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Composing grammatically correct sentences

Mary Bull

New member
<rolling on the floor laughing>
I guess it doesn't really matter--but isn't it great fun to be talking about it, on a rainy afternoon (or not, as the case may be around the world)?
 

Nill Toulme

New member
StuartRae said:
...The only thing that could confuse me is how do an unspecified number of us, one of whom may not be me, know what the aforesaid may have done, are doing, or will do ...

Much less — heaven forefend — what they were to be doing.

Nill
~~
www.toulme.net
 
A Late Reply

Mary Bull said:
Sentence structure--at least as an ideal--should be as transparent as one can make it. If grammar or spelling errors distract, then right away something is lost from the conversation. So I guess I could just as well have titled this "Creating transparent language."

None of us writes perfectly, and many here are writing "on-the-fly" as they fit OPF into their busy lives. So typos or tangled sentences are going to arrive here from just about every poster, and if they make the thought unclear, I think we know how to ask for clarification.
I agree. While my grammar is not always perfect my goal is communication and I sometimes fail just like everyone else. As I scan rather than read 98% of the time small errors matter little at times. While one could fault me for not "reading", I should note that scanning is a stream of consciousness pace where the flow of ideas is the primary value. While "reading" is more a word for word page with thought on definitions of things and that just takes too long.
Mary Bull said:
And the best writing really is in what would be our speaking style, one-on-one or in a small group. So I think whoever is moved to write here should just type away, correct whatever he/she has time for, and count on the goodwill of the reader to see past typos or mistakes of language mechanics.

Woe. What a long preface ...
Just to be a pain, was that whoa or woe? ;) There is a signficant difference and I suspect the former while the latter strikes me as an intersting rhetorical comment.

This is an example of what I normally ignore. But since we were on grammar it piqued my interest.

Mary Bull said:
Sean explains that the entire phrase "the rules of grammar and the structure of a language" is intended by him as a singular noun-phrase, which would properly take the verb "has."

When I read the post the first time, my gut feeling, as an educated native speaker who's been fortunate to have grown up in a home where formal standard grammar was in natural use, kicked in. I wanted the verb to agree with the plural noun "rules" and thought, typo, should be "have."

But insignificant typo, since the entire thrust of the paragraph was true and compelling to me. I'm quoting in full, below, Sean's posts from which I'm excerpting, so others can see without going back to the "Smilies" thread in another forum.
Sean DeMerchant said:
It depends upon whether one is refering the singular referential developed by the and, or plurality of items brought together by the and. Has is the appropriate term for the singular entity, the rules of grammar and the structure of a language. Hence blindly going with what an english professor would [prefer] fail to convey that I was refering to it as a singular entity. This is the same as saying roll of film is singular even though it is a spindle, a case, and some film wound into it.
<mildly edited for clarity in square brackets>
However, another reader posted his take that the verb should be the plural "have."
In truth I agreed with Don when I read his comment initially and restructured my thought and the "has" felt wrong. Then I reread it the next day and "has" was again the correct word. The rules may be wrong, but "have" gave the wrong meaning to what I was trying to communicate.
Mary Bull said:
Something like, "This is not to say that the structure of a language, together with its rules of grammar, has no value ..."
I agree, this would be grammatically correct, but it does not fit with my typing speed and stream of consciousness writing. But in my mind, the structure of a language and its rules of grammar are simply facets of the same being. A better example would be that the creation with both a lead tip and an eraser has been called a pencil. Nonetheless, here the meta object is something I lack the word for while having the term for its parts. So this could be termed a failure of my vocabulary. Yet, using "has" marks out the singularity of the referential concept.
Mary Bull said:
For me, Sean's post is fine just as it stands, and I buy completely into his take on how to learn to write well.
Truth be told, I would have been more appreciative if they had simply started the rules of grammar and taught us 5 other languages simultaneously during my education. Instead, I know 3 (english, mathematics, computer programming). And I can remember enough French that I would not starve while looking like the vulgarian from the West that I may be at times.
Mary Bull said:
I think we learn to write by reading, and the better the writing in what we read, the better our own composition will be.
I think grammar is best learned from reading. I think we learn from a combination of reading, verbal communication*, and finally the rules. After all the rules let us know:

its = belongs to it
it's = it is

and other silly pieces.

On a side note, one grammatical construct I consistently fail to use correctly is the semicolon. Recently I finally realized it was because I wrote to d@#med verbosely and the contraction it allows does not fit in rhetorical style.

enjoy, :)

Sean



* Both speaking and listening as the confused look are a listener's face tells us much about whether or not we were clear. Similarly, a listener's tangential rebuff can also tell us when we failed.
 
Don Lashier said:
But on a related note, I rather like the British practice of pluralizing the group.

That does not read right to me. But then, we already know I have problems going the other way so it should be expected. ;)

enjoy,

Sean
 
Mary Bull said:
That's interesting. Being provincially U.S.-American, I haven't run into that.

Being a perpetually intellectual* US citizen I find that I disagree with many terms. Some technically correct examples that counteract popular usage but are without question are true:

  • Fidel Castro is an American.
  • All Peruvians are American.
  • The mid-west of the USA is Montana, Wyoming, Colorado, and New Mexico. Illinois is in the mid-east of the USA. Just look at a map to figure this one out. Albeit, using the centroid of the USA's population density there was a point when Chicago was the Heart Of The Midwest.
I remember about a decade ago in college I used the term United Statesish in a term paper and was criticized by a professor for it. I said back that since Peruvians are Americans, American is not a reasonable adjective and the awful sound of the correct adjective should instead make you feel egocentric or some words to that effect.

ever obstinate,

Sean :)

* I do not know how to stop thinking and learning which is why I ended up behind the camera as even without it I can still look and think.
 
Dierk Haasis said:
About Sean's construction, it's a matter of semantics, not syntax. When I first read the incriminated sentence I changed the plural to singular in my head, I then stopped and thought, 'maybe he sees structure and rules as one entity' licencing the singular. That is a viable interpretation.

I'd still mark it in red, deeming it wrong. To me 'structure of language' and 'rules of grammar' are two different entities strung together in Sean's sentence by a conjunction to indicate their equalness [syntactically and semantically].

I agree. But as I already noted on Mary's comment, my stream of consciousness spelling out of the singular entity was plural. But the entity within my stream of consciousness was singular and that was reaffirmed in my looking at it the day after Don's comment. But then, I only do minimal if any proofreading online in forumns.

enjoy,

Sean
 
Nill Toulme said:
Be all of the above as it may, and as interesting as it all may be, the original sentence in question...

"This is not to say the rules of grammar and the structure of a language has no value."

...is just plain wrong. To say that "the rules of grammar and the structure of a language" is a "singular entity" because the writer intends that it be so is no more meaningful than forcefully declaring "Mission accomplished!" when the mission is just beginning to unravel. IOW, sometimes wrong is just wrong, and intending — or saying that one intends — otherwise doesn't change the fact.

[/pipe-smoking curmudgeon]

Ouch! :) I still, even after the burn, see them as a singular entity. The rules of grammar are simply a subservient element of the structure of a language and without said structure they have no existence.

i.e., The Godhead made up of Ganesh, Bhrama, Krisha, Kali, and etcetera are equivalent to the structure of language made up of the rules of grammar and the structure of language and leave me wondering what the meta term is. What is that meta term? After all, the structure of language is based on what is used while the rules are based upon what was historically used.

enjoy, :)

Sean
 
Mary Bull said:
That is how I think about it, too, and I'd mark it in "red" if I were Sean's editor--which, of course, I'm not, but he did give me permission to start a thread to discuss the construction.

Mary,

Feel free. Sometimes I type too fast, sometimes I am tired, and othertimes I want to say something relevant while the stream of consciousness rolls faster than my fingers can type. And othertimes I just do not care too. ;) But if there is something unclear said that is ambiguous (as opposed to unclear but not ambiguous), then feel free to ask/correct. Just like your rhetorical woe earlier that I noted.

Sometimes I may just learn a new rhetorical mechanism. :)

enjoy,

Sean
 
Dierk Haasis said:
Which is a matter of decision, there is definitely one mistake in his sentence - the question is which do we call: a superfluous definite article or muddled congruency?
Wow! You have blown past me on this one. :) Perhaps we could step back and talk about edge detection at the pixel level or something simple* like that. ;)
Dierk Haasis said:
*I hold a university degree in Language and Literature.
Are you aware that I hold a university degree in Language and Literature.is practically invisible on a calibrated display and on a poorly calibrated display? Though I suspect this may be intentional to hide off topic footnotes. Which, by the way, I like as an online concept as opposed to the deep parenthetical notions I once used which are hard to read even though they clearly reflect stream of consciousness.

enjoy,

Sean


* Simple depending on your training. I focussed on computer vision is graduate school so I am more familiar with that than grammar. ;)
 
Nill Toulme said:
And thanks to both of you for not takin' a bite out of me for starting two sentences with "But" (or this one with "And). ;-)

But, starting a sentence with "but" is a rhetorical mechanism that removes the readers mind from grammar and focusses it upon the topic at hand.

And, one should always remember that rhetoric is of far more value than grammar as it is the rhetoric that is method of communication. Just consider an out of context quote from Foucalt's History of Sexuality* translated into english. If one ignores the rhetoric and the fact that many passage only have meaning to the overall narrative by including many pages of text one could make hundreds of short quotes that totally contradict the narative as they were used rhetorically as long examples of absurd notions.

enjoy,

Sean




* I will find one if desired, but give me a couple of days to find the book.**

** I have not read much philosophy but have been exposed to enough to make me abrasive with the need to fall back on logic as it was taught in the math*** department.

*** Which brings to mind another pluralization error. Math is plural and maths is simply not a word as math is simply an accepted abbreviation of mathematics. That is one such error that grates upon me. ;)
 

Don Lashier

New member
Sean DeMerchant said:
I said back that since Peruvians are Americans, American is not a reasonable adjective and the awful sound of the correct adjective should instead make you feel egocentric or some words to that effect.
I spent quite a bit of time in El Salvador as an advisor and in late night discussions this came up several times as a sore point. The locals considered themselves "Americanos" also and were offended when it was commonly used in the (NA) press and media to refer to US citizens. They in turn referred to us a "Norte Americanos" lumping us in with the Mexicans and Canadians. When I asked for a more specific designation they said technically I was an "estadounidense" (of or from the states), but this term was not in common use.

- DL
 
Will_Perlis said:
tthe sentence could have been re-cast to something like "...the structure of a language (the rules of grammar) has..."

In proper grammar AFAIK, the parenthesised (sic) sotto voce comment should properly be done with comma. i.e.,

The aggregating anemone, Anthopleura elegantissima*, is currently thought to possibly be two species with one reproducing sexually and one reproducing asexually via cloning.
Whereas deeper parenthetical expansion is better handled via footnotes. This is not to say I have (maybe a few thousand times but not tens of thousands) never been guilty of using such constructs. ;)

enjoy,

Sean

* An interesting (to me at least ;)) sidenote is that species names are not proper nouns and are not capitolized when part of a Family species name pair.
 
My Apologies

A wee delay in my responding and I found an overwhelming number of replies. To which, I have aperently replied in overwhelming amounts. ;) I almost have a page devoted to my ramblings. I think I need to work on something more photographic now.

enjoy,

Sean :)*

* Who truthfully types smiles for about one smile in seven when typing. I honestly smile a fair bit. And once I learned that smiling smilies meant smiles it added a whole new dimension to the emotional character of online interaction that would be lost by trying to add paragraphs detailing emotional state.
 

Don Lashier

New member
Sean DeMerchant said:
once I learned that smiling smilies meant smiles it added a whole new dimension to the emotional character of online interaction that would be lost by trying to add paragraphs detailing emotional state.

Which brings us full circle, cross-forum, cross-thread (from "Smilies invading"), back on-topic. What a detour!

- DL
 
Don Lashier said:
They in turn referred to us a "Norte Americanos" lumping us in with the Mexicans and Canadians. When I asked for a more specific designation they said technically I was an "estadounidense" (of or from the states), but this term was not in common use.

Though I have also heard of Canadians taking offense at being called Americans due to its popular usage. Hence, I chose United Statesish as it sounds awful but is the correct english term. :)

enjoy,

Sean
 

Don Lashier

New member
Sean DeMerchant said:
Hence, I chose United Statesish as it sounds awful but is the correct english term. :)

I always preferred United Statian (also "correct" I believe), pronounced "united stayshun".

- DL
 

Mary Bull

New member
In re my choice of U.S.-American, it's something I chose as an alternative to U.S.A.-an--quite mindful of all the other nations on the North American and South American continents.

A long time ago there was an article in *The Atlantic Monthly* entitled, "Digging the Weans." I loved that pun on U.S. as US (or us'ns, as folks in the Appalachian Mountain chain would have it). Think I'll style myself an Us'n, in future.
 

Dierk Haasis

pro member
Sean DeMerchant said:
Are you aware that [...] is practically invisible on a calibrated display and on a poorly calibrated display?

Yes, that's the point. There's two kinds of footnotes I like to hide: bragging [or name dropping] and warnings about the intent of what I wrote [irony and satire warnings]. I include the latter sometimes when readers may not be too familiar with my styles and my rather dry humour; also quite good to point Americans the way, Britons have much less trouble with reading comprehension.

I included a hint to my university degree because it may help some to see where I am coming from. It does not make my word on linguistic matters sacrosanct ...


Some notes on other banter in the thread:

- Don't confuse rules of grammar with matters of style. Unfortunately there are still many prescriptive style manuals around, claiming certain constructions as 'bad style'. And the two most notorious rulings are, never to start a sentence with a conjunction, or to end it with a preposition. Stupid. Style is about effect, not about right and wrong.

- As I've pointed out, the original sentence in question can easily be saved by omitting a 'the'; the parenthesis is a sub-optimal solution because it makes a stumbling stone when reading which is why I shouldn't use it). In this specific case it is also wrong because it would be interpreted as an explanation what the 'structure of language' means, but 'rules of grammar' is not a synonym.

- Sean, your comment on taxonomic names: It's a convention laid down by taxonomists that the genus part of a proper species name is captalised and the specific part is not, nothing to do with language or writing per se. Most of the time biologist will use the form E. coli, abbreviating the genus part, for well-known or already mentioned species. Taxonomic naming has a very interesting history with some rather unintuitive results stemming from several conventions (no, technically there is no Brontosaurus).
 
Don Lashier said:
I always preferred United Statian (also "correct" I believe), pronounced "united stayshun".

Perhaps United Statesian (sic) /state-shan/ would be the better call. Reduces confusion verballly with united station and it flows better on the tongue. But then it loses the US-centric intellectual insult which can have value*.

* The value can be good or bad but the awful sound strikes me as neutral with a non-nationalist intent. If I knew a term in a foreign tongue that worked**, I would proseltize for it.

** États-Unisish just fails to cut it for a smooth sound regardless of the smoother sound of le français language as it would go way over the heads of most citizens of the USA just as the Russian, German, and Hindu or Urdu translation of United States would go over my head***.

*** Excepting obvious cognates which is why I can read French mathematics with little more difficulty than english based mathematics.
 

Mary Bull

New member
Late Reply Very Welcome

Sean DeMerchant said:
I agree. While my grammar is not always perfect my goal is communication...
Spotted that in you right away.

...Just to be a pain, was that whoa or woe? ;) There is a signficant difference and I suspect the former while the latter strikes me as an intersting rhetorical comment.
The latter. It stood in for a sigh at my own long-windedness.

NB:In my own spoken dialect, there's an "h" sound in "whoa"--like "hwoa." The aspiration is very soft, but it does distinguish the two words, in the pronunciations ingrained in me as a native-speaking infant in South Texas.

And, yes, my use of "woe" here is a rhetorical device. I picked it up from my smiley-using friends in another place of my life.

..."have" gave the wrong meaning to what I was trying to communicate....But in my mind, the structure of a language and its rules of grammar are simply facets of the same being. ...Nonetheless, here the meta object is something I lack the word for while having the term for its parts. So this could be termed a failure of my vocabulary. Yet, using "has" marks out the singularity of the referential concept.
I took your meaning right away, and we would not be in this thread, had Don not posted "have." But I'm very glad he did, since I'm enjoying the discussion very much.

As an aside, I am persuaded by the interpretation given by Dierk on the semantics of your expression of your thought as well as by what he suggested as the best way out of your "no single word for it" dilemma. It seems to me that rather than being "facets of the same being," "rules of grammar" is a subset of "structure of the language"--a subset which, incompletely, attempts to define "the structure of the language."

But this is thinking that is personal to you, and, in my set of ethics, the last word belongs to the author. And especially so in informal conversation. I know that Max Perkins sometimes managed to get the last word over Thomas Wolfe--the North Carolina author--and so did Margaret Mitchell's editor heavily edit *Gone With the Wind*.

Still, I want to plainly state: I grant you the right to write "has." <she said graciously, while eschewing the royal "we.">

hehehe "right to write" <rolling on floor laughing>

Truth be told, I would have been more appreciative if they had simply started the rules of grammar and taught us 5 other languages simultaneously during my education. ...
<appreciative smile>
...Instead, I know 3 (english, mathematics, computer programming). And I can remember enough French that I would not starve while looking like the vulgarian from the West that I may be at times.

For me, it's english (sic--though I don't buy into the conventions you've laid down on this), Spanish--enough to get by, because I have forgotten so much from disuse--and what little's left over from my college German.

I think grammar is best learned from reading. I think we learn from a combination of reading, verbal communication*, and finally the rules.
This was what I understood to be the thrust of your original comment and found to be both true and compelling.

On a side note, one grammatical construct I consistently fail to use correctly is the semicolon. Recently I finally realized it was because I wrote to d@#med verbosely and the contraction it allows does not fit in rhetorical style.
To each author his own. <conspiratorial wink>

* Both speaking and listening as the confused look are a listener's face tells us much about whether or not we were clear. Similarly, a listener's tangential rebuff can also tell us when we failed.
Ah, those feedback clues! Life-preserving, sometimes.

I have. Most definitely I did and do enjoy! <big smile>

Mary
 

Mary Bull

New member
The Weans first published in Harpers 1956

I woke up this morning early again, with Robert Nathan's anthropological spoof, "Digging the Weans" on my mind. Decided to look for it with Google. Found immediately one more evidence of how the memory plays tricks. This article was publishing in *Harpers Magazine*, not *The Atlantic Monthly*, in 1956.

In 1960 it was published in book form by Knopf, as *The Weans* and I just now found a used copy on Amazon.com and ordered it.

Okay, strictly speaking, it's SF--but so is Douglas Adams's *The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy* placed in that category.

Seller says B&W photographs illustrate the book.

I'm looking forward to a treat.

Mary,
An Us'n
 
<written over the course of days>

Dierk Haasis said:
Yes, that's the point. There's two kinds of footnotes I like to hide: bragging [or name dropping] and warnings about the intent of what I wrote [irony and satire warnings]. I include the latter sometimes when readers may not be too familiar with my styles and my rather dry humour; also quite good to point Americans the way, Britons have much less trouble with reading comprehension.
Just checking. Then I shall not bother to refer to the past "missing" footnotes.

I should also note I still owe you at least one response on past topics I defered. One of those is on the complexity of software. And there I agree that software is simple in specific.

The only one that instantly comes to mind was my comment on complexity of computer systems and your comment that they are not complex. I agree. Every data communications protocol I have studied was identical modulo some higher level variations in properties which can be compared to the differences between a finite group and a finite field (or a group and field).

Nonetheless, when you combine many layers you get complex distinctions like whether an optimization algorithm converges super-linearly or quadratically. You then start mixng hundreds of these simple layers together and you get incredibly complex systems regardless of each layers simplicity due to the complexity each layer adds. While each layer may be simple, the sum total of all the layers would be insanely difficult to write correctly as a single layer. Hence, I referenced the complexity of software. In other terms, 100% unit testing is reasonable and potentially cost effective while testing the layers which are not complex while it is unreasonable to comletely testthe totality in a viable business process business model as no one has a spare 3 billion years for testing and 100.000 line piece of software that does something simple due to the insane number of permutations of the isomorphic actions.


Dierk Haasis said:
I included a hint to my university degree because it may help some to see where I am coming from. It does not make my word on linguistic matters sacrosanct ...
No worries, I always question authority by default as this was what a college professor, who gave me a lesser grade for doing just that, taught me. Respect is always an earned feeling. Subservience/Acting Like a Slave is something that is blindly given. ;) (nasty but honest words)
Dierk Haasis said:
Some notes on other banter in the thread:

- Don't confuse rules of grammar with matters of style. Unfortunately there are still many prescriptive style manuals around, claiming certain constructions as 'bad style'. And the two most notorious rulings are, never to start a sentence with a conjunction, or to end it with a preposition. Stupid. Style is about effect, not about right and wrong.
I cannot agree with this totally, but that is my lack of knowledge of the structure of language. Communication is another issue entirely. Nonetheless, matters of style map to the human consciousness. And, where matters of style generate clear communication of concepts while breaking the "rules of grammar" it is without question clear that the rules in question need updating or removal due the failure to map to actual human communication.

Dierk Haasis said:
- As I've pointed out, the original sentence in question can easily be saved by omitting a 'the'; the parenthesis is a sub-optimal solution because it makes a stumbling stone when reading which is why I shouldn't use it). In this specific case it is also wrong because it would be interpreted as an explanation what the 'structure of language' means, but 'rules of grammar' is not a synonym.
I disagree. I do consider the rules of grammar and the structure of language to be synonyms just as rain and snow are synonyms for water falling from the sky.
Dierk Haasis said:
- Sean, your comment on taxonomic names: It's a convention laid down by taxonomists that the genus part of a proper species name is captalised and the specific part is not, nothing to do with language or writing per se. Most of the time biologist will use the form E. coli, abbreviating the genus part, for well-known or already mentioned species. Taxonomic naming has a very interesting history with some rather unintuitive results stemming from several conventions (no, technically there is no Brontosaurus).

Actually, the practical reason is that species names are not unique and hence Cannabis sativa L. and Medicago sativa L. are both sativa while strictly diffent species (one is hemp or dope/shag/weed/....) while the other is alfalfa. Hence species names without family qualifiers are too often not proper nouns due to severe cognates which sound the same and are spelled the same even though the mean the same thing. ;)

enjoy,

Sean (who should be sleeping)
 

Don Lashier

New member
Sean DeMerchant said:
... In other terms, 100% unit testing is reasonable and potentially cost effective while testing the layers which are not complex while it is unreasonable to comletely testthe totality in a viable business process business model as no one has a spare 3 billion years for testing and 100.000 line piece of software that does something simple due to the insane number of permutations of the isomorphic actions.

Which is why Windows sucks (to bring this down to ground).

- DL
 

Mary Bull

New member
Yeah, but I've already got all this emotional and financial investment in WinXP. So I've learned to live with its quirks, and shore up against its vulnerabilities.
Mary,
An Us'n who din't know no better
 

Dierk Haasis

pro member
Sean DeMerchant said:
And, where matters of style generate clear communication of concepts while breaking the "rules of grammar" it is without question clear that the rules in question need updating or removal due the failure to map to actual human communication.

It's rather simple: grammar developed for easy understanding [OK, 'grammar' as in rulings or t4xtbooks; although the concept can easily be adapted to the underlying natural grammar of everyone; cf. Steven Pinker], style - which often breaks rules - is a matter of effect and personality. While their can be rules on how to create or enhance an effect, their can be no rules to personality.

Grammar, so to speak, is the lowest common denominator for writers of a language [partly for speakers, but grammar is even more rudimentary in that domain*].

I disagree. I do consider the rules of grammar and the structure of language to be synonyms just as rain and snow are synonyms for water falling from the sky.

1. Than all my tries to salvage your grammar were wrong-minded; your original sentence is simply false.
2. From a linguistic PoV 'rules of grammar' and 'structure of language' are at best partly overlapping, they are difinitely not the same.
3. Your example synonyms are questionable, 'water falling from the sky' is much broader than 'snow' or 'rain' or 'a bucket full of water landing on your head'. You cannot without loss of meaning substitute 'rain' or 'snow' by 'water falling from the sky' - and it surely isn't possible the other way round unless you want to specify the state of aggregation. Additionally there's the complication that 'water falling from the sky' is not only a factoidal rendition but alos a poetic one.


[Edit: simply forgotten first time around]
*The German language has two different words: Sprache, which is usually translated as 'langage' but literally means 'spoken'; Schrift is literally 'written'. Unfortunately many Germans, incl. so called and self-announced experts do not know the difference. During the ongoing debate on the spelling reform they always invoked the "change of the language" ('Sprachverfälschung'), sometimes going so far to claim that filial generation 1 and parent generation would not be able to communicate anymore. Spoken language and written word do have some connecting points but they are not the same, and actually they are rather far apart.
 

Don Lashier

New member
Dierk Haasis said:
During the ongoing debate on the spelling reform ...

Spelling reform? Of German? One of (the few) joys of the German language is that if you can say it, you can spell it, and v-v. What's to reform?

Now if they could get rid of the stupid gender stuff - let's see, is a table feminine or masculine?

- DL
 
Last edited:

Dierk Haasis

pro member
Don, spelling isn't that easy, would be nice iof it were so. Actually the reform - originally talked about when the original Duden Dictionary became offical standard in 1902, then took up in the middle of the 1970s, at last really worked on during the early 90s, made official in 1996 with 10 years of transition, recanted partly over the past 10 years, and now, with the advent of August 2006 finalised - started out to have a closer connection between spoken and written word.

Due to having politicians and bureacrats within the decision oprocess German spelling has become even more problematic than before, to the point that the Duden explains the rules but tdoes not consistently use them in the same book [and edition]. Not quite as troubling is that the second major dictionary - called Wahrig Rechtschreibung, or Kleiner Wahrig - from the Bertelsmann Group decided to interpret some of the rules different than Duden. From the discussion in the FAZ I'd say Wahrig's interpretation is more consistent and sensible.

Apart from the already mentioned problem of not differentiating properly between written and spoken language, the major problem with the reform is that Germermans now sometimes have to decide what they want to say; before they were just told "how spellink a vord, Heil Duden"!



PS: I am a German [see, you made me do it] and as such allowed, even under the rules of Newspeak - sorry: Political Correctness - to make fun of Germany, its people and customs. Let me add that 'Germermans' is not a typo but an allusion to ...
 
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