Not when your language isn’t the speaker’s native one. Which kind of reinforces my point.
I’m glad you were able to understand what I meant. It’s not any kind of failing or negative thing on your part, just a possible mismatch.
Thanks.
Not when your language isn’t the speaker’s native one. Which kind of reinforces my point.
I’m glad you were able to understand what I meant. It’s not any kind of failing or negative thing on your part, just a possible mismatch.
Thanks.
Heh. My high school Latin teacher spoke 2 languages, one of which was NOT Latin.
That’s where the bafflement comes in. I wasn’t baffled that she doesn’t know, I was baffled that my brain kept telling me that she did know because she speaks the language. Since I haven’t seen her in a week I can’t tell if I’m going to keep doing it. Now that I know I WAS doing it, I’ll be more conscious of the need to NOT do it. In addition to me paying attention to what I’m doing to avoid doing it, she is also quite assertive and will not allow me to get ahead of her comfort level.
It’s a very strange feeling to me. I have never been one to make assumptions about people and I very rarely pay attention to stereotypes. When I first decided to volunteer, I thought that my first student wouldn’t speak English at all. Then I was supposed to get an English speaking reading student. When my first student ended up being comfortably conversational, it kind of screwed up my thought process.
If it doesn’t end up working out, I’m not afraid to tell the director and I don’t think my student is either if she’s not satisfied with me. If I find that I can’t wrap my head around being an ESOL tutor, I can always volunteer at the animal shelter.
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.
I want to know why the student is asking why.
Is it unusual to ask why? I never asked why because it seemed natural to me but once she asked, I suddenly realized that I didn’t have a rational explanation for it. I was pleased that she DID ask why. Should I not have been?
Maybe it’s because she’s six years old…
And that, my dears, is why I will never ever ever teach or tutor children. Little bastards.
Actually she is almost 40.
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 and that mainly from the second conjugation in Latin (IIRC). The German word for “mouse” is the essentially homophonous “Maus” whose plural is “Mäuse”. The diphthong in the middle is roughly the vowel of “moist” and the final -e is pronounced. That is a standard pattern in German to add an -e, but with the passage of time, the previous vowel became unlauted under the influence of that final -e. Guessing that it was similar in Anglo-Saxon, the final -e, like so many final vowels, got dropped and then under one or more vowel shifts, we got “mice”. Although I have heard “mouses”, but only in connection with computer mice, I have never heard anyone say “louses”. But one day… What I cannot answer is why the plural of “house” isn’t “hice”, but it isn’t (although it is irregular anyway, being pronounced “houzes” in most dialects of English (although not in my native Philadelphian, where it has become regular).
This kind of story could be told for all the strong verbs too, of which there are fewer in each generation. “Dive” is an interesting case since the preterite of “dive” is “dived” in most dialects in England, but one of the aberrant ones gave rise to the common American “dove”.
The real point is that languages have evolutionary histories and, like the human appendix, many things would not exist if you designed it intelligently, but it evolved that way.
The easy answer is that, while English not merely boirrows from every other language, but mugs them in back alleys and steals their vocabulary, it is at base a Germanic language. Almost every English noun forms its plural with -s or -es (the “s” declension), a bare handful belong to the old “n” declension, a small number of borrowings retain their “foreign” plurals (alumnus, crisis, flambeau, criterion), but a stock of old Germanic words retain the old “strong” declension of Germanic, and form their plurals by a vowel change – and there is no rule to identify which ones do this; they must be learned individually. But that’s the explanation.
No reason to be displeased I am just wondering whether she asked out of general curiosity or because she thought knowing will help her learn to speak English or for some other reason.
Oooohhhh. I’m fairly certain it was the belief that it will help her learn to speak English, as if she had a concern that it was a common rule she needed to memorize. That was the impression I got.
BTW Spanish is a much more regular language than English, but three examples do come to mind–the conjugations for tener, hacer and ser are different from all other verbs as well as from each other. There’s no rule governing that–it’s just an arbitrary fact of the language. That might be something else to bring up.
Was the other one?
My favorite weird plural is from one of Steven Pinker’s books: children. Used to be, “child” was pluralized in a regular form: you just put “-er” onto the end of it to get “childer.” But at some point how you pluralized words changed, and that no longer sounded right to people, so they treated “childer” as if it were singular and re-regularized the plural. At the time, the regular form for pluralizing -er verbs was to change them to -ren verbs: “childer” became “children.” And today that doesn’t sound right to some people, so they treat “children” as if it’s singular and re-re-regularize the plural, adding an -s to make “childrens.”
Mine is probably “you.”
“You” used to be the plural of “thou.” As “thou” dropped from use, “you” became both singular and plural (I’m leaving out “ye” for simplicity’s sake).
Since we needed a new plural, folks in the southern US came up with “you all,” which shortened to “y’all.” Now, “you” is the singular of “y’all.”
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.
There are similar tales in other parts of the US–like “yinz” in Pittsburgh and “youse guys” in New York City–and in other English-speaking countries.
“English as a Second or Other Language.”
Even tutors who can in fact grasp that point often aren’t much good at teaching pronunciation. Too often–when working with segmentals especially-- they approach it as a cognitive challenge, when really it’s more of a motor-physical challenge.
I would say that simply “you guys” is the most common and least regional of all the plural forms of you.
French - and you’d think that being fluent in French and English would help her to not completely suck as a Latin teacher but it was not to be. She was a bitch too. She didn’t like me because I wasn’t one of her butt-kissing French students (most of the class took both)
My second/third year teacher wasn’t really a Latin teacher either. He was a Spanish teacher but he a good Latin teacher (and he let us watch The Holy Grail in class). He also had a student teacher for 6 months and she had gone to Boston Latin for high school (4 years of Latin and I think 2 of Greek) and was majoring in Latin and Greek (I think) in college. She was awesome.
“There’s more of a guideline than an actual rule.”
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”.
You’d think that English’s conjugation would be:
be be
be be
bees be
but as you know, that’s not even close.
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.
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!