Re: On prescriptions and misunderstanding: was can/may

>
> Well what IS that?  I'm curious.  I was raised in a middle class
> midwestern
> family with a mother whose roots were in the uppercrust Episcopalian
> South
> (Georgia).  She actually did have to make a violent adjustment when her
> family moved to northern Indiana.  She was rapidly socialized out of
> saying
> "rayed hoss" ("red horse") within a few weeks, and over the years she
> adopted a nearly flawless Radio Announcer Standard Received American
> English
> which she passed on to me, along with a formidable vocabulary that I
> started
> learning at an early age.  That was my "native English."  I never said
> "ain't," I never used double negatives, "ain't got no," I never said
> "mischeevious," and I never said "rayed hoss."
Ah, the joys of hyper-correction. I speak a "fake" accent too.... my
parents are always careful to speak "proper" english (which is strange
since I don't have a single family member who didn't grow up here), so
as I grew up I resisted assimilation to the local dialect pretty much. I
remember when I first went to school I temporarily reverted to
pronouncing /T/ as /f/ (a lot of people in the midlands and the north of
England do) for over a year, since I picked it up from the other kids,
and then was corrected everytime I spoke until I was getting it right
again. I've often been told I have a posh accent because I pronounce
things carefully and tend to underuse contractions. In local speech we
get the following kind of things, taken from almost everyone else at the
shop where I have a part time job:

/T/ -> /f/, /D/ -> /v/

/enIfiNK/   anything
etc... for some reason they don't insert a /k/ or /g/ on the end of
participles or a lot of other words (singing isn't /sININg/ but /sININ/
for example), but with words ending in "thing" like "anything",
"something"  etc they do.

"I'll learn you" for "I'll teach you" and similar things are quite common.

"more better", "more good", "more betterer" (strangely not "betterer" on
its own) etc .....

"If you was...." (ie frequent elimination of the subjunctive)

"I din't do nuffink" (ie double negatives)

By contrast I tend to overuse the subjunctive, and I try to never use
double negatives. The problem is that all the things I've listed are
associated strongly with being uneducated in the south of England
especially, so my parents probably did me a favour by forcing standard
English on me.

> Rather, I find that the affectations I've adopted (the foul language, for
> instance), along with the seepage into my grammar of expressions like
> "there's dogs at the vet" and "he laid on the bed" interfere with the
> "native" language I learned from my mother's lips.  (Actually, I never
> consciously say "he laid on the bed"... but it's so prevalent that it may
> affect me eventually).
>
I'd say "he lay on his bed"... which may also be wrong, but "laid" feels
definately wrong in that sentence. I'd never say "there's" with a
following plural either... it would always be "there are" or "there're"
sometimes in speech (why don't we write "there're"? I wonder...). I
don't swear often because it sounds unnatural and affected when I do
it... or maybe it sounds unnatural and affected when I do it because I
don't swear often.

>> SC> What I disagree with is the identification of preschool English
>> as the
>> SC> authentic one ("English itself").
>>
>> What I was trying to avoid is the notion - which I am, again, not
>> attributing to you! - that people who have little or no education (and
>> therefore, presumably, only speak the English they learned intuitively
>> starting as babies) speak "bad" English.   Indeed, as you inferred from
>> my earlier message, I think you can make a case that what they speak is
>> instead, in some sense, a more authentic "English", as it is the living
>> language of a generation, relatively unencumbered by rules left over
>> from prior generations.
>
>
> But what if your prior generations spoke the "King's English," so to
> speak?
> Something I've been apologizing for all my life.
>
>> Being more authentic doesn't make it "better",
>> any more than uneducated doesn't make it "worse".  Nor do I think
>> those leftover rules are a bad thing - but whatever their value, they
>> are in some sense artificial add-ons to the base language.
>
>
> This is something we all agree on.  With as much mansuetude as
> possible, may
> I remind you that I am arguing something a little different. And that is
> that in the interests of making this point that we all agree on, Marcos,
> over and over again, you are perhaps associating, a little too glibly,
> "native" or "authentic" English in *all cases* with language that some
> schoolmarms cautionate us against.  It is actually the case, and I
> pointed
> this out in my last post, that we all come from different backgrounds,
> slide
> into different registers that we learn as we grow up, and that
> "native" is
> relative; and that you are making perhaps too simple a demarcation
> between
> what we learn before we go to school and what we learn in kindergarten,
> first grade, watching television, reading, going to college, and so
> forth.
> Parents and their backgrounds count.  You also seem to be assuming
> that all
> native English is of the type that schoolmarms school us out of.  That
> was
> one of my points.  My other point had to do with backgrounds and
> identities.
> What is my "native language," I asked you in a part you've snipped,  if I
> come from the background that I do?  So for you to tell me (speaking
> generally of course) that my "native language" is something that I had
> to be
> schooled out of feels false to me.  Rather, my education--from many many
> different sources--augmented my native language.  It didn't replace it,
> another notion of yours that I took issue with.  My point is that
> "enhanced"
> language ability is something that everyone, educated or not, acquires as
> they become adults.  I live in a very urban neighborhood, and I chat with
> people who say "he ain't got no."  But I can assure you that they also
> have
> acquired vocabulary like "tsunami," "voter registration," "social
> security"
> and other learned, latinate terms that affect their adult lives.
>
> I spoke of a "continuum."  I'd rather offer a different metaphoric
> adminiculation.:)  The English language is like a globe.  We all start in
> different places on that globe, but it's still the same planet.  Where
> we go
> on that globe differs as well.  Some stay in the same city.  Some go to
> other cities and pick up the argot there.  Some return to their home town
> and find that everything is changed.  Their language has changed with
> experience, and so has that of their parents.  Mothers and fathers who
> used
> to say "what the heck" are now saying without blinking an eye "what the
> fuck," and "there's dogs at the vet" and "he laid on the bed."
> They've also
> picked up "pdf files," "stem cell research," "global warming," and are
> praying for the people in Asia who've been devastated by a "tsunami."
> Aren't they all still speaking a moving, living, turning English
> language in
> all its registers?  And where and when did they depart from their
> "native"
> language?  Hasn't it evolved into a new "native" language?
>
>> SC> Perhaps we agree more than we differ, actually.
>>
>> I suspect so.  :)
>
>
> We agree that making class judgments is a bad thing.  An eximious
> achievement. :)  But the new question is whether you approve the
> metaphors
> I've presented above.
>
> Sally
>
>

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