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Re: New to the list

From:Yoon Ha Lee <yl112@...>
Date:Wednesday, October 11, 2000, 23:32
On Wed, 11 Oct 2000, Nik Taylor wrote:

> Yoon Ha Lee wrote: > > (pedants like me who use "whom," things like "whose," etc. remain) > > Since when has "whose" been pedantic?
Sorry--"pedant" applied to "whom," not the rest.
> > If you don't like cases, sure! > > I personally find cases indispensable. :-) I think I've had a grand > total of *one* conlang without cases.
I *love* cases. But if someone else doesn't like 'em, hey--there's room for a lot of conlangs.
> > And yet native > > English speakers may make any number of "mistakes" (depending on how > > prescriptive your grammar is) but they rarely make the kinds of > > article-use errors that these foreign speakers do. > > Probably because prescriptivists have never bothered to make rules about > articles. I'm sure that if they had, we'd be making lots of "errors". > :-)
<wince> Judy Pierpont, who's Cornell's resident linguist-hired-to-work-with-EFL-people, prepared a handout for the writing tutor service on articles. I can *use* articles fine without thinking about them, but when I saw rules-of-usage (things that sound "right" to most English-speakers in an American academic setting), I was flabbergasted. There are a lot of them, and a lot of "irregularities" that I am often at a loss to explain to people whose languages have *no* articles. (We're not trained to work specifically with EFL people, unfortunately, though there is a separate, smaller group of tutors who work with certain of those people throughout the year.) YHL