Pedants' Paradise

[Eine Alpensinfonie]

... and when you speak, how do you articulate the apostrophe?

I've often wondered that myself. You don't notice the spelling mistakes either. Possible the intonation of the voice helps to overcome confusions that might occur with the written word.

[vinteuil]

... and when you speak, how do you articulate the apostrophe?

I've often wondered that myself...

... well, the Danes thought they had an answer -

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qf_TDuhk3No

[Serial_Apologist]

There were rules of grammar into which we were drilled at school, back in the 1950s and 1960s. (Not that I wrote "into which we were drilled" as opposed to "we were drilled into", because one never, never ended a sentance a preposition with). Noticing as one does that correct spoken English seems most often to be observed in non-primarily English speaking people - especially from MEPs from Germany, Holland and the Scandinavian countries during the course of the EU referendum - it occurs that one source of good spoken English, which must surely have derived from the written, might be preserved by continuing to defend immigration from those countries, post-Brexit! For while modernisation of the language can be presented as a pretext for accepting any new changes to the language whatever, given that it only takes, for example, one person to refuse to insert apostrophes where they've previously been so to be taken as legitimate, how it will be made easier, from this time on, for anyone from non-English speaking countries to learn what is already one of the most difficult of languages in the western world to learn is anyone's guess.

[Nick Armstrong]

There were rules of grammar into which we were drilled at school, back in the 1950s and 1960s. (Not that I wrote "into which we were drilled" as opposed to "we were drilled into", because one never, never ended a sentance a preposition with).

Surely the rules were drilled into you, rather than the other way around?

[vinteuil]

... one source of good spoken English, which must surely have derived from the written....

... erm?

I suspect Serial comes from a Protestant tradition, believing that a written New Testament somehow preceded a practising Church

[umslopogaas]

And as Winston Churchill said when told he should not end a sentence with a preposition:

"This is the kind of arrant pedantry up with which I will not put!"

[Serial_Apologist]

... erm?

I suspect Serial comes from a Protestant tradition, believing that a written New Testament somehow preceded a practising Church

Well, I was thinking of people whose correct spoken English, in all probability, must have derived from the correctly written kind as taught, as opposed to the colloquial.

[Serial_Apologist]

Surely the rules were drilled into you, rather than the other way around?

OK, "drilled in" then - or "... in which we were drilled".

[Serial_Apologist]

And as Winston Churchill said when told he should not end a sentence with a preposition:

"This is the kind of arrant pedantry up with which I will not put!"

[vinteuil]

Well, I was thinking of people whose correct spoken English, in all probability, must have derived from the correctly written kind as taught, as opposed to the colloquial.

... and languages that have no written form, or which have only acquired a written form recently - do the speakers thereof not speak "correctly", even without the benefit of writing?

[Serial_Apologist]

... and languages that have no written form, or which have only acquired a written form recently - do the speakers thereof not speak "correctly", even without the benefit of writing?

I don't know the answer to that, assuming there is one. Presumably language formalisation was helped, if not enabled, by being written down. Can one say that?

[ahinton]

My father never visited the Alps.

John Adams' father never knew Charles Ives either...

[Eine Alpensinfonie]

The rigid so-called 'rules' of language laid out how language usage had developed among the educated classes (especially those of the 19th c.). Language came first; the 'rules' came afterwards, fossilising usages that were no longer current and insisting that they must continue to be adhered to.

Standardising language is not necessarily fossilising it. It just prevent chaos. Adhering to the language of the educated classes may be a better starting place than the uneducated classes. That could be called snobbery, but let's not go there.

[jean]

That could be called snobbery, but let's not go there.

You just have!

[vinteuil]

I don't know the answer to that, assuming there is one. Presumably language formalisation was helped, if not enabled, by being written down. Can one say that?

... but in what way has any of this to do with forms which some people wish to assert as 'correct' or 'incorrect', when the only real indication is usage? I don't think the written form is helpful. Some languages have distinctly different written and spoken forms - French, for example. Notions of 'correctness' in the spoken form don't flow from what might be regarded as 'correct' in the written.