Grammar

[Deloria]

Forgive me, but no one would ever make that mistake in RL. The oracle was obviously just trying to sound mysterious and ended up sounding rather daft instead. It rather ruined it for me.

emm, so you are saying you always speak grammatically correct. Always. 100% of the time. Never make a mistake while you speak. The same way you never get a quick sum in your head wrong, never, better than a calculator.

Hmm, I think I will save that for my robot characters

Errare humanum est. But that particular mistake just seems and sounds somewhat unnatural.

Just because I think Mandarin is hideous, I will add that syntax is not really grammar.

I will give my two cents as someone with a degree in Linguistics.

It really depends what you are talking about. The actual result of the study of syntax is called a "Grammar", which is essentially a machine which you can input any words into that will produce a "Grammatical" sentence in the language as long as you follow the machine's rules. More recently Optimality Theory is overriding that but that is a bit more in-depth than anyone in this forum probably cares about. The question of course is what exactly grammatical is. What you are describing and arguing about is not grammar; it is prescriptive language, which is essentially meaningless in speech. People from, say, Brooklyn will speak a vastly different form of English and have a vastly different view of what is grammatical than someone from, say, Manchester. However, as long as they can be understood by other speakers of their language, they are correct.

Languages are always changing, and what is considered grammatical in speech is constantly changing with them. If you correct someone based on prescriptive grammar, but you understood what they said, then you are wrong. Sorry.

Sorry, that was something of a private joke between Delling and me. I'm still mad at him for taking Mandarin instead of Lithuanian and we tease each other by saying things like that.

[GoneTooLong]

Hmm, I think I will save that for my robot characters

I'd ask if that's a Corridor 9 hint, but I'm pretty sure the answer would just be " "

[Deloria]

Languages are always changing, and what is considered grammatical in speech is constantly changing with them. If you correct someone based on prescriptive grammar, but you understood what they said, then you are wrong. Sorry.

In this case though, evidence is conflicting as there are two subjects and one might well not understand what it means.

[KuroShiro]

Languages are always changing, and what is considered grammatical in speech is constantly changing with them. If you correct someone based on prescriptive grammar, but you understood what they said, then you are wrong. Sorry.

In this case though, evidence is conflicting as there are two subjects and one might well not understand what it means.

"Seek he who rules on the..."

"Seek the man who rules on the..."

Can you imagine either of these being incomprehensible to anyone? They are exactly the same sentence structure. It's simply a more archaic-sounding way of saying it. If you want to get all syntax-y, then the "who" in this sentence is not a subject, but rather what is known as a complementizer in Linguistics, which precedes a subordinate clause. If you dropped the "who" or the "he/the man", now that might start getting incomprehensible .

[Deloria]

It's not about the "who", but rather about the "he". We have a hidden subject in the imperative and another subject following that. Whenever I hear a pronoun before a relative clause, I always think "he what?" and wait to get to the end of it, but in this case, we have no corresponding predicate ("rules" is to "who"). If it were "the man" instead of "he" I would have no problem with it, since that can either be a subject or an object.

[KuroShiro]

It's not about the "who", but rather about the "he". We have a hidden subject in the imperative and another subject following that. Whenever I hear a pronoun before a relative clause, I always think "he what?" and wait to get to the end of it, but in this case, we have no corresponding predicate ("rules" is to "who"). If it were "the man" instead of "he" I would have no problem with it, since that can either be a subject or an object.

Fair enough. The problem is that thinking about syntax simply in terms of single-word subjects and objects is a bit misleading. From my perspective I would argue that the "He/him/the man/whatever" alone is not the object, but rather the entire clause (i.e. "The man who rules on..." or "He who rules on..."). Of course this is all debatable which is the fun of figuring out a Grammar.

[Rosella]

While this is a slightly different topic, was anyone else bothered by Azure saying "You have proved"? Isn't "proven" the past participle?

[B'rrr]

Languages are always changing, and what is considered grammatical in speech is constantly changing with them. If you correct someone based on prescriptive grammar, but you understood what they said, then you are wrong. Sorry.

In this case though, evidence is conflicting as there are two subjects and one might well not understand what it means.

Luckily for us (or at least for you, because I understood what she meant aswell!) Graham understood!  Guess he is truly a man of the people that he can figure out what others mean even when they are not using perfect grammar *nods*

[Delling]

While this is a slightly different topic, was anyone else bothered by Azure saying "You have proved"? Isn't "proven" the past participle?

Both "proved" and "proven" have standing as the past participle of "prove".

(Posted on: July 13, 2010, 08:54:44 AM)

It's not about the "who", but rather about the "he". We have a hidden subject in the imperative and another subject following that. Whenever I hear a pronoun before a relative clause, I always think "he what?" and wait to get to the end of it, but in this case, we have no corresponding predicate ("rules" is to "who"). If it were "the man" instead of "he" I would have no problem with it, since that can either be a subject or an object.

Fair enough. The problem is that thinking about syntax simply in terms of single-word subjects and objects is a bit misleading. From my perspective I would argue that the "He/him/the man/whatever" alone is not the object, but rather the entire clause (i.e. "The man who rules on..." or "He who rules on..."). Of course this is all debatable which is the fun of figuring out a Grammar.

It's simply a matter of phrasing.

Sure, absolutely, the adjective clause is part of the noun phrase as it modifies "he", and yes, it is the entire noun phrase that fulfills the function, but the pronoun's being in the nominative case places the whole phrase squarely in the nominative case, which maps to a specific subset of noun functions, none of which contain the word "object" at all (oddly enough, the "objective" case ONLY maps to functions that include the syllables "ob" and "ject" (I'd have just said the word "object" but then there's the "objective complement").

(In my head, I've decided to pronounce "ject" above as "yekt", so I'm guilty of that whole trying to sound mysterious thing too).

[igrewold]

What's your grammatical take on this post:

To everyone who thinks the episode is too short and with not enough puzzles

http://www.postudios.com/blog/forum/index.php?topic=8733.0

Do you agree that he shoulda used "without" as an opposite of "with" instead of "with not"

[MangoMercury]

Shouldn't this topic be called...  "GRAHAM-MAR"?

...Sorry.

[KatieHal]

Shouldn't this topic be called...  "GRAHAM-MAR"?

...Sorry.

Wap-wap-wap....

I've also been tempted to comment that the Winged One Oracle cares not for your human grammar, hehe.