Speaking a language is a skill and like any skill, such as driving a car or painting a picture, you should first learn how to do it well and then you can get creative. I would rather speak with your Japanese spook, with his contorted, but correct, constructions, than with someone who never learned how to speak English “right.”.
I have noticed recently that when I skim something I am reading I unconsciously convert some of those into a more conversational style. Interesting…
OK. I’m stumped. I read this sentence last night, and again this morning. What’s wrong with it?
People are not “getting creative” when they’re speaking their own dialect. If they want to learn a different dialect they have to learn the rules, but it’s nonsense to say that people must master some standard dialect before they’re allowed to speak their native one!
*You mean a Japanese person who never learned to speak English, or an American who speaks a non-SAE dialect fluently? X-san would certainly be easier to understand than the former (if you don’t speak Japanese), but I can all but guarantee you that you’d find him more difficult to comprehend than even the most poorly educated native speaker of any American dialect.
There’s nothing wrong with it. It’s perfectly fine formal, textbook English grammar. The only problem is that it’s not a construction commonly used in American conversational English. (Some of the rules for subject/verb agreement differ between the US and UK, so it may be more popular in the UK.) Most American English speakers would match the verb to the nearest subject: “There is a rabbit and two squirrels in the yard.”
A strict editor might correct this if it occurred in writing, but people say such things out loud all the time. In writing we can look at the whole sentence almost at once and see that the plural verb refers to a compound subject. In speech, it’s not immediately obvious that there’s going to be a compound subject instead of just the one rabbit. “There are a rabbit” sounds strange. When beginning the sentence the speaker might not even realize that there is going to be a compound subject. If I’m looking out into the yard, I could see the rabbit and begin speaking before I notice the squirrels.
I’ll go a step farther than Lamia and say that a native English speaker, even in SAE, would most likely say ‘There’s a rabbit and two squirrels in the yard’ or even ‘There’s a rabbit and a couple of squirrels in the yard.’ Using ‘is’ in such a case is, by strict technical definition, incorrect, but it sounds more natural to most people these days. Even then, a contraction is preferred. People notice when a speaker doesn’t use contractions, and it tends to sound stilted and overly formal.
There is no ‘right’ way to speak English (or any other language/dialect) except what sounds right.
Out of curiosity, I just Googled a few phrases containing common subjects (“There is a dog and”/“There are a dog and”) to see which verb form was more popular. The singular verb always got far more hits than the plural. With “dog”, “is” was 12.5 times more common than “are”, and a couple of the first-page hits for “There are a dog and” were grammar links!
*This is true. One of the biggest differences between standard written English and standard spoken English must be the use of contractions.
X-san would have much more interesting stories to tell, though my past experiences with guys in his line of work says he wouldn’t tell them. 
But…but…but IT’S WRONG and sounds, uh, (how can I say this?) ignorant and more than a bit Hillbilly. Better be careful because here come Sister Mary Ellen with her ruler! (In a Catholic school placed in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains we had pressure to use SAE coming from TWO directions, our teachers in one and peer pressure to not sound like a Hillbilly in the other.)
Probably not. I never got more than the vaguest hints of anything exciting, like that he’d been to Germany (I think it was Germany)…for 48 hours…on business…and hadn’t been able to do much sightseeing.
This is the fun part; it works both ways. It sounds to you like it’s ignorant, but to me, it sounds perfectly fine. Conversely, ‘There are a rabbit and two squirrels’ sounds fine to you, but to me it sounds like you’re talking out of a textbook. I wouldn’t judge that you’re ignorant, though, I’d think you’re probably an ESL speaker who hasn’t quite learned how to talk naturally yet.
Again, what’s right is what sounds right to you. If you find that your method of speaking confuses people, it does behoove you to find a more widely accepted dialect and use that, but as long as it doesn’t impede communication there’s nothing wrong with it. You just have to look past how a person speaks and listen to what they’re actually saying. 
Wow. I’m just stunned. The use of there’s when the subject calls for there’re (if one insists on using a contraction) is one of my pet-peeves. Its usage seems to pop-up everywhere. I’ve been meaning to start a Pit thread about it, as a matter of fact. It sounds wrong to me and I’m very surprised to read that someone says it sounds right!
I used to have pet peeves about speech patterns, too, but you have to realize that if you see its usage everywhere, you’ve already lost that battle. Popular opinion holds sway when it comes to language, after all. If popular opinion likes a word, phrase, or grammatical construction, it takes root and requires the natural evolution of language to let it run its course. (“You are the weakest link!” seems to be fading away, for instance. Thankfully.) Holding a pet peeve will just raise your blood level every time you run across what is now a common usage. Best thing you can do, I suppose, is just not use it in your own speech.
Like Lamia says, I’d only say ‘there’s’ when the first item in the conjunction agrees. It would be no trouble for me to say ‘there’re two squirrels and a rabbit’, though on reflection, to be frank, in regular colloquial speech I’d probably just use ‘there’s two squirrels and a rabbit.’
I can’t say ‘there’re a rabbit and two squirrels’ because ‘there’re a rabbit’ sounds stupid, full conjunction be damned. This is, I imagine, how many people who use this construction operate. Logically, of course, 1 + 2 = 3, which is plural, and that ought to be taken into account when determining whether to use ‘is’ or ‘are’. But that doesn’t happen, so I offer up my half-assed hypothesis that people just look at the first item because they don’t think far enough ahead in the sentence when speaking informally.
Because I’m lazy when talking, I’d fall back to ‘there’s two squirrels’, simply because ‘there’s’ is easier to say than ‘there’re’, and ‘there are’ is too formal. It’s easier to say, and it doesn’t impede communication with those who don’t have a pet peeve about it 
so I let myself grow into the habit of using it. Naturally, this is just one person’s habits, but anecdotal evidence is quite useful in linguistics.
Now, of course, in writing and formal speech, when you have time to think about what you will say and when you want to be perceived as knowing what you’re talking about, then making sure your words fit proper logical constructs is necessary. But in everyday speech? Fuck it.
And that, to me, is the point.
I am a non-native speaker. I have been living in the States for a few years now. I am still stunned at the number of people who do not speak any kind of reasonable, grammatically correct English.
Where do I start? Best by saying that I know a lot of smart people who use “I ain’t”, “Where you at” or similar wrong[1] terms. But they use it in conversations, and I still can understand what they are saying. And they know how to write proper English. These people are no dummies not[2]. And a lot of them are keenly aware of their particular ways to speak, and use it to lighten up situations with, say, New York investment bankers. They all know that they do not speak proper grammar, and they do it because they feel comfortable that way. And, I can’t stress that enough, they know how to write proper English.
The problem are the folks who know only some gibberish. Their written communication is always terrible. You cannot trust them to contact a client, or for that matter, any international business contact. And I claim that all of them have been exposed to some roughly proper english, even if it is localized as somebody claimed in earlier posts. I often cannot tell whether their grammar is wrong, their pronounciation is wrong, they are missing 31 teeth, or whether anything else is going on. And I claim that these folks are at least lazy, and most likely outright stupid. I have yet to meet a smart person who I cannot understand. I have yet to meet a smart person who cannot switch to proper english when I ask what they mean. I have met many, many folks in fast food restaurants, stores, buses, on the street, who talk to me, and when I ask something that, in proper english would look like “I am sorry, I did not understand you, could you please repeat that sentence” but comes out as “huh?”[4], repeat the same incomprehensible gibberish just louder. :smack: :smack: :smack: These are, indeed, idiots. Sorry, no other word for it. You live hear, you have been taught English, speak it!
One example where this works reasonable well seems to be Germany. Ever heard a Bavarian talk to somebody from Hamburg (or to me, for that matter)? They start out in their local dialect but pretty quickly switch to something resembling Hochdeutsch when they see that you don’t understand. None of them is perfect, even in Hochdeutsch you can still guess where they are from. But they can communicate in a grammatically and accoustically acceptable matter. Many, many American can’t.
And that’s that.
Dorfl, who will be corrected and/or yelled at further down
[1] I maintain that they are wrong. Look it up in the books
[2] I couldn’t [3] resist
[3] This is, I learned way back when in high school, also not proper for written English. Then I came to the U.S. and learned it is fine in certain situations. Like a personal email, or indeed, this board.
[4] But I digress
HOWEVER, I must admit a soft place in my heart for “ain’t.” We have a permitted contraction for “are not” so why don’t we have one for “am not?”
Actually, this is a very clear example of a construction that is (now) correct] in spoken English that differs from written English. It is correct from the perspective that it occurs universally among all regional and class dialects, in the UK, the US, Australia, Canada, etc. It is not found (or accepted as correct) in writing, because we have the tradition in formal writing of avoiding contractions. However, the person wo religiously writes “there are” will most often speak “there’s” and only a few people will even notice that the shift has ocurred.
(Interestingly, Spanish has undergone a similar constructiuon with the ver hay and I have heard that French also has such a construction, although I do not know what it is.
Well, I have, and I’m sure that’s partly why I have a different take on this.
I know people in remote areas of Appalachia (yes, they still exist) with very little formal schooling who are very intelligent people. I also know some people there with extremely low IQs, of course. But you take a fellow who has memorized good portions of the Bible just from hearing them, who can build a house true and strong without a blueprint, who knows how to raise and preserve food, who has a quick sense of humor, who’s a sharp judge of human nature and individual character, who sees through political BS and can sum up his thoughts on it in very few words, who can even insult someone and leave them thinking they’ve been complimented – that’s an intelligent person. It doesn’t matter that he uses double negatives, multiple modals, and archaic vocabulary and pronunciation, and often ignores the standards rules of agreement.
And when linguists study dialects like that of the person I’m thinking of (and he’s not an isolated case), lo and behold, there are regular rules being observed just as there are in the syntax used by Buckley and Safire.
I recall a friend of my father’s, a city fellow who built himself a house way back in the woods, showing up with a new truck. One of the stonecutters (a common trade up there) said, “I wouldn’t care to drive to California in that.” The city fellow looked puzzled and said, “Well, I wouldn’t either.” But he was being given a compliment. “Care to” meant “be worried about”. So who was ignorant?
Maybe I am ignorant, but isn’t that an idiom rather than wrong grammar? The construct is grammatically correct [1], but the meaning depends on the context.
Dorfl
[1] I agree that constrictions are correct se of spoken English
Pretty much everything that’s being cited on this thread (and other related threads) is dialect/idiom, including the use of “ain’t”, double negatives, generic “they”, multiple modals, tacit “be” (e.g., “Where you at?”), universal “there’s”, etc etc etc.
This, on the other hand, is a grammatically incorrect sentence: “My father, he standing at airport still.”
How do you classify the famous “May I axe you something?”
Honest question, I am posting here in old tradition of stating opinions that are not clouded by any scientific knowledge whatsoever
It’s simply a variation in pronunciation. Transposition of consonants (metathesis) is very common. For instance, I say (even when I’m using my most formal register) “comftorble” rather than “comfortable”, transposing the T and the R.
Btw, the ask/aks variants have existed for centuries. In his book “Historical Linguistics”, Herbert Schendl discusses the Old English parallel forms of acsian/ascian. If there’s a university near you, you may be able to find his book in the library.
Thanks for this, I find that intriging.
Unfortunately, while there are many universities close by, there is also a 12 hour workday (made longer by posts here), commute, pregnant wife, kid, and (at least at the moment) mother in law in the guest room. So I think I will pass on the visit for a while and try Google during lunch.
Dorfl