A little bit of grammar

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by Rizla

@Pulpmeister

The stuff on iambic pentameter is fascinating. I glazed over in school when it was mentioned. Thanks for your explanation.

Has anyone actually mentioned iambic pentameter in this thread? I don't see it .

[eschwartz]

Originally Posted by Rizla

English is like that. It's an easy language. Try writing in French. In any case, it pays to understand the nuts-and-bolts if you want to write in any formal capacity. Look at the horror that is so many self-pub authors who adhere to your reasoning. Then there are those who will tell you how to spell "potatoe." Amazon has a lot to answer for

And I am eternally thankful I don't live in France, although that is for different reasons.

Actually, I tend to get away with it, since I have seen enough proper grammar to know when something is off.

[eschwartz]

Originally Posted by HarryT

Knowledge of "formal" grammar is absolutely essential when you start learning other languages (as an adult, at least - children learn languages differently). I read a number of different languages moderately well, including Latin, ancient Greek, and ancient Egyptian. The people who always struggle on language courses are those who are not equipped with the vocabulary to understand how their own language "works", and hence are unable to understand how other languages achieve the same result.

I'm guessing that you can read Hebrew, echwartz; were you not taught that on the basis of the grammar of the language, or did you learn it by "absorption" as a child?

The dirty secret of Jewish Hebrew studies.
Skill levels vary. Although I learn talmud and scripture, a large part of that involves discussing talmud, outside of reading it, in English. (Because we aren't silly enough to spend te entire day engaged in casual back-and-forth in a non-ntive language.)
Oh, I can read and understand a fair bit, but speak it? A whole 'nother story.

Interestingly, my Yeshiva has several Mexican students, and one of them who doesn't yet know much English is in my shiur. He learns with his chavrusa in Hebrew, because is something they both know.
It is mildly amusing to listen to, as neither speak it fluently.


Yeridas HaDoros -- the generarions get weaker. Once upon a time, the stupid students were the ones who only went through all of talmud once or twice, and didn't know the Maharam Shif by heart. Now we struggle with a few tractates and forget half of what we learned over the summer.
(Yes, back in the day it was fairly common for Jewish talmudical students to memorize whole tractates to the point where they knew it cold.
I suppose it could've been their work ethic...)

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by eschwartz

The dirty secret of Jewish Hebrew studies.
Skill levels vary. Although I learn talmud and scripture, a large part of that involves discussing talmud, outside of reading it, in English. (Because we aren't silly enough to spend te entire day engaged in casual back-and-forth in a non-ntive language.)
Oh, I can read and understand a fair bit, but speak it? A whole 'nother story.

Interestingly, my Yeshiva has several Mexican students, and one of them who doesn't yet know much English is in my shiur. He learns with his chavrusa in Hebrew, because is something they both know.
It is mildly amusing to listen to, as neither speak it fluently.


Yeridas HaDoros -- the generarions get weaker. Once upon a time, the stupid students were the ones who only went through all of talmud once or twice, and didn't know the Maharam Shif by heart. Now we struggle with a few tractates and forget half of what we learned over the summer.
(Yes, back in the day it was fairly common for Jewish talmudical students to memorize whole tractates to the point where they knew it cold.
I suppose it could've been their work ethic...)

That's very interesting - thanks for explaining it!

Sounds like a similar situation to that of one of my work colleagues, who is a British-born Muslim of Pakistani heritage. He uses a bilingual version of the Koran - English and Arabic on facing pages - and knows enough Arabic to be able to follow along when the Koran is read, but when I try to practice my Arabic with him (my Arabic is far from fluent, but it's sufficient to get by with in Egypt for everyday stuff) he gets rather lost. But that's probably down to that fact that neither of us speak Arabic terribly well .

[Pulpmeister]

Well, who/whom IS used in speech! Harry T is surely not the only person who does, so the Shorter OED got it wrong. The chances are I have indeed heard 'whom' in speech and not noticed, but I'm reasonably sure I have never used it myself (but who can be certain? In my longish life I must have spoken millions of sentences, if not hundreds of millions, and I'm sure I don't remember any of them verbatim.)

What triggered my OP was acquiring from Gutenberg a happy little tome called The Common People of Ancient Rome, by Frank Frost Abbott, published in 1911. It is a series of articles, the largest of which concerns the differences between written Latin and spoken Latin, and gave some clues as to how what is a very large difference came about.

It came as news to me (I did not study Latin at school) that Cicero, the noblest of Latin writers, used it in his formal works, but in his letters to his family and friends he used what is referred to as "vulgar" Latin; that is, the language of the people. Today "vulgar" has a different shade of meaning, so in my own mind I now think of the spoken language as Roman and the written language as Latin.

Abbott also makes the point, and from the text this is old news to him, that the Romance languages didn't evolve from Latin, but from what I call Roman. Indeed, the common language of the city Rome until quite recent times was Romanesco, which is now not much more than a regional accent and some unique idioms.

There is not an awful lot of text in Roman left, as the classical scholars were obviously more interested in the great works of the great Latin writers. There is enough, though, to show that the spoken Roman, when written, looks a lot more like Italian than Latin, notably in the frequent omission of the common ending -m. This something that the pedants of the times railed against. (In Latin, the region around Rome was Latium. Most likely in casual Roman use it was Latio; modern Lazio.)

The man in the street also used prepositions as a matter of course, rather than the formal Latin inflections. Abbot gives this example: magna pars de exercitu, in preference to formal magna pars exercitus. ("A large part of the army")

To me a telling, though throwaway, reference was to the fact that early Latin scholars, coming late to writing, looked to the Greeks, who had been literate for centuries, and Greek grammars, for guidance. The more things change...

It seems logical to me that formal Latin, which was the language of literature, temple, courts, and the ruling class, but not of the common people, died out as a spoken language around the time of the fall of the Roman empire, but the spoken language I call Roman continued unabated by evolving into the Romance tongues. Of course that is no doubt another thing I haven't got quite right.

[Pulpmeister]

Oh-- Iambic pentameter is iambic meter, with five "feet" of two syllables, hence penta--
The Manderly line has 6 feet. "To boldy go" starts off with two iambic feet and then goes astray, but then it surely wasn't meant to be in meter. I'm quite sure Daphne du Maurier knew exactly what she was doing when she composed that opening line.

[Rizla]

Originally Posted by HarryT

Has anyone actually mentioned iambic pentameter in this thread? I don't see it .

Thank you for the clarification. I (naturally) associated the iambic with pentameter.

[Rizla]

Originally Posted by Pulpmeister

Abbott also makes the point, and from the text this is old news to him, that the Romance languages didn't evolve from Latin, but from what I call Roman. Indeed, the common language of the city Rome until quite recent times was Romanesco, which is now not much more than a regional accent and some unique idioms.

The man in the street also used prepositions as a matter of course, rather than the formal Latin inflections. Abbot gives this example: magna pars de exercitu, in preference to formal magna pars exercitus. ("A large part of the army")

I didn't know that. I did wonder at the use of inflections in Latin as opposed to prepositions in the Latin-derived languages I am familiar with. So so-called Latin-European languages are not purely derived from Latin but also from Romanesco (and other local languages) which used prepositions, if I understand correctly.

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by Rizla

I didn't know that. I did wonder at the use of inflections in Latin as opposed to prepositions in the Latin-derived languages I am familiar with. So so-called Latin-European languages are not purely derived from Latin but also from Romanesco (and other local languages) which used prepositions, if I understand correctly.

Latin also uses prepositions as well as inflections, of course. Only a small number of prepositions are "replaced" by cases.

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by Pulpmeister

It seems logical to me that formal Latin, which was the language of literature, temple, courts, and the ruling class, but not of the common people, died out as a spoken language around the time of the fall of the Roman empire...

Except, of course, that it didn't . Spoken Latin is alive and well today - it's the official language of the Vatican, for example. Latin was the language of European scholarship - both spoken and written - until at least the early part of the 18th century. Most universities taught all their classes in Latin, and every educated man could speak and read Latin. The reason that the area around the Sorbonne University in Paris is still called today "the Latin quarter" is that most people who lived and worked there in the Middle Ages spoke Latin.

[HarryT]

There's a Latin language news radio broadcast in Finland. You can read (and listen to) it here.

[DiapDealer]

I always thought the church Latin was what was considered "vulgar" Latin? I know I always had difficulty switching from classical Latin studies (long, long ago) to the singing of songs in Latin. The former was "waynee, weedy, weeky" while the latter was "vaynee, veedy, veechy."

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by DiapDealer

I always thought the church Latin was what was considered "vulgar" Latin? I know I always had difficulty switching from classical Latin studies (long, long ago) to the singing of songs in Latin. The former was "waynee, weedy, weeky" while the latter was "vaynee, veedy, veechy."

Yes, mediaeval Latin has rather different grammar to classical Latin. Not too different, but different enough to take a bit of getting used to if classical Latin is what you're familiar with. It also has a lot of vocabulary that's not there in the classical language, of course.

[heythereimkira]

Originally Posted by ATDrake

Fun fact: my Collins Engelsk-Norsk Ordbok/English-Norwegian Dictionary has as the example sentence under the "boldly, adv" entry:



While I didn't exactly buy it for that reason alone, if I'd already had a bunch of Norwegian dictionaries prior, I'd still have picked it up for sheer awesomeness just because.

Aside from that, most prescriptive grammar is incorrect and can be blamed on people with too much time on their hands and too little linguistics knowledge of how their own language actually works, who then spread it around to others such, unfortunately.

Sometimes blamed very specifically.

Prepositions not ending a sentence? That's the fault of John Dryden (Wikipedia, Motivated Grammar blogpost write-up), noted and influential poet and playwright whom you may know from his pithy "hostages to fortune" remark, who thought that his generation's usage of language was way cooler and would be longer-enduring than those outdated wordsmiths Shakespeare and Chaucer (ahahaha… so wrong).

Split infinitives? A number of fingers to point, but apparently mainly the work of Henry Alford (Wikipedia, write-up on this from one of the co-authors of the Cambridge University Press' A Student's Introduction to English Grammar), another poet who should have stuck to poetry instead of helping to make the Queen's English clunkier and less lyrical.

And we have Robert Lowth (Wikipedia), another poet-ish (well, professor of poetry-ish) guy, who went and enabled them all.

Incidentally, the entire who/whom thing is because of the subject/object case distinction and it really is a real grammar rule that's descriptive, not prescriptive (except in cases of genuinely incorrect usage).

It's just that the object-only "whom" inflection has atrophied its ending in favour of becoming object-"who", but it's still an objective case ending and the misuse comes from when people mistakenly use object-"whom" when they mean subject-"who"*.

Long story short: the easy way to remember when to use whom if you want to (which incidentally I personally do, and in actual speech too, though YMMV) is in situations where you would use "him" and not "he" (and if you can't tell those apart, then I can no longer help you).

Otherwise, you can't go wrong with using object-"who" for all informal usages if you don't feel like visibly (and audibly) distinguishing it from subject-"who".

* There's actually a case descriptive word† for when the same form is used consistently for both subject and object in certain circumstances across a particular language, but that's not what's happening in the English language.

† And IIRC, it's "ergative-absolutive" (Wikipedia), not that you actually wanted to know.

Hi, I can’t seem to grasp how to make a Norwegian Bokmål dictionary. Would you mind sharing yours? I would really appreciate it, I didn't think it would be so difficult and I'm having an hard time making one myself

[HarryT]

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