Re: SURVEY: Idiomatic Expressions In Your ConLang Or ConCulture

On 11/14/05, caeruleancentaur <caeruleancentaur@...> wrote:
> --- In conlang@yahoogroups.com, "Ph.D." <phil@P...> wrote:
>
> >"My father said there'd be trouble if I didn't mow the lawn, so
> >I guess I better had."
>
> >Here, "I better had" is what I would call an idiom. It doesn't
> >make sense under the normal rules of English grammar, but
> >every native English speaker knows what it means.
>
> This is not an idiom to me (although I would have said "had
> better."  It is merely an elliptical sentence, "so I guess I had
> better mow the lawn."  It makes perfect sense to me.
"I better had" wouldn't work in my 'lect either; it would be
"I had better" or more likely "I'd better".  And it is an idiom;
"to have better" as synonymous with "I must, I ought to"
is nonliteral and peculiar to English, as becomes obvious
when you try to translate it literally into another language:

*Mi pli bone havis trancxi la gazonon

*J'avais mieux ...

It doesn't work with any other tense or mood of "to have"
in English, either; *"I will have better", *"I would have had
better", *"I have better"....  So definitely an idiom.

I'd say only a few of the phrases cited by Tom in his
first message are conventional idioms; the others
are witty metaphors or exaggerations.

For instance, "dense" has an idiomatic meaning
of "stupid" in addition to its literal physical-property
meanings, but "He's so dense, light bends around him"
is a witticism based on that idiom, not linguistically much
different from other insult-jokes like "He's so fat he needs
his own zip code" or such-like.

> >Another example is "I will try and attend the meeting." Here, "and"
> >doesn't quite make sense. The expected word would be "to."  (To me,
> >the use of "and" implies "I will try the meeting and I will attend
> >the meeting.")
> To me, this is just an example of poor English; there's nothing
> idiomatic about it. "Try" and "attend" are not equivalent terms to
> be joined by a co-ordinating conjunction. "Meeting" is not the
> dirrect object of "try," but of "attend."  This should be rather a
> finite verb "try" with a dependent infinitive.  The use of "try and"
To me this is colloquial but not really substandard.
The fact that most native speakers of the English dialects
concerned will understand it in spite of its not being
logical suggests that it is an idiom in those dialects.

--
Jim Henry
http://www.pobox.com/~jimhenry/review/log.htm