is therefore 'unmarked'; 'authoress' specifies only women is therefore 'marked'. Or in a more interesting example, "In the case of 'wide' and 'narrow', 'wide' is the unmarked word: asking 'How wide is the road?' does not suggest that the road is wide, but asking 'How narrow is the road?' does suggest that the road is narrow."
My impression (I'm not an expert at all) is that 'marked' words and unmarked words also are associated with specific kinds of sounds or structures.
Thanks. While I've heard people say those things I don't recall being taught them or having read them anywhere authoritative, though I think Strunk & White recommended something in particular for less/fewer.
There is no clear support for the people who insist that a ‘split infinitive’ is a grammatical error. Even quite conservative grammar and usage books agree that it is not ...
The cite recommends a usage manual, Merriam-Webster's Concise Dictionary of English Usage, and says that book rejects the common advice/rules on about less & fewer.
---------
Those two cites, at least, seem to be examples of the opposite of your claim; they say these aren't rules but misunderstandings (or possibly the second cite says that one is obsolete) and that authorities reject them.
Even if they are rules, that doesn't make them arbitrary. For example, some could be obsolete, useful in a time and place. Some may be useful for mass publication, when a wide range of readers means you need to deal with edge cases that ordinary communication can ignore (sort of like the difference between code you write for yourself and code you write for millions of users).
> Can you give me four equivalent examples of rules that have to be taught in school but arose naturally?
I appreciate that you appear to have done some research. Thank you. And maybe I should return the favor. But are you really contending that there aren't many rules of grammar that arise naturally?
I should also avoid any absolute arguments: Of course some 'rules' are arbitrary. Some are obsolete, as described above. Language changes.
But that doesn't condemn all or most of grammar. I see on HN and other places a template - the sort of thing I was talking about in the post with Heraclitus - of rejecting rules, intellectual things, etc. as arbitrary, opinion, etc. Like the rules, their rejection can be just as reflexive as their acceptance, and just as arbitrary and meaningless without evidence.
> Those two cites, at least, seem to be examples of the opposite of your claim; they say these aren't rules but misunderstandings (or possibly the second cite says that one is obsolete) and that authorities reject them.
That's exactly my point—most of what is taught to American children as grammatical rules are not, in fact, natural rules of grammar.
> But are you really contending that there aren't many rules of grammar that arise naturally?
No, all I've ever said is that the real rules of grammar don't have to be taught to native speakers: if it's a rule, they pick it up naturally. If it has to be taught to native speakers, it's artificial, even if it were once part of the language.
I don't know that those things are taught, at least not in classrooms. The manual in your citation doesn't teach them.
> the real rules of grammar don't have to be taught to native speakers: if it's a rule, they pick it up naturally. If it has to be taught to native speakers, it's artificial, even if it were once part of the language.
I understand your point now! See how tricky communication is? :)
I don't believe the argument that we can't be taught to improve what we learn naturally, if that's what you mean. In fact, I think it's very common. We learn to run naturally, but if you want to do it well (e.g., to run track or for other sports, or to protect your back/knees/shins if you're a jogger), you study technique. The same goes for writing, reading, programming, ... even basic functions like learning, sleeping, eating (I eat too much, naturally!), etc. The same goes for grammar and language, IMHO.
EDIT: Relevant, and copied from another post:
From David Adger, professor of linguistics, Queen Mary University of London:
"People have a notion of grammar as being a set of rules that someone tells you to do. ... I want to say, 'No, look at the amazing complexity of languages around the world, and look at how unified it all is.'"
"There's an unlimited number of even numbers but obviously they’re limited, right? Because 3s and 7s aren't in there. Language is like that. There's an unlimited number of possible things we can say, of sentence structures, but not anything can be a sentence structure. ... Language is unlimited, but it’s unlimited in a limited way."
I do find listening to a southern California speaker say "I was on 'the' 10" is physically stressful, as it expands to "I was on the [part of Interstate Highway] 10 [which is a limited-access highway ['freeway'] but because Interstate 10 is an Interstate Highway, that's all of it.]"
Just like you don't get your kicks on "the" Route 66, anywhere else we say "I was on I-10" or "I was on Route 10" or just "I was on 10."
That may sound like a vent, but I am confirming a physical stress, at least from the constant repetition of such linguistic pain.
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[ 1.7 ms ] story [ 178 ms ] threadhttps://research.birmingham.ac.uk/en/publications/physiologi...
It is possibly related to the fact that my own bad grammar often resulted in a different sort of physical stress...
I've spoken Australian|British English for six decades and never had issue with singular 'they', it's a natural part of day to day discussion.
FWiW I've been on internet forums on a near daily basis since before WWW (original Usenet and !bang!bang addressing) and have nearly always used "they" in discussions when referring to the work or comments of anybody that I've not met personally.
For that matter I mostly use 'they' |'them' | 'their' when referring to people whose gender I know on public forums.
How is it that usage causes you pain?
I accept both usages of the term, but choose the term carefully depending on who I am talking to.
Do they have an opinion on their choice of invariant transforms, etc.
Would they (your parents) have to look up a biography of E.J.Holden to first determine gender before commenting on his or her work?
In the early 1980s I was surrounded by women in mathematics and computer science at the university I attended so I rapidly fell into the habit of not assuming anything about individuals known only by mail or by journal papers.
They do not know or care about invariant transforms, math or sexuality because they are farmers. Offending people they will never meet is on the bottom of their list of priorities.
No drama :)
The question is how would they refer to singuler people whose gender they don't know.
> They do not know or care about invariant transforms, math or sexuality because they are farmers.
You do make some odd assumptions; I was raised on a Kimberley cattle station, am now farming in the Western Australian wheatbelt, and once worked on a sheep shearing robot.
There are a number of farmers that care about math, GIS resource mapping, drone operation, optical laser wool grading, etc. etc. etc.
That your parents do not is not a universal attribute of farmers.
Otherwise... well, that usage is so common--and ancient--that I don't think they know what they are talking about.
I doubt it was ever "correct English" but it may well have been common in some parts of the UK in times past.
True, but I'd say that's a "bad grammar" problem, not a "singular they" problem.
SA is not a naive word-swap of "he/she" with "they (and "him/her" with "them") while keeping everything else the same, but a style which demands a certain internal consistency. You use various words which cover the "one or more" case even when broader context establishes it's just one.
It would be another story if English had an option that covered the case of (people_count==1 && gender==null), but instead we have to make do with either "it" (which denies personhood) or "they" (which is open-ended on count.)
Please don't create accounts to break HN's rules with; it will eventually get your main account banned as well.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
More commonly called "cringe".
The grammar issues that do cause me to stumble are news with piss poor editing. Maybe it's just a pet peeve so when I'm reading news with those issues, it bothers me more than other forms. But the current state of first to post, edit later really irritates me
Indeed. But in the hands of a great writer like Russell Hoban, what results is a sense of being on a post-nuclear apocalyptic Earth that's so vivid and powerful, it's like mind transport once you get used to the weird grammar, crazy spelling and neologisms, and their ilk.
https://www.google.com/books/edition/Riddley_Walker_Expanded...
https://archive.org/details/riddleywalker00hoba
Interesting that a more regular heartbeat is a sign of stress. Wonder why that is...
Perhaps the ready-for-action regularity comes at a cost, and when everything is calm and safe there's no need for your body to incur that cost, it can afford a less-strict clock.
"A healthy heart is not a metronome: an integrative review of the heart’s anatomy and heart rate variability" https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25324790/
seems like a missed opportunity to evolve the 'native' speech to something new
I like this. A missed opportunity to be conquered. I'm going to keep that one in my back pocket on account of I bet that sooner or later I'll be able to trot it out for some poignant drollery.
There was one thing, "the worse of them" and "worst than" that I think is a non-native error, that is so common, that it made me think it might even be some grammatical construct I never heard of.
Maybe it's like music in some way. A cacophony is not unpleasant at all, when that's the majority of everything (tell me you're a death metal fan, without telling me you're a death metal fan), but when an otherwise clean and smooth rhythm or harmony is disrupted, it sounds extremely unpleasant. For a specific example, the intro to the song Cemetery Gates [1] practically ruins the song for me. It's such a beautiful and pleasant first 1:32, but then the dirty bit hits, and it's just too much. By contrast the transition at 2:31 is smooth, and so it sounds great and pleasant.
[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cSZf8ZYHV7o
They say / I said: I don't need to know those things; they are arbitrary and useless; I can do it fine without them (and when I can't, it's the art, etc., not me that has failed). But in my life it has turned out that those things arose from challenges and subtleties that have real impact but that my naive self - not an insult; I came by it honestly, from inexperience - hadn't yet noticed.
Now when there is miscommunication I can often attribute it to grammatical error, and it turned out that the English grammar is a handy, powerful abstraction that works well. Now it seems that when I disdained certain art as offering nothing to understand, I was unwittingly disdaining my lack of understanding.
I think what Heraclitus meant was, "Dogs bark at those whom they do not know." Now when people speak, I listen.
[0] Heraclitus, I'm pretty sure.
There's the English grammar as it exists in the actual language, and then there's the English grammar as it is insisted upon by self-appointed arbiters of proper speech. The first is indeed quite handy and productive, the second is mostly a tool for reinforcing hierarchies: like the Mid-Atlantic accent, the rules are useful precisely because no one speaks or writes that way naturally. You have to spend time learning and practicing them, and spending that time sets you apart from the plebians who only speak their native tongue.
Human languages in general is very good at introducing the right amount of redundancy to avoid miscommunication, even as the languages evolve. We don't need artificial rules to help with that.
Accents are not grammar.
> There's the English grammar as it exists in the actual language, and then there's the English grammar as it is insisted upon by self-appointed arbiters of proper speech.
Who are you referring to as the latter? The grammar I know arose from the language, and from centuries of study of both descriptive and optimal use of it. That's the grammar I learned in school though, as I said in the GP, I didn't understand it at the time.
> Human languages in general is very good at introducing the right amount of redundancy to avoid miscommunication, even as the languages evolve. We don't need artificial rules to help with that.
Do you mean to imply that humans naturally communicate well. My experience is that humans are poor communicators, and effective communication takes skill and work. As more objective evidence, lots of very smart people, for centuries, have worked very hard at it. If you can write well, you can make good money doing it. (I don't agree that the rules are 'artificial'; at least the ones I know arose from usage.)
It's actually rather hard to separate the two. "I done told you" is a grammatical sentence in the South but not in other forms of English. Most "accents" are actually a full dialect.
> The grammar I know arose from the language, and from centuries of study of both descriptive and optimal use of it.
No, not really. Most of the classic grammatical rules taught in schools were never rules in the English language in the first place: they were borrowed from Latin because Latin was perceived as being "better". That's why they have to be taught—they're not naturally part of spoken English.
Split infinitives are the classic example of this: a totally normal part of English, they're impossible in Latin (since Latin infinitives are a single word), so the grammarians insisted we must keep them together in English. Francis Bacon, Edmund Burke, and the King James Bible all used coordinating conjunctions at the start of a sentence. Double negatives had to be rooted out by force (again, because Latin doesn't allow them) and still persist in most non-standard dialects because they're a natural part of English speech.
> (I don't agree that the rules are 'artificial'; at least the ones I know arose from usage.)
Can you give concrete examples? Which rules arose from usage but have to be explicitly taught?
> Most of the classic grammatical rules taught in schools were never rules in the English language in the first place: they were borrowed from Latin because Latin was perceived as being "better". That's why they have to be taught—they're not naturally part of spoken English.
I'm aware that rhetoric in the Early Modern period (~16th-17th centuries) was based at least partly on Latin and Greek rhetoric. Rhetoric isn't grammar - rhetoric is about style and persuasion - and I wasn't taught rhetoric in school. I don't recall any Latin-style grammar in school either, and Latin grammar is much different - no set word order and word endings, not order, determine parts of speech (e.g., in a Latin sentence the subject could be anywhere; you find it by word endings. English lacks word endings so the example is missing something, but the Latin word order 'dog bites person' could mean 'person bites dog', depending on the endings of 'person' and 'dog', and 'person dog bites' or any other combinatoric possibility could mean the same), much more genderized, etc. How could that be taught as English grammar?
> Double negatives had to be rooted out by force (again, because Latin doesn't allow them) and still persist in most non-standard dialects because they're a natural part of English speech.
They're instinctive but confusing, IME and IMHO. That's at least one reason - the only reason I know - that they are disliked. E.g., 'did you not fail to eat the apple?' 'Yes.' People don't communicate very well without some training and skill.
I beg to disagree. Maybe this explanation is English-specific, i.e. many languages have a much stricter grammar that children learn for a decade or so?
Divjak sounds like a slavic last name. English probably wasn’t their first language.
That said, in Slovenia we get about a decade of formal grammar training for our native language because it’s so complicated. But we learn it descriptively more than prescriptively. Yes it helps you write and speak formal Slovenian but we are always thought that “When in doubt, do what feels right and you’ll probably get it right”.
When learning a second language, you’re learning grammar so you can use the rules instead of the gut feel you don’t yet have.
edit: looks like she did undergrad in Poland so likely intimately familiar with non-english first languages
Grammar is a powerful, mature abstraction that applies widely and well. When I miscommunicate, I think about why and how to prevent it. Often the problem has already been solved in English grammar.
However, I think at least a significant subset of grammar is only learned implicitly, never taught in school. The classic example of this is adjective order (https://www.grammarly.com/blog/adjective-order/): native English speakers know that “the nice orange cat” sounds better than “the orange nice cat”, but most can’t explain why.
Consider these sentences:
1. The angry man complained to the manager.
2. The angry about his food man complained to his manager.
3. The man angry about his food complained to the manager.
I won't get into the details of everything that's going on here, but (3) is much "better" than (2), and kids naturally learn that you need to move "angry" or any other adjective to the other side of its noun when it gets a prepositional phrase complement. No parent is ever telling their kid (except a linguist parent, maybe, since they love making their kids subjects), "Remember, Jon, when the adjective has a _complement_, it needs to come _after_ the noun rather than before it."
It's making me wonder if language learning ability might be linked to this grammar-annoyance effect, that those who can be more accepting of (for them, internally or naturally) "wrong" grammar in other contexts (i.e. other languages) will learn quicker than those who stubbornly refuse to drop the innate grammar rules they know even when the context changes and they're no longer correct.
When most native English speakers think about "bad grammar", what they actually are referring to are a combination of dialectical differences and archaic rules that rarely were ever true grammatical rules—more of stylistic preferences that have to be taught precisely because they aren't a part of colloquial speech.
Hence what the researcher says: "Your knowledge about your first language is largely implicit, i.e., learning your mother tongue did not require you to sit and study, and using it does not require much, if any, thought." She's referring to the actual grammatical rules of English, like when to use "a" vs "an", not the myriad style-guide preferences that are taught in school.
I suspect that a similar study done with the more artificial rules would have a weaker effect, because most people wouldn't notice violations in speech (though they might in writing).
[0] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S091160442...
"An burger" sounds like a abomination to you and is more difficult for you to say than "a burger" because that's how you learned to say it.
That's an oversimplified (and therefore unfair) dismissal. There are 'correct' ways of performing muscle kinematics that stem from nature, and not nurture.[0]
For a trite example, consider the golf swing. There is a right way to do it, and the correctness of 'good golf form' does not derive from golfing pedagogy, but physiology. A competent golfer, I would presume, would also experience physical signs of stress from having to watch an amateur at the driving range.
[0]I am not enough of a language nerd to attest to a-consonant vs. an-vowel but it seems plausible enough.
I'm not sure why it matters if the technique is optimised for human physicality.
It does if you'd like to hit said golf ball far, or accurately. Likewise if the aim is to enunciate clearly[0].
[0]If I may take a presumption for brevity that this is the case, and that this is a reasonably valid objective of the spoken word.
You have to learn to speak english correctly, you have to learn to do a golf swing correctly. The beginner speaker/golfer uses the incorrect form most likely because they haven't learned the correct form. The rules don't exist because it's the easiest way to do it, they exist because it's the correct way to do it.
I could understand someone wondering whether that was true, but what evidence supports that claim? As a wild guess, maybe putting two consonents together, as in 'an burger', is too hard to say and one is eventually dropped.
I'm a bit confused about what point you're making. Are you talking about individuals "naturally" preferring the correct grammar -- as opposed to learning it? Or the grammar has developing over time?
Not every variation of grammar is equally possible or usable. It's a philosophical argument, a fantasy of (rebellion?), to reject all practices and rules and preferences as arbitrary and therefore to be ignored. Some are arbitrary, some are obsolete, but many have real reasons, value, and impact.
From David Adger, professor of linguistics, Queen Mary University of London:
"People have a notion of grammar as being a set of rules that someone tells you to do. ... I want to say, 'No, look at the amazing complexity of languages around the world, and look at how unified it all is.'"
"There's an unlimited number of even numbers but obviously they’re limited, right? Because 3s and 7s aren't in there. Language is like that. There's an unlimited number of possible things we can say, of sentence structures, but not anything can be a sentence structure. ... Language is unlimited, but it’s unlimited in a limited way."
http://nautil.us/issue/76/language/-talking-is-throwing-fict...
> I'm a bit confused about what point you're making. Are you talking about individuals "naturally" preferring the correct grammar -- as opposed to learning it? Or the grammar has developing over time?
I'm saying the great majority of explicitly learned/taught grammar is not arbitrary or obsolete, but has developed from study and practical experience of what is used and what works well (and what doesn't).
> "An burger" sounds like a abomination to you and is more difficult for you to say than "a burger" because that's how you learned to say it.
That seems to imply, to me, that the rules/etc don't have legitimacy; they're merely what we have been told. What am I missing?
I was responding to this part of the parent comment:
> The a/an rules exist because they make it easier to speak.
I disagree with that. I can understand how an english native speaker would feel that that's a natural conclusion though -- because they learned how to follow the rules at a very young age. The correct form is easier to a native speaker, because that's what they know.
I'm not judging the rules / grammar. The rules are learned, but that doesn't assign a value to them.
Also, not sure if you used "myriad [(not) of]" referring to style-guide "rules" for entertainment purposes but I appreciated it, nonetheless.
You've said this in a couple of comments, at least, but what is it based on? To my knowledge and in my experience, the 'rules' of grammar arose from the study of language as it is used.
Could you give some examples of artificial rules?
Edit: Also there are universal aspects to grammar, found in completely disconnected cultures, strongly implying an inherited foundation to them. Here's a non-exhaustive list based on Donald Brown's Human Universals, the seminal book on such things, language and otherwise. Unfortunately, not much detail here on grammar, but my point is more about the inherited, not learned or created, nature of much language. (The categorization is by me, not Brown.)
EDIT2: For those wondering, a 'marked' word is the non-default one in a binary pair of words. For example, for author & authoress, 'author' could mean any gender and is therefore 'unmarked'; 'authoress' specifies only women is therefore 'marked'. Or in a more interesting example, "In the case of 'wide' and 'narrow', 'wide' is the unmarked word: asking 'How wide is the road?' does not suggest that the road is wide, but asking 'How narrow is the road?' does suggest that the road is narrow."My impression (I'm not an expert at all) is that 'marked' words and unmarked words also are associated with specific kinds of sounds or structures.
Split infinitives: http://www.lel.ed.ac.uk/~gpullum/grammar/splitinf.html
Ending a sentence in a preposition: http://web.archive.org/web/20160222013258/http://blog.oxford...
Less vs fewer: http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/003775.h...
Singular they: https://www.jstor.org/stable/4166805?mag=grammar-rule-is-pro...
Can you give me four equivalent examples of rules that have to be taught in school but arose naturally?
> Split infinitives: http://www.lel.ed.ac.uk/~gpullum/grammar/splitinf.html
From the citation:
There is no clear support for the people who insist that a ‘split infinitive’ is a grammatical error. Even quite conservative grammar and usage books agree that it is not ...
> Less vs fewer: http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/003775.h...
The cite recommends a usage manual, Merriam-Webster's Concise Dictionary of English Usage, and says that book rejects the common advice/rules on about less & fewer.
---------
Those two cites, at least, seem to be examples of the opposite of your claim; they say these aren't rules but misunderstandings (or possibly the second cite says that one is obsolete) and that authorities reject them.
Even if they are rules, that doesn't make them arbitrary. For example, some could be obsolete, useful in a time and place. Some may be useful for mass publication, when a wide range of readers means you need to deal with edge cases that ordinary communication can ignore (sort of like the difference between code you write for yourself and code you write for millions of users).
> Can you give me four equivalent examples of rules that have to be taught in school but arose naturally?
I appreciate that you appear to have done some research. Thank you. And maybe I should return the favor. But are you really contending that there aren't many rules of grammar that arise naturally?
I should also avoid any absolute arguments: Of course some 'rules' are arbitrary. Some are obsolete, as described above. Language changes.
But that doesn't condemn all or most of grammar. I see on HN and other places a template - the sort of thing I was talking about in the post with Heraclitus - of rejecting rules, intellectual things, etc. as arbitrary, opinion, etc. Like the rules, their rejection can be just as reflexive as their acceptance, and just as arbitrary and meaningless without evidence.
That's exactly my point—most of what is taught to American children as grammatical rules are not, in fact, natural rules of grammar.
> But are you really contending that there aren't many rules of grammar that arise naturally?
No, all I've ever said is that the real rules of grammar don't have to be taught to native speakers: if it's a rule, they pick it up naturally. If it has to be taught to native speakers, it's artificial, even if it were once part of the language.
> the real rules of grammar don't have to be taught to native speakers: if it's a rule, they pick it up naturally. If it has to be taught to native speakers, it's artificial, even if it were once part of the language.
I understand your point now! See how tricky communication is? :)
I don't believe the argument that we can't be taught to improve what we learn naturally, if that's what you mean. In fact, I think it's very common. We learn to run naturally, but if you want to do it well (e.g., to run track or for other sports, or to protect your back/knees/shins if you're a jogger), you study technique. The same goes for writing, reading, programming, ... even basic functions like learning, sleeping, eating (I eat too much, naturally!), etc. The same goes for grammar and language, IMHO.
EDIT: Relevant, and copied from another post:
From David Adger, professor of linguistics, Queen Mary University of London:
"People have a notion of grammar as being a set of rules that someone tells you to do. ... I want to say, 'No, look at the amazing complexity of languages around the world, and look at how unified it all is.'"
"There's an unlimited number of even numbers but obviously they’re limited, right? Because 3s and 7s aren't in there. Language is like that. There's an unlimited number of possible things we can say, of sentence structures, but not anything can be a sentence structure. ... Language is unlimited, but it’s unlimited in a limited way."
http://nautil.us/issue/76/language/-talking-is-throwing-fict...
Just like you don't get your kicks on "the" Route 66, anywhere else we say "I was on I-10" or "I was on Route 10" or just "I was on 10."
That may sound like a vent, but I am confirming a physical stress, at least from the constant repetition of such linguistic pain.