Re: Opinions on English

On Sun, Sep 17, 2000 at 06:53:01PM -0400, Yoon Ha Lee wrote:
[snip]
> > 4) many compound verbs that convey little immediate
> >     semantic value (e.g. to "put up with")
>
> Now *that's* something that puzzles me, and that I have a hard time
> explaining to ESL grad students.  I usually tell them to memorize the
> whole thing as a unit and not try to break it into components.
That's because it's an idiom. If you break up "put up with", it has
nothing to do with the meaning as a whole, because it's not a syntactic
construction. I wouldn't call "put up with" a proper compound verb,
because its semantic meaning is idiomatic and cannot be analysed in that
way.

Every language has its own idioms, so I don't see why this should be a
reason to hate English...

[snip]
> >  7) Written ambiguities (divers, sewer, tower
> >     read/read   row   bow)
>
> I like these because they're useful in humor, puns, poetry.  I can see
> where others would find them annoying.  It's the proliferation of TLA's
> (three-letter-acronyms) that usually does me in.  :-p
[snip]

Well, I *do* find the read/read ambiguity rather annoying, because it's
differentiable in speech but not in writing; whereas other things are
differentiable in writing but not speech (eg. the two/too/to ambiguity).
But I find that context usually resolves any such ambiguities (unless they
were intentional, of course). Of course, I happen to be one who *likes*
context-sensitive constructs, so I won't try to speak for those who hate
stuff like this in English :-)

As for TLA's... the fact that "TLA" is a TLA for TLA is probably reason
enough to throw *anyone* off... :-) But these things aren't really built
into the language, though... it's more from the culture of people who
likes to throw acronyms around all the time. (I know a certain Canadian
government worker who spends most of his time in office speaking purely in
acronyms, punctuated with the occasional conjunction...)


T