Or, as the stand-up Al Murray once said:
Other Germanic languages like German, Dutch and Swedish are similar in their word order, but they stick them together more. German for “boat show” is “Bootsmesse”. In fact “boat show” in all three of those languages is just one word. Sometimes there are amusing results when words like “Schiff” and “Fahrt” (see, it’s funny already) get combined to make the German word for shipping - “Schifffahrt”. In fact there was also “Flußschiffahrt” which is now “Flussschifffahrt” (ß = double S). Until recently, triple letters were avoided but now the rules have changed in an attempt to simplify. In English we seem to try to keep our language somewhat more elegant, but as a result it can be very complicated to learn.
That’s absurd. When I was in HS, for example, hardly anyone learned any calculus and those who did learned a few cookbook rules. Now it seems that almost everyone who follows an academic track in HS is taught calculus (how well is a different issue). My kids all had chemistry and physics courses that were well beyond what I took (and I went to one of the premier public high schools in the entire US.
Much the same is true at the college level. Our undergraduates math majors are routinely taught at least the beginnings of Galois Theory (want to know why there is not and cannot be a formula to find roots for fifth and higher degree polynomials). A colleague of mine has a PhD from UC Berkeley and never learned any there.
How about this one?
“That is precisely the kind of English up with which I will not put.” --a quote I’ve seen attributed to Churchill, but who knows?
We all killed Grammar
http://www.amazon.com/ALL-KILLED-GRANDMA-Fredric-Brown/dp/B002LTIQ2C
Tell it to author and Far East expect Steven Schlossstein. Firssst time I sssaw him quoted in a newssspaper I had to take out my contactsss and ressst my eyesss.
Or perhaps Grammar done got runned over by a reindeer?
German word order can be crazy different from English, thanks to the still fairly robust system of noun inflection, which in English was almost completely lost.
That said, why is it that speakers of other European languages typically seem to speak much more “grammatically” in the context of their own language? They get verb conjugations right, they get case and gender inflections right, even if to us as English speakers all this seems to make no sense. In German, for instance, when you are laying the book on the table, you have to refer to the table in the accusative case, but in saying that the book is already there, it’s dative. Even when speaking in haste, even youngsters usually get these grammatical niceties right. To be sure, German does have a few variances that are somewhat analogous to the situation with “who” and “whom” in English. A certain class of prepositions require genitive predicates, but German speakers will often use the dative in informal speech. But there’s none of this “Me and him went to the park” stuff, not even by eight-year-old kids. In the Anglophone world, this is standard adult speech in many dialects.
From a linguistic standpoint, I’m pretty sure that “boat show” is actually a single word as well. The fact that we write it that way is a matter of orthography.
From the outside looking in, I find that there’s a large difference between Anglo countries there.
And from previous threads, in other languages people get much more formal grammar training (I even recall Canadians mentioning that they had had more grammar training in French than in English). Some of the grammar analysis tools I learned in 5th grade still get whipped out occasionally, most often when someone is having certain kinds of problems with a second language (such as subject-verb mismatch because they’ve lost track of which group is the subject; as soon as they start trying to analyze the sentence, it becomes obvious). Also, in those cultures where grammar mishaps are considered unacceptable, they will be less likely to happen: when my mother or my grandmother speak in sentences so incomplete as to be incomprehensible, our standard response is “subject, verb and complements!”, but I’ve heard that exact line in the subway… for people whose cultures lean on the prescriptivist side, a grammatical error is a bug; for those who are more on the descriptivist side, a feature.
But a lot of those carry necessary information. Tengo un gato en mis pantalones and Tienes un gato en mis pantalones mean very different things. Me and Jim went to the park carries just as much info as Jim and I so there’s no pressure on speakers to speak it “correctly”.
You’re just showboating.
Finally, an intelligent post that actually addresses the question. Thank you.
I think the primary culprits are technology and the disturbing trend or fad of talking like a moron, which is apparently “hip” and all the rage.
I’m not sure the difference can be explained by greater emphasis on grammar in schools. Though it’s been a long time, I’m fairly certain we had similar lessons and drills in the fifth grade, and even later, when I was in school. (I can’t speak to what they do now, though.) In any language, six-year-old kids usually don’t yet understand all the subtleties of complex sentence structures, such as might be used in academic papers, but my impression with Spanish and other continental languages is that the kids already have a ready command of those verb forms and/or nominal inflections that are in common daily use. (The ability to explain how it works is a different matter). German-speaking kids, and I assume Spanish-speaking kids as well, raised in their respective standard languages might utter short “child” sentences, but the verbs and nouns in those sentences will be correct as to number, person and gender. In the case of German, they will additionally be correct as to case. This type of grammar isn’t generally taught so much as it is acquired naturally as the child learns to speak.
So tell me, whom are you?
(Whom are you? Whom, whom? Whom, whom?)
'Cause I really wanna know
(Whom are you? Whom, whom? Whom, whom?)
Tell me, whom the fuck are you?
(Whom are you? Whom, whom? Whom, whom?)
'Cause I really wanna know…
Him and her did it.
That is the case with Spanish, and, I suspect, all Romance languages. Spanish is excruciatingly verbose.
Even though I started speaking Spanish 7 years before I uttered my first word in English I think, count and function in English on account of it being a much leaner, flexible and simpler language.
Plus Spanish is 20 years behind English when it comes to the internet, computers and the like. You should see the contortions we go through to name terms of the trade when it comes to technology and the internet. The vast majority of people resort to English to make themselves understood.
(“Who are you” is actually correct in that usage, just in case anyone is wondering.)
A U.S. TV game show started the rot in the '50s. Who Do You Trust, indeed.
Hurrumph.
Who do you trust? is completely acceptable in educated discourse, even in the apparently outmoded standard that college educated people were once held to, at least for those who speak English as their native language.
To who or at who is a different matter.