The union has more one teacher? In my first English course where I was taught UTI’s for urinary tract infections, I was also taught in showing possession of plurals ending in ‘‘s’’, the apostrophe goes after the existing ‘‘s’’
The teacher’s union defended her.
The teachers’ union signed a new contract.
There are special foods to prevent reoccurring UTI’s in dogs.
The UTI’s cure was an antibiotic.
Note, has anybody caught me using 2 apostrophes instead of quotation marks? I have terrible keyboard skills and find it easier. Should my punishment be banishment from SD?
Maybe I should avoid it in emails to my friends that use screen reader programs.
Get thee hence to a DVD store and rent The Big Lebowski. You can thank me later.
Académie or not, French grammar & syntax is just as much of a crapshoot with 36 exceptions per rule. Why is the plural of “cheval” “chevaux” and not “chevals”, like it is for every other word ? Because fuck people who try and learn French, that’s why :).
(actually, it’s even worse than that: words that end in -al pluralize in -aux. This is a special rule one must know, which only applies to these particular words. Except some don’t, like “chacal” which pluralizes as “chacals”. Why ? See above.)
In light of this, I would say that there are indeed cases where apostrophing a plural is the right choice. But those are exceptions to the rule. And those exceptions to the rule are *also *rules.
I’m a prescriptivist, couldn’t you tell ?
Humans speak and understand each other naturally–speaking isn’t taught. But writing is. And in order to teach writing, you have to devise conventions–rules, guidelines, or whatever–such as an alphabet, etc. People have to agree to some degree on these conventions, so that the writing can be mutually comprehensible and serve its purpose.
Of course speaking is taught? Children do pick up a lot directly by listening, but parents and others spend considerable time saying words slowly to them and correcting them when they speak incorrectly – both mispronunciations and incorrect grammar, many of the same conventions used in writing. And we must, also agree on these conventions in our spoken languages. Pretty much all of spoken language is convention with the exception perhaps of onomatopoeia, I guess. If it weren’t convention, but innate, I hazard we’d all speak the same language.
Yes, parents do this, but it’s not how we actually learn to speak. Do you realize how many phonological, suprasegmental (intonation, etc.), grammatical (syntactic), lexical, pragmatic, etc. rules are necessary to speak any language? If parents (or any adult) actually were the means to learning this, they would have to be teaching the child 24-hrs a day. Humans will learn to speak whether an adult corrects them or not. Just look at the research on things like regularization of verbs, etc.
It is actually pretty amazing to see a kid’s capacity for language. I knew this one Albanian-Kosovar refugee in Hungary, and her kid (about 5 or 6) was able to speak Albanian, Serbian, English, and Hungarian, despite not getting any formal training and her mother not even being able to speak Hungarian and having marginal English skills herself. She just picked it up from her surroundings. I grew up in a Polish household, and I don’t ever recall being formally taught anything about grammar, yet when I was in high school, I discovered that when I spoke Polish, I used all sorts of grammatical devices that don’t exist in English: gender, case, perfective/imperfective aspect, etc. I had no idea I did that in my speech, or even what they were, until I started learning a little bit about Polish grammar.
Language acquisition at a young age seems to be instinctual.
No, humans do not speak and understand each other naturally—spoken language, like any other form of language, is learned behaviour, and learning a language (or a representation thereof) takes time. For both speaking and writing, teaching is just a way of accelerating the learning process. And for both speaking and writing, there are certain conventions which communicators agree upon in order to make themselves mutually intelligible. You gave the example of an alphabet in the case of writing, but I could just as easily point to the example of a phoneme inventory for spoken language. Usually the former is derived from the latter, because most languages arose in spoken form first, but there is nothing that requires this to be so.
Why is that not natural? I never said they don’t learn. I said it isn’t taught. And of course it takes time. Who ever said it doesn’t? Most children don’t talk until 1-1/2 to 2 years–but from the first day of life the child is listening, and more importantly, interacting and bonding with parents. All of that period is learning, and then it’s another three or four years for the full complexity of language competence to become apparent. (That’s when the things which were never “taught” clearly start to come out of the child’s mouth.) But it’s not like the parents are giving explicit lessons in pronunciation and vocabulary. They don’t have to. All they need to do is engage in normal care-taking and play. That’s not explicit “teaching.” The parents don’t have to decide what the child needs to learn and what it can learn, and then implement some kind of sequence of instruction (which is generally what must happen with writing).
The “teaching” that goes on for speech is completely different from that which must take place for writing. Parents (and other adults) do “correct” children, and elicit production, but that is not necessary for children to start speaking, and eventually speak competently. Really the “teaching” of speech is to provide meaningful contexts and interaction with–as the most recent research shows–supportive emotional bonds. And even in cases where parents do correct children, observations show that often these corrections will make no eventual difference in the child’s production that’s perceptible. In these cases, a child simply must reach a certain point of development. Acquisition of irregular verbs is a common example. Whether the parent corrects the child or not, he or she acquires them at the same pace, providing that particularly morphology is native to the child’s overall discourse community.
guizot is spot-on. Children are scary little language sponges.
Someone (Pinker?) has a possibly apocryphal story about a culture that feels it’s necessary to teach babies how to sit up. Silly, right? Well they feel the same way about us “teaching” babies to speak. I’ll see if I can dig that up, mostly because I want to see if there’s a cite because I’m a bit :dubious:
I think I remember in the same book Pinker refers to a culture or cultures where adults do not talk to babies and toddlers at all. No baby-talk, no attempt to “teach” them to speak. The point being that the children in that culture learn to speak just as effectively as in cultures where there is more interaction.
Right, it’s the same culture. They make little mounds of dirt or sand to slowly work the babies into sitting up. We look at that and go “Crazy people, if they didn’t make the mounds, they’d see the kids learn to sit up just as fast.” But in that same culture they don’t talk to babies because what’s the point of talking to someone who won’t talk back? Their kids learn to speak at the same rate as kids raised in western countries and if they saw us leaning over the bassinet cooing our preferred brand of motherese, they’d feel exactly the same way about us. I don’t remember where it is either, but I’m pretty sure it’s in The Language Instinct.
guizot, I don’t know where to go with you. You are categorically wrong. The “rules” for speech and the “rules” for writing both came up systematically. Neither was ever more prescriptive than the other. Both change over time. Both involve some people telling you what is correct and incorrect.
None of the actual true things you say matter in the slightest. Writing is just a method of transmitting speech using pen and paper. It started out with fewer rules, but standardization occurred over time, just like what happened with speech.
I dare you to find a citation that actually agrees with your statement that there is no descriptivist school of writing.
As a moderator I was able to do that from the Quick Reply window by clicking on “Go Advanced”. As ordinary members it might work for us within the edit window, but the issue’s never come up for me.
