Re: New to the list

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