Common Errors: my mistake!
Hmmm... I should maybe reread my posts more before publishing, because in another article I said "we should be paying close attention to the thought processes behind this change and trying to make the way we right English match the way we speak it" and then forgot to describe the process in any detail.
Because even though the solution I proposed was to legitimise the writing of contractions, this is not the internal process causing the change. If the average speaker's internal model saw 've as a contraction of have, then no-one would make the 'mistake' of using of instead.
Put it this way: the "error" only occurs when have is used as a second auxiliary -- no-one would say *I of done it in place of I've done it/I have done it, for example.
So it would appear that here we have ceased to think of 've as an verb at all, let alone an infinitive. At best it is a clitic that modifies the first auxiliary to make it part of the perfect construction, but in fact it would appear to me to be in reality a new suffix, because I cannot see any situation where you could syntactically separate 've from the first auxiliary.
What we see here is English gaining a new fusional feature, and while English has displayed a tendency to become more isolating over the centuries, it isn't unknown for a language to pick up new fusional elements even when the general tendencies is towards isolation.
Consider, Latin vs the Western Romance language family.
Latin was a highly fusional language, and relied on very few periphrastic constructions. However, the future was a periphrastic form, consisting of the verb in the infinitive followed by the present indicative of to have -- so I will do was literally formed as to-do I-have.
Most members of the Western Romance family has lost a lot of the fusional features of Latin, but at the same time, the future has mutated into an inflected tense, with suffixes derived from (and in some cases identical to) the present tense of to have added to a future root that is almost identical to the infinitive.
Note that the creation of these new suffixes didn't alter the present tense of to have in any other constructions, even though in the early stages of this change, grammarians would most likely have declared that it was "obvious" that they were the same thing, and lamented the "common error" of people saying nous le ferons instead of the previous nous le faire avons. But today, the latter looks so unnatural that it would not be understood except by a scholar.
This is analogous to what I believe is happening in English. One particular usage of the verb to have is becoming replaced with a suffix derived from, but not identical to, a form of the verb. However much the status quo appears more logical, the frequency of occurrence of the "of" error (Google "would of", "could of" etc, and you get millions upon millions of hits) tells us that people's brains just don't work that way.
You cannot rewrite how people pick up their native language. People seem to pick up 've as a suffix, not an infinitive, so it's time to stop resisting. While it would be natural for a suffix to be incorporated into the word without the apostrophe, that would be a step too far for most pedants, and even besides that would be a fairly radical change that would take a bit of getting used to.
So I advocate using the contraction notation for now, but recognising that it has now ceased to be a contraction in the mind of the native speaker.
Showing posts with label orthography. Show all posts
Showing posts with label orthography. Show all posts
26 July 2011
23 July 2011
In language, there's no such thing as a common error
This is a statement mired in controversy. It wasn't me that first said it, but I agree with it... with one caveat: we're talking about native language.
For many, many years, grammarians and school teachers would hound us for saying things wrong. As a child, I was constantly "corrected" by my mother for asking for permission with Can I...? instead of Please may I...? or for saying if I was you... in place of if I were you....
So when I studied English at university it was very heartening to find that modern linguistics considers everything that is said by a sizable chunk of the population as acceptable language. And of course this includes both Can I...? and if I was you....
What triggered this post was seeing an article on the Register about a grammatical error in a BBC headline: Phone-hacking: the other news you might of missed.
This is one of those "errors" that's now common enough and consistent enough that we may have to stop calling it an error.
When I suggest this, people often recoil in horror. "But it's the perfect tense," they cry, "logically it must be have." (And yes - I know that perfect is an aspect, not a tense, but pointing that out at this point would seem like cheap point-scoring so I generally let it lie.) But since when was language logical? You must and You have to are logically equivalent in some usage, but when you negate them you get two very different things: you mustn't and you don't have to.
The thing is, logic aside, we have empirical evidence that shows people's brains don't see it as have -- the errors themselves stand as proof of an emerging norm. Rather than fretting about the logic of have=perfect, we should be paying close attention to the thought processes behind this change and trying to make the way we right English match the way we speak it.
This does not mean that we have to accept might of, could of etc. No, because there is an existing mechanism that rids us of this problem: contractions.
Contractions are mostly hated by our schoolroom English teachers, but they are gaining growing acceptance. We're allowed can't now, where my primary school teacher insisted on cannot, and even I'm where my teacher insisted on I am. Yet we're still told off by teachers and editors if we try to use could've or coulda, should've or shoulda, might've or mighta. But these are what we say. Our habits of speaking have gradually reduced the auxiliary have to something more of a fusional element, a suffix, than a word. It is only when a writer is expected to write "in full words" that might've becomes might of, so why not simply accept might've? It would eliminate both the error and the controversy, and would say several pedants a few more grey hairs....
This is a statement mired in controversy. It wasn't me that first said it, but I agree with it... with one caveat: we're talking about native language.
For many, many years, grammarians and school teachers would hound us for saying things wrong. As a child, I was constantly "corrected" by my mother for asking for permission with Can I...? instead of Please may I...? or for saying if I was you... in place of if I were you....
So when I studied English at university it was very heartening to find that modern linguistics considers everything that is said by a sizable chunk of the population as acceptable language. And of course this includes both Can I...? and if I was you....
What triggered this post was seeing an article on the Register about a grammatical error in a BBC headline: Phone-hacking: the other news you might of missed.
This is one of those "errors" that's now common enough and consistent enough that we may have to stop calling it an error.
When I suggest this, people often recoil in horror. "But it's the perfect tense," they cry, "logically it must be have." (And yes - I know that perfect is an aspect, not a tense, but pointing that out at this point would seem like cheap point-scoring so I generally let it lie.) But since when was language logical? You must and You have to are logically equivalent in some usage, but when you negate them you get two very different things: you mustn't and you don't have to.
The thing is, logic aside, we have empirical evidence that shows people's brains don't see it as have -- the errors themselves stand as proof of an emerging norm. Rather than fretting about the logic of have=perfect, we should be paying close attention to the thought processes behind this change and trying to make the way we right English match the way we speak it.
This does not mean that we have to accept might of, could of etc. No, because there is an existing mechanism that rids us of this problem: contractions.
Contractions are mostly hated by our schoolroom English teachers, but they are gaining growing acceptance. We're allowed can't now, where my primary school teacher insisted on cannot, and even I'm where my teacher insisted on I am. Yet we're still told off by teachers and editors if we try to use could've or coulda, should've or shoulda, might've or mighta. But these are what we say. Our habits of speaking have gradually reduced the auxiliary have to something more of a fusional element, a suffix, than a word. It is only when a writer is expected to write "in full words" that might've becomes might of, so why not simply accept might've? It would eliminate both the error and the controversy, and would say several pedants a few more grey hairs....
14 July 2011
3 Skills Safe
Last week, I discussed the traditional "4 skills" of language teaching: speaking, listening, reading and writing. I presented a different set of four skills: syntax, morphology, phonology and orthography. I then set about showing why the skill of syntax demonstrates the problems caused by the traditional model, and then went into a quite extreme theory expanding on this. This time, I'm going to focus on orthography and phonology.
Actually, I lied first time round. I said:
Centuries ago, people couldn't read quietly. According to QI and my good friend the internet, there is a historical record of the first man known to be able to read without moving his lips: Saint Ambrose, Bishop of Milan (338-397AD). Nowadays, it's not a particularly notable skill -- in fact, we use the idea of not being able to read without moving your lips as a way of insulting someone's intelligence. Most people today would swear that when they read, their brains are silent. Neurolinguists suggest otherwise.
Modern brain scanners are incredibly sensitive machines that can detect activity in any part of the brain, and last I'd heard, no-one had been found whose auditory functions weren't activated by reading -- ie. all reading seems to be translated into sound in order to be understood, whether we're aware of it or not.
And that is why this post is called 3 Skills Safe: because language is composed of 3 core skills: syntax, morphology and phonology. Orthography is something we're all born with the ability to learn, but in some weird way it appears to be an adjunct to language, something we add on top.
But what about sign language? I hear you cry. Very few people consider sign language as a form of writing, but rather as a form of speaking. Many respected language scientists now believe that the first human language was a gestural (sign) language, not a spoken language. In fact, the work of V S Ramachandran suggests that even spoken language is gestural in nature, and sound is merely the medium of transmission for that gesture. As a theory, it's pretty mind-blowing stuff. It all revolves around the so-called "mirror neuron" -- a mechanism in the brain that takes observations and turns them into experience. So we hear a sound and our brain understands it by recreating mentally how and why we ourselves would have produced that sound. This would explain the crossover between speaking and listening that I highlighted last week and it has some very profound consequences for the teaching of phonology, which I'll spend more time on soon.
But if phonology is about shape, why use a term derived from the Greek for sound? Well, simply put, it's the established term. Perhaps someone will make a new name for it in the future, but right now we're stuck with the words people use. But phonology is not restricted to the spoken medium, and interestingly enough, "orthography" is similarly not restricted to its usual visual medium. There is Braille, of course, but more interesting than that is the audio channel.
Though massively outdated now, telegraphy revolutionised global communication. The vital components in this global engine were the telegraphers, who relayed messages via Morse code. While they were working mostly through the medium of sound, the code was still denoting letters, not phonemes. An expert coder would have no problem even with the phonetic irregularities of English, such as the famous "rough, cough, bough, through" example. We can only conclude that they must have been "reading" through their ears.
Reading and writing therefore cannot be considered independent of speaking and listening. They are not separate "skills" but something that is built on top of spoken skills. Which means that before you start teaching reading and writing, you must ensure you have something to build on!
What happens if you don't?
Well, the learner builds on something else -- either an arbitrary pattern or on their first language. Case in point: many English speakers have problems with the "3 Es" of French: E, É, È. You will hear even some advanced students asking "Does this E have an accent? Which one?" But this is a regular feature of French: each refers to a distinct sound. By starting from the written form and almost invariably picking the "e" of English "pet", the learner has not built a proper representation of French phonemes and they've all merged into one. With only one sound behind all three forms of E, the choice of accent seems arbitrary and is difficult to remember. But to someone who has learnt from phonology, the correct accent is a matter of second nature.
Note that I said "someone who has learnt from phonology", not "someone who has learned by listening", because the two are not the same. People can also fail to notice phonemic differences when listening -- phonology must be taught explicitly. The irony is that after everything I've said, in some languages (Spanish, but not Chinese, for example) orthography can actually be a useful tool in teaching phonology... but that path is rather convoluted so we'll avoid going down it today and leave it for another time.
An anecdote from personal experience
I've held the above beliefs for a good few years now, but it wasn't until I started trying out LiveMocha's Polish course that the reality hit home.
My Polish is pretty basic, but I do know how the orthography works. I understand the non-palatised/alveolar-palatal/retroflex distinction in the main consonants, I know how it's written and I know how to pronounce it. And yet...
LiveMocha's speaking practice exercises ask you to read out a script. And I kept making silly mistakes. For example, I kept pronouncing C as /k/, rather than the correct /ts/. I put the stress in the 3rd-to-last syllable sometimes, or the last syllable sometimes. Why? Well although I "know" the rules of Polish sound, I'm not really comfortable with them yet. Reading pushed me beyond my level of ability, and I fell back on the systems of other languages.
Conclusion and consequences
I suggested previously that an apparent better ability in the written mode than in the spoken mode was a sign that the learner was using inappropriate and untransferrable strategies in the written mode, which means that the common learner situation of having a higher ability in the written mode than the spoken mode is actually a disordered state and consequently leads to long-term difficulties.
Today, I've tried to give another reason why this is such a disordered state, by showing that the written mode isn't pure language, but rather a layer of abstraction added on top of the language, and you can't build on a foundation that hasn't been laid yet.
Now let me be clear: I am not saying that everyone should be better at listening than at reading (this is something I plan to discuss in my next article, on phonology), but simply that a beginner has an urgent need to develop performance in the spoken mode. I'm not even saying that all new vocabulary should be presented in the spoken mode. No, if the vocabulary is built on phonemes that the student knows and has rehearsed sufficiently, and the orthography is regular enough, it's not a problem. But introducing new phonemes in the written mode is just mental. The student will learn to read them, but he will have to construct his own phonology underneath that orthography, and that will almost certainly be wrong.
Actually, I lied first time round. I said:
two of the skills are common to both the spoken and the written mode.
In fact, as far as I'm aware, three of the skills are common to both the spoken and written mode.
Centuries ago, people couldn't read quietly. According to QI and my good friend the internet, there is a historical record of the first man known to be able to read without moving his lips: Saint Ambrose, Bishop of Milan (338-397AD). Nowadays, it's not a particularly notable skill -- in fact, we use the idea of not being able to read without moving your lips as a way of insulting someone's intelligence. Most people today would swear that when they read, their brains are silent. Neurolinguists suggest otherwise.
Modern brain scanners are incredibly sensitive machines that can detect activity in any part of the brain, and last I'd heard, no-one had been found whose auditory functions weren't activated by reading -- ie. all reading seems to be translated into sound in order to be understood, whether we're aware of it or not.
And that is why this post is called 3 Skills Safe: because language is composed of 3 core skills: syntax, morphology and phonology. Orthography is something we're all born with the ability to learn, but in some weird way it appears to be an adjunct to language, something we add on top.
But what about sign language? I hear you cry. Very few people consider sign language as a form of writing, but rather as a form of speaking. Many respected language scientists now believe that the first human language was a gestural (sign) language, not a spoken language. In fact, the work of V S Ramachandran suggests that even spoken language is gestural in nature, and sound is merely the medium of transmission for that gesture. As a theory, it's pretty mind-blowing stuff. It all revolves around the so-called "mirror neuron" -- a mechanism in the brain that takes observations and turns them into experience. So we hear a sound and our brain understands it by recreating mentally how and why we ourselves would have produced that sound. This would explain the crossover between speaking and listening that I highlighted last week and it has some very profound consequences for the teaching of phonology, which I'll spend more time on soon.
But if phonology is about shape, why use a term derived from the Greek for sound? Well, simply put, it's the established term. Perhaps someone will make a new name for it in the future, but right now we're stuck with the words people use. But phonology is not restricted to the spoken medium, and interestingly enough, "orthography" is similarly not restricted to its usual visual medium. There is Braille, of course, but more interesting than that is the audio channel.
Though massively outdated now, telegraphy revolutionised global communication. The vital components in this global engine were the telegraphers, who relayed messages via Morse code. While they were working mostly through the medium of sound, the code was still denoting letters, not phonemes. An expert coder would have no problem even with the phonetic irregularities of English, such as the famous "rough, cough, bough, through" example. We can only conclude that they must have been "reading" through their ears.
Reading and writing therefore cannot be considered independent of speaking and listening. They are not separate "skills" but something that is built on top of spoken skills. Which means that before you start teaching reading and writing, you must ensure you have something to build on!
What happens if you don't?
Well, the learner builds on something else -- either an arbitrary pattern or on their first language. Case in point: many English speakers have problems with the "3 Es" of French: E, É, È. You will hear even some advanced students asking "Does this E have an accent? Which one?" But this is a regular feature of French: each refers to a distinct sound. By starting from the written form and almost invariably picking the "e" of English "pet", the learner has not built a proper representation of French phonemes and they've all merged into one. With only one sound behind all three forms of E, the choice of accent seems arbitrary and is difficult to remember. But to someone who has learnt from phonology, the correct accent is a matter of second nature.
Note that I said "someone who has learnt from phonology", not "someone who has learned by listening", because the two are not the same. People can also fail to notice phonemic differences when listening -- phonology must be taught explicitly. The irony is that after everything I've said, in some languages (Spanish, but not Chinese, for example) orthography can actually be a useful tool in teaching phonology... but that path is rather convoluted so we'll avoid going down it today and leave it for another time.
An anecdote from personal experience
I've held the above beliefs for a good few years now, but it wasn't until I started trying out LiveMocha's Polish course that the reality hit home.
My Polish is pretty basic, but I do know how the orthography works. I understand the non-palatised/alveolar-palatal/retroflex distinction in the main consonants, I know how it's written and I know how to pronounce it. And yet...
LiveMocha's speaking practice exercises ask you to read out a script. And I kept making silly mistakes. For example, I kept pronouncing C as /k/, rather than the correct /ts/. I put the stress in the 3rd-to-last syllable sometimes, or the last syllable sometimes. Why? Well although I "know" the rules of Polish sound, I'm not really comfortable with them yet. Reading pushed me beyond my level of ability, and I fell back on the systems of other languages.
Conclusion and consequences
I suggested previously that an apparent better ability in the written mode than in the spoken mode was a sign that the learner was using inappropriate and untransferrable strategies in the written mode, which means that the common learner situation of having a higher ability in the written mode than the spoken mode is actually a disordered state and consequently leads to long-term difficulties.
Today, I've tried to give another reason why this is such a disordered state, by showing that the written mode isn't pure language, but rather a layer of abstraction added on top of the language, and you can't build on a foundation that hasn't been laid yet.
Now let me be clear: I am not saying that everyone should be better at listening than at reading (this is something I plan to discuss in my next article, on phonology), but simply that a beginner has an urgent need to develop performance in the spoken mode. I'm not even saying that all new vocabulary should be presented in the spoken mode. No, if the vocabulary is built on phonemes that the student knows and has rehearsed sufficiently, and the orthography is regular enough, it's not a problem. But introducing new phonemes in the written mode is just mental. The student will learn to read them, but he will have to construct his own phonology underneath that orthography, and that will almost certainly be wrong.
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