Re: Grammar in HS (Was: Re: Argument Structures)

Hi, all,

You won't get flamed by me, H.S.   I think that omitting letters that stand
for unstressed vowels is a wonderful idea.   Anything that makes our awful
spelling system more regular is a wonderful idea in my book.

:-)

Jim




----- Original Message -----
From: "H. S. Teoh" <hsteoh@...>
To: <CONLANG@...>
Sent: Wednesday, August 23, 2000 1:35 PM
Subject: Re: Grammar in HS (Was: Re: Argument Structures)


> On Wed, Aug 23, 2000 at 03:50:56PM -0400, nicole perrin wrote:
> [snip]
> > Maybe this is a silly question, but is grammar of one's native langauge
> > taught in countries other than the US?  Because here almost everyone
> > grows up without knowing even what subject and object are.  I always
> > think it's a stupid practice (or non-practice) but I wonder what it's
> > like in other places?
>
> Yes. I'm from Malaysia, and in primary school (equiv of grade 1-6 in N.
> America) I was in a Chinese school where they taught elementary Chinese
> (Mandarin) grammar, proverbs, etc.. I don't remember much, mostly 'cos I
> was a slacker back then. :-P But in addition to that, we had to learn
> Malay, esp. 'cos from secondary school onwards (equiv grade 7 onwards),
> *everything* was taught in Malay -- textbooks and exams were in Malay,
> even in the nominal "chinese" or "indian" or even "english" schools. There
> were definitely lessons on Malay grammar, even for students who are Malay
> by race. (Aside: I used to shudder at the frightening complexity of Malay
> verbs, which have a system of prefixes and suffixes with sometimes
> inconsistent (or, unexpected, I should say) nuances... but now I wish I'd
> paid more attention to them in class -- what I know of verb conjugations
> now is mostly from Indo-European languages; wish I had a better grasp of
> how those Malay suffixes work, might turn out useful in my conlang...)
>
> And of course, we also had to learn English (to various degrees of
> competency, depending on the school), so imagine my shock when I came to
> N. America and discovered that apparently students here aren't even taught
> English phonetics (don't even mention grammar), they are just taught to
> follow the "gut feeling" they get when they see a word. (This, IMNSHO, is
> probably why the schwa sound is becoming increasingly prevalent in spoken
> English. Native English speakers may not notice this, but I remember
> having a lot of trouble deciphering spoken English that sounds like a
> string of consonants punctuated by the occasional vowel which isn't
> pronounced exactly in the most intuitive way, either. I honestly won't be
> surprised that sometime in the future, the vowels in unstressed syllables
> won't even be written out anymore, since it makes no difference to the
> pronunciation. But enough of this rant, before I get flamed ;-)
>
>
> T