# Grammar Question **URL:** \ **Category:** Factual Questions\ **Created:** [December 30, 2010, 8:20pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/grammar-question/565863 "2010-12-30T20:20:53Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 15\ **Page:** 3
**Author:** ![Left\_Hand\_of\_Dorkness](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/left_hand_of_dorkness/32/7156_2.png) [@Left\_Hand\_of\_Dorkness](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Left_Hand_of_Dorkness)\ **Post date:** [January 1, 2011, 4:54am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/grammar-question/565863/41 "2011-01-01T04:54:00Z")
[quote=“Gary “Wombat” Robson, post:34, topic:565863”] But people used “y’all” more and more often to address a single person, making it the singular, and this led to the birth of “all y’all” as the current plural. [/QUOTE] I’m skeptical of this. [This wikipedia article](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Y%27all#Second-person_singular_usage) suggests that it’s very rare for y’all to be used to truly address a single person (I might ask my brother, “Are y’all coming for dinner?”, to which he’d answer, “If we can make it, sure,” but never, “If I can make it, sure.”) “All y’all” seems to me to be an intensifier of a sort, similar to “all of us.” Compare: “We’re all going to the party.” “All y’all should come to our party afterwards.” ---
**Author:** ![Schnitte](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/schnitte/32/9033_2.png) [@Schnitte](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Schnitte)\ **Post date:** [January 1, 2011, 10:33am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/grammar-question/565863/42 "2011-01-01T10:33:37Z")
> [@Chessic\_Sense](#): > > The verbs “to have”, “to do”, and “to be” are almost always irregular because they’re so common. Now, obviously, I don’t know if that holds true in literally _every_ language, but it’s pretty damn common, especially “to be”. I read somewhere that Turkish was one of the most regular naural languages in the world with only one irregular verb - _to be_. My guess is that when natural languages evolved and grammar was not yet formalised, people would not think of _to be_ as a verb because it doesn’t really denote an activity, it simply denotes a state of being. Afrikaans has very few irregular verbs too, and one of them is _to be_. It’s irregular in the sense that the infinitive is not the same as the verb in its conjugated version, as is usually the case for Afrikaans verbs. The conjugated form, however, is the same (“is”) for all persons. Constructed languages, obviously, can get rid of these points too, and consequently _to be_ (“esti”) is perfectly regular in Esperanto. ---
**Author:** ![Gary\_Robson](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/gary_robson/32/3448_2.png) [@Gary\_Robson](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Gary_Robson)\ **Post date:** [January 1, 2011, 7:35pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/grammar-question/565863/43 "2011-01-01T19:35:45Z")
> [@Left\_Hand\_of\_Dorkness](#): > > I’m skeptical of this. [This wikipedia article](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Y%27all#Second-person_singular_usage) suggests that it’s very rare for y’all to be used to truly address a single person I’m sure it’s a regional thing. I’ve heard “y’all” used as a singular quite a bit. (And, BTW, Wikipedia is not a valid primary source for GQ, although it’s a nice starting point for research.) ---
**Author:** ![guizot](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/guizot/32/3636_2.png) [@guizot](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/guizot)\ **Post date:** [January 1, 2011, 8:07pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/grammar-question/565863/44 "2011-01-01T20:07:57Z")
> [@Inner\_Stickler](#): > > The explanation, I’d always heard is that because they’re learned so early on in a child’s life, the older more archaic forms stick around longer because they’re drawn on so often and not given a chance to regularize like less common verbs… Doesn’t this explanation conflate the language acquisition of an individual with the historical change of a language? I think it has less to do with the age at which lexicon is acquired than frequency of use, and sometimes simple semantics. (The plural of _fish_, for example, depends upon whether it refers to one species or various species.) ---
**Author:** ![guizot](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/guizot/32/3636_2.png) [@guizot](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/guizot)\ **Post date:** [January 1, 2011, 8:27pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/grammar-question/565863/45 "2011-01-01T20:27:56Z")
> [@Schnitte](#): > > …My guess is that when natural languages evolved and grammar was not yet formalised, people would not think of _to be_ as a verb because it doesn’t really denote an activity, it simply denotes a state of being.. In English, too, _be_ is not really a “verb” but rather a copula and auxiliary. After all, it doesn’t take do-support (except in imperatives), has limited aspect, has two distinct past forms, etc. You can call it a “verb,” but it rarely behaves like one. Many English teachers obsess with the idea that it’s a verb simply because in their minds there’s a slot in every sentence that must be filled with a “verb” at all costs. ---
**Author:** ![Svejk\_1](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/ea666f/32.png) [@Svejk\_1](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Svejk_1)\ **Post date:** [January 1, 2011, 9:41pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/grammar-question/565863/46 "2011-01-01T21:41:31Z")
> [@Diogenes\_the\_Cynic](#): > > I think a simple way to explain it (and this can be applied to other questions as well) is that English is an amalgamation of multiple languages, that each ancestral language had its own gramatic and spelling rules, and that’s why English is inconsistent that way. English is a mixture of languages, and the rules can be different depending on which language a given word came from. Nice, perhaps, but wrong. Tons of languages that are no linguistic mixes like English have irregular plurals, often much more heavily so (the plural of child (Rebyonok) in Russian is /Dyeti/, which makes child\>children look like child’s play. The irregular plurals in English are hardly explained by the provenance of words except in cases like words ending in -us which take -i, where the rules of Latin are followed. Most of the time, plurals that are irregular in English are irregular in the language that they originate in, and are a result of the fact that those words are used a whole lot. ---
**Author:** ![guizot](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/guizot/32/3636_2.png) [@guizot](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/guizot)\ **Post date:** [January 1, 2011, 10:08pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/grammar-question/565863/47 "2011-01-01T22:08:57Z")
> [@bordelond](#): > > …The short bowdlerized answer as to why human language works this way is that the human brain is something more than just a mess of logic gates, and thus does not function in the same way that, say, a digital computer does. Many exceptions and irregularities in human language actually help the brain process many common words and constructions more quickly and efficiently than if all forms were perfectly regular. This linguistic processing, being based ultimately on a biological entity, is imperfect… I think this is probably the best way to explain it, but the underlying premise that there exists some kind of "perfect’ state to which a language might aspire is what is causing both the OP and his/her student the angst in the first place. Moreover, Bodmer’s concept of language “diseases” arises from a narrow, purely grammatical view of language–almost completely ignoring pragmatics–which is presented for those who would “learn” a language from their armchair by studying it as though they were studying a philosophy. (You might just as well say that the human body itself is “diseased” simply because it has an appendix, but what does that really mean?) You’ll get a lot closer to “perfection” (whatever that means to you) if you can see beyond decontextualized grammar and morphology. ---
**Author:** ![tomndebb](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/b9e5f3/32.png) [@tomndebb](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/tomndebb)\ **Post date:** [January 2, 2011, 8:17pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/grammar-question/565863/48 "2011-01-02T20:17:05Z")
> [@KneadToKnow](#): > > I will again mention on these boards having seen the irregular plural of _roof_ almost completely disappear in my lifetime. It now is apparently completely grammatical to say _roofs_, which as recently as 30 years ago would have been as laughably ungrammatical as \*_gooses_ still is. Odd. I have never known a different plural for “roof” in my 60+ years and my 47 year old collegiate dictionary provides “roofs” (final phoneme [s/), as the plural. It does give an alternative final phoneme /z/, but only as an alternative. You might be seeing a change in your local dialect without seeing a shift in the overall language. ---
**Author:** ![septimus](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/septimus/32/410_2.png) [@septimus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/septimus)\ **Post date:** [January 3, 2011, 7:51am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/grammar-question/565863/49 "2011-01-03T07:51:58Z")
> [@septimus](#): > > > [@Hari\_Seldon](#): > > > > I very much doubt that “mouse” ever had an -s plural, since -s plurals are rare in Germanic languages. The -s plural largely has to come from French … > > Unlike some of us ( :dubious: ) I tend not to post as facts things from my imagination! German is not proto-Germanic. The proto-Germanic I showed (though I re-rendered the phonetic symbols) is taken from _Historical Linguistics, an Introduction_ by Lyle Campbell, page 22. (Singular “muus”, plural “muus-iz”, Campbell putting bar above u instead of doubling it.) > > Thanks in advance for your apology! 😃 No response from Mr. Seldon? Apparently he lacks access to any linguistics textbook. [Wikipedia/Wiktionary](http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Appendix:Proto-Germanic_*m%C5%ABs) to the rescue! Scroll down to _Declension_ and Click on _show_. Does this help? ---
**Author:** ![pulykamell](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/pulykamell/32/3166_2.png) [@pulykamell](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/pulykamell)\ **Post date:** [January 3, 2011, 8:30am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/grammar-question/565863/50 "2011-01-03T08:30:42Z")
[quote=“Gary “Wombat” Robson, post:43, topic:565863”] I’m sure it’s a regional thing. I’ve heard “y’all” used as a singular quite a bit. [/QUOTE] I have, too, but only from people trying to affect certain Southern dialects, i.e. they are not native dialect speakers. I’m not entirely convinced that it is used in the singular with any regularity, and there seems to be [a bit of a controversy](http://sandersn.com/blog//index.php/2008/08/26/singular_y_all_myth_or_legend) over whether it is or not. > [@](#): > > It appears that the universal intuition of Southerners and South Midlanders is that y’all is plural only and cases in which it appears to be used as a singular are in fact implicit plurals in which the rest of the group is not present, or frozen forms like “y’all come back” that don’t vary with number. This pretty much jibes with my experience. ---
**Author:** ![BellRungBookShut-CandleSnuffed](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/bcef8e/32.png) [@BellRungBookShut-CandleSnuffed](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BellRungBookShut-CandleSnuffed)\ **Post date:** [January 3, 2011, 8:55am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/grammar-question/565863/51 "2011-01-03T08:55:53Z")
[quote=“Gary “Wombat” Robson, post:5, topic:565863”] It’s always nice to define acronyms like that the first time you use them. I have worked with “English as a second language” teachers in the past, but never heard of ESOL until this post. [/QUOTE] I think it’s “English, shit outta luck” because of all the irregularities for a ESL student. ---
**Author:** ![Frylock](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/f/ce7236/32.png) [@Frylock](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Frylock)\ **Post date:** [January 3, 2011, 11:33am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/grammar-question/565863/52 "2011-01-03T11:33:43Z")
> [@septimus](#): > > No response from Mr. Seldon? Apparently he lacks access to any linguistics textbook. [Wikipedia/Wiktionary](http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Appendix:Proto-Germanic_*m%C5%ABs) to the rescue! Scroll down to _Declension_ and Click on _show_. > > Does this help? My advice would be to give it a rest. This is GQ, not Ego Battle Central. Besides, **Hari Seldon** didn’t “post as fact” anything “from his imagination.” He expressed doubt about a claim you made, and also, in giving the reason for his doubt, related the (true, not from his imagination) fact that s plurals are rare in Germanic languages. You provided a fuller form of your citation, showing that **Seldon’s** doubts were misplaced in this case. End of story. Apologies, indeed any responses at all from **Seldon** , are uncalled for and irrelevant. ---
**Author:** ![bordelond](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/bordelond/32/150_2.png) [@bordelond](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/bordelond)\ **Post date:** [January 3, 2011, 3:58pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/grammar-question/565863/53 "2011-01-03T15:58:23Z")
> [@guizot](#): > > I think this is probably the best way to explain it, but the underlying premise that there exists some kind of "perfect’ state to which a language might aspire is what is causing both the OP and his/her student the angst in the first place. I agree with your overarching point. I just felt like the OP and his student needed a conceptual way to get “there” from “here”. The expectation that human language _should_ work logically seems to come naturally to people … the realization that maximally-efficient, [wetware](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wetware_(brain))-based human language depends upon the presence of irregular forms is not particularly intuitive, IMHO. > [@guizot](#): > > Moreover, Bodmer’s concept of language “diseases” arises from a narrow, purely grammatical view of language–almost completely ignoring pragmatics–which is presented for those who would “learn” a language from their armchair by studying it as though they were studying a philosophy. (You might just as well say that the human body itself is “diseased” simply because it has an appendix, but what does that really mean?) You’ll get a lot closer to “perfection” (whatever that means to you) if you can see beyond decontextualized grammar and morphology. Agreed. What Bodmer really does is demonstrate that many different human languages, by diverging from perfect logical precision in their contructions, present difficulties of one kind or another to the learner. I only recommended _Loom of Language_ as a counter to the conceit that “_my language_ makes _so much_ sense, while English is just a chaotic mess”. ---
**Author:** ![Chessic\_Sense](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/7c8e57/32.png) [@Chessic\_Sense](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Chessic_Sense)\ **Post date:** [January 3, 2011, 4:46pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/grammar-question/565863/54 "2011-01-03T16:46:48Z")
> [@Inner\_Stickler](#): > > The explanation, I’d always heard is that because they’re learned so early on in a child’s life, the older more archaic forms stick around longer because they’re drawn on so often and not given a chance to regularize like less common verbs. > > LhoD, my understanding is that -er was an older pluralization but people saw ox and oxen and the like and stuck the en on the end of childer. The r smooshed up against child and the e got dropped to give us children. From what I know of children’s linguistic acquisition, it should be the reverse. Kids regularize everything and only learn their irregular forms later. I can’t count the number of times kids have said “He hitted me” and “We goed outside.” Google " ‘frequency boosting’ linguistics". The first three (.pdf) results are pretty on-point. ---
**Author:** ![ENugent](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/4af34b/32.png) [@ENugent](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/ENugent)\ **Post date:** [January 4, 2011, 5:45am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/grammar-question/565863/55 "2011-01-04T05:45:49Z")
> [@Chessic\_Sense](#): > > From what I know of children’s linguistic acquisition, it should be the reverse. Kids regularize everything and only learn their irregular forms later. I can’t count the number of times kids have said “He hitted me” and “We goed outside.” Actually, in my experience (with my two kids), first they learn many of the irregular forms one by one (because they are common words that are learned first), then they grasp the concept of “rules” and apply them to everything, applicable or not, then they learn the exceptions. So a toddler says “I got,” then “I getted,” then back to “I got” as his language skills develop. Similarly, they get the orientation of their letters right when they first learn them, then start randomly mirroring some of them for a while when they’re working on combining them and interpreting them (instead of just identifying them), then get them all straight again in a year or two. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/grammar-question/565863.md?page=2)