I’m skeptical of this. This wikipedia article 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.”
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.
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.)
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
No response from Mr. Seldon? Apparently he lacks access to any linguistics textbook. Wikipedia/Wiktionary to the rescue! Scroll down to Declension and Click on show.
Does this help?
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 over whether it is or not.
This pretty much jibes with my experience.
I think it’s “English, shit outta luck” because of all the irregularities for a ESL student.
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.
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-based human language depends upon the presence of irregular forms is not particularly intuitive, IMHO.
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”.
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.
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.