When a native English speaker learns their first foreign language, they will probably run into the familiar vs formal verb conjugations that English doesn’t have. Then when speaking the new language, they will have to make a conscious decision on which form to use. I assume, and correct me if I’m wrong, that native speakers of the language are so used to it that the decision is automatic and/or subconscious. This is just the first and most obvious example of what I’m thinking of.
What similar decisions do we make in English?
Whether or not to use contractions. I’d guess that English learners would have to consciously decide while native speakers don’t.
There’s a fine code to using pronouns, even if we ignore the current political correctness craze. When to use “they” as a substitute for “I don’t know if it’s him or her”.
Another one, for example, is that some eastern European languages I’m told (Russian?) don’t have articles - which is why those less familiar with English sound funny, they don’t say “a” or “the”. When to use “a” rather than “the” is something subconscious. “I’m going to the beach, the bank, the bar, the movies” even if which specific one is not necessarily obvious or determined.
Same with in and On. I get up on Sunday and brush my teeth in the morning before I get on the phone and into a conversation. (and I didn’t say “a Sunday” or “a morning”) I’m not on the bus but in my car. I’m on time so not in trouble. I speak in rhyme when I’m on a bender. (Or on the computer or in a happy mood.)
It comes down to common usage and familiarity with the language. I’m sure there are some rules that can be articulated, but “what sounds right” seems arbitrary. It’s a piece of cake but a slice of pie, even though those are interchangeable if necessary. We haven’t even mentioned the rare English subjunctive “If I were you” not “If I was you”.
When is a collective noun singular? Half of English speakers are confused, but half a dozen is a lot.
Heck, it seems even half of English speakers can’t figure out “there”, “their”, and “they’re”.
Quite often, bad grammar can sound right too though.
Related: automatically knowing which nouns are countable versus uncountable.
I am the only native English speaker in a European business office serving EU financial markets, in which English is the de facto cross-border lingua franca, so I am regularly asked to edit and rewrite marketing material and client/investor guidance written in English by non-English speakers. One of the most amusingly common usages I have to change is the French-native insistence that “information” is a singular piece of data and “informations” is used when you are dealing with a collected set of multiple facts. As in, “you enter each information into its field, and then you save the informations to the database.”
Of course, this kind of thing isn’t specific to English; there are potential mismatches in common usage between all languages, in both directions. If I go to an English-speaking bakery, I ask for “a loaf of bread,” but in France I ask for “un pain.” If I were to ask le boulanger for an individual item of bread by translating the English word-for-word, they’d probably reach for the knife; whereas if in England I request “a bread,” all I’d get back is a blank stare.
If you want to learn how incredibly diverse all the languages of the world are, get a Ph.D. in linguistics. Every language has rules about what kinds of meanings it distinguishes, what rules of conjugating it uses, what rules of grammar it uses, what kinds of sounds it distinguishes from other sounds, and so on that only a few other languages use, and it has a few such differences from other languages that it’s the only language in the world that has those rules. All those rules become subconscious when someone grows up speaking it.
As seen in (on?) the title of this thread, English speakers have long ago decided that if it is a noun, they can put it to work by using it as a verb.
Of course, the first and most important decision the speaker of any language makes is that they do it right and the others do it wrong. But that is not unique to English, only more prevalent.
I think there is very little in the English language that I have to consciously “decide”.
The above sentence (and this one) just sounds or feels “correct” and I don’t conciously consider any grammer rules in order to construct them. To be honest, I remember virtually nothing from my english language education.
Same here, and I couldn’t articulate why in any technical sense. When I’m editing other people’s work I offer alternatives that are “better” but I don’t try to explain why, they just are.
Native Chinese or Japanese speakers really have difficulty with “a” and “the.” There are a number of rules which explain it, but it’s complicated. “I’ll go to school after stopping in at the park.” “The school is across the street from a park.”
Prepositions are also difficult and British English and American English don’t always agree. At the weekend is British, on the weekend is American.
With all languages, there are understood “rules” for what information is implied and doesn’t need to be stated while other things must be explicitly expressed. “It’s raining today.” in English just gets translated to “Raining today.” in Japanese. In English, when we say we leave the house, we don’t mention that we will come back, something Japanese always are sure to include. One can only wonder as to why a whole nation feels that is necessary, each and every time.
In Japanese will add “here” to signs saying “keep right” or “keep left” presumably to ensure that the reader knows that they will not be required to follow those directions forever.
Stress patterns on words in a sentence can completely change the meaning. A simple example:
I love you. It’s me that loves you. Not that other guy who keeps sending you flowers.
I love you. No, I don’t hate you! I love you, even if I forgot today is your birthday.
I love you. Her? Who is she? That was nothing! I love you!
There are many rules to stress patterns in sentences.
As a hobbyist translating Hebrew to English, I have noticed that each Hebrew preposition does have a “main” English translation that you’d find in a dictionary, but in actual practice, that is the best translation perhaps half the time. The rest of the time, I just pick whatever English preposition sounds most appropriate in context.
And more specifically Typology, which compares the grammatical systems of the world’s languages and attempts to find correlations between features (e.g. if a language has characteristic A, then it will also have characteristic B but is unlikely to have characteristic C).
It seems to me that the OP is touching on the difference between overt and covert categories.
Overt categories refer to concepts that are clearly grammatically marked in a language. For instance in English, the (regular) plural and past are marked by the -s and -ed suffixes respectively. This is the grammar that native speakers can easily explain and that foreign students learn.
Covert categories refer to rules that are not apparent, even to native speakers although they follow them perfectly. The order of adjectives mentioned above is a great example, as is the order of adpositional phrases and adverbs as well as the gender of names (Harry is masculine and Mary is feminine but nothing in the way the word is structured indicates this). When someone does not follow a covert grammatical rule, native speakers are often at a loss to describe why it’s incorrect and will often comment that it “feels” wrong or that you “just don’t say this.”
I’m sure that what is at play here is precisely the difference between overt and covert categories, with the latter being much more difficult for native speakers to break.
I mean … everything. I started learning English in 4th grade, and initially I had to think about all of it. Now I’m generally fluent, but there are a few pronunciation and grammar things I know I fail at again and again. Those would be different for someone with a different starting position though. I struggle with v and w sounds because Norwegian doesn’t have w’s, a Finn on the other hand might struggle with articles, because Finnish has none.
Please note that apparently I quoted Left_Hand_of_Dorkness in that thread, but I didn’t write any of the things that are under my name in Moonrise’s post, so I wonder why my name is there at all.
Are we looking for instances where one choice is the technically correct one and the other alternative(s) are incorrect? Or where we’re choosing between different, but equally correct, ways of saying something? I got the impression that the OP was looking for the latter, but many of the responses seem to be thinking of the former.
The OP’s example of whether or not to use contractions (which was the first thing that came to my mind even before I saw the OP mention it) is the latter. We have to choose whether to say, for example, “I don’t know” or “I do not know,” even though both are equally correct.
I can’t think of another example as good as contractions. Word choice, I suppose, would count: deciding which of several synonyms to use. But that’s common to all (I assume) languages, not just English.
To be fair, I never see anything quite so egregious in the work I review, but in general spoken english? yep, fair too common and like nails down a blackboard to me.
