(I know you're being a little silly here but my two cents: )

It's more pretentious to insist that a language is an unyielding entity, that there are gramatical rules that are fixed into place, canonical spellings for things, proper ways of doing things. Clearly, on the one hand, I favor standardization as a way to effect proper communication. On the other hand, I'm a firm believer in language evolution, dawinism for grammar if you will. A language that doesn't adapt, will eventually become another latin. For a while, there were latinates who *insisted* and waged a purity of language campaign. Basically standardized spellings and words and constructs were held in higher regard than evolved sequences that more clearly articulated new ideas, situations more succinctly than the old "proper" way of doing things.

Usage, definition, all these rules are subject to change. Like nouns becoming verbs, split infinitives becoming acceptable, etc.

This sort of evolution occurs in isolated pockets, and the successful "memes" reproduce and spread to the rest of the language ("population"). The unsuccessful modifications die out, and the constant changes keep the language adaptive and alive.

Calvin

Like nouns becoming verbs...

Remember: Verbing weirds language.

Not any less strangely than being spammed and finding spam in your e-mail.

Calvin

I agree with you. There are evolutionary traits in language that will not and should not change. Good recent examples are the fact that split inifitives are no longer the bugbears that they once were. Nor are trailing prepositions, although I personally try to avoid prepositions with no objects wherever possible. And the subjunctive case is all but gone in English because it's simply no longer used. All of these are perfectly valid forms of linguistic evolution. But deliberately changing the pronunciation of a word (or deliberately changing anything, except introducing a new word), IMHO, is no more valid than Free Speling.

When i learned the english language in school here in Germany, i was told to pronounce "often" without the "t".
I think, it's "Oxford English", what they teach in Germany. In my case, it was about 15 years ago...
Learning a foreign language without a native speaker as a teacher should have the "official language form" as the result. ;-)

cheers,

Learning a foreign language without a native speaker as a teacher should have the "official language form" as the result. ;-)

There's of'en some truth in this....I've met a few Danes who spoke perfect English with an upper-middle class London accent. (ie, not snobby, but very well spoken). One of them was an au-pair on her first trip to England, and no-one could tell that she wasn't English until told. She knew and could pronounce (perfectly) the Really Long and Obscure Words(tm) that usually catch out foreigners who've lived in England for 2 or 3 years. My respect for Danish education was heightened to say the least.

I don't think that the German or French education systems place quite so much emphasis on English. Both of their native languages are spoken outside of their borders, but the Danes appreciate the fact that their language is virtually dead outside of Denmark, and have dealt with that situation practically.

I always find it amusing that there seems to be more non-native English speakers in Europe with an American accent than with a British accent. It's not surprising when you think about it, but there is definitely an irony there.

As an American, I always find it odd when I hear someone with a combination accent, like a German who speaks with a British accent on top of his German accent. It makes sense, really, but it always takes a minute for my brain to wrap around it.

One of the main problems with English (and I speak only from my own experience and from hearsay) is that schools simply do not teach it. The last time I was taught any sort of English grammar was in, I think, 4th grade (about 10 years old), and, even then, only incidentally. Most of it was in 2nd grade (8 yo, obviously) This is far too early to comprehend grammar. After that, it was all ``literature'' and ``creative writing''. Not that there's anything wrong with that, but there needs to be followup grammar once you've done a good amount of reading and writing and can now comprehend what a subjunctive case is, or what the difference between a direct object and a predicate nominiative is, and so on. I get the impression that other languages are taught to their native speakers much better. In fact, most of the grammar I know now comes from taking German classes in high school, which spurred me to learn more about my own language. (Comparative grammar is very interesting, BTW, for geeks like me.)

Because it has been this way for so long, most teachers are clueless (or at best - inconsistant). I've had teachers tell me this!

And that's somewhat based on the fact that we, as a society, don't respect the teaching profession enough to either pay teachers enough or hire people who are actually qualified. And it's gotten well into a domino effect now, where teachers didn't learn enough grammar (or whatever) to teach it well. Certainly primary school teachers are taught to be teachers, not necessarily to understand the subjects they are supposed to be teaching, and the fact that a majority of adults in the US seem not to even understand simple concepts like the difference between subjective and objective cases (in other words, when to use ``I'' and when to use ``me'') means that the same majority is also teaching our kids to not know the same things.

I'm not saying that everyone should know what a gerund is, but they should know that a word ending in `ing' is a verb modified to work as a noun, or at least the concept behind it. (In a comparative manner, all Perl programmers should know that $a{'index'} references an array indexed by arbitrary keys, but there's no reason that they should need to know that it's called a dictionary or hash or associative array or whatever it's called in Perl, unless they need to talk about the language itself.)

I'm not saying that everyone should know what a gerund is, but they should know that a word ending in `ing' is a verb modified to work as a noun, or at least the concept behind it.

Hear, hear. When I was at school, the only lessons in which any grammar was taught, were foreign-language lessons; the O-level French curriculum required grammatical knowledge long after the O-level English curriculum ceased to do so. For the GCSE examination which replaced O-level, the grammar component finally evaporated (at least under the exam board my school used). I remember, on the eve of the exams, our French teacher world-wearily asking how many of us in the top French set understood the concepts of past versus present tense (not how to form them in French, or anything like that). About half the hands went up. Almost everyone got A's though.

(In a comparative manner, all Perl programmers should know that $a{'index'} references an array indexed by arbitrary keys, but there's no reason that they should need to know that it's called a dictionary or hash or associative array or whatever it's called in Perl, unless they need to talk about the language itself.)

Actually I disagree with that. An important part of being a programmer in any language, is discoursing about your code to other programmers. Using commonly-understood names is thus important. It's been said to me that computer science is just about giving important-sounding names to the completely obvious -- well, yes it is; that's why it's important.

Only in such dens of pedantry as software development teams is much time spent discoursing about the structure of human language.

Peter

I suppose I should have been clearer in my statement about ``unless they need to talk about the language itself''. Of course, all people that work in a group of programmers need to talk about the language itself all the time. But if one was working alone, there would be no need for there to even be a term to describe it, as long as you know what it does. Sorry for the lack of clarity.

Edit: I've always been fascinated by the British schooling system of O-levels, A-levels, etc. This is probably based on the fact that I don't really know what they are. Please break my fascination and explain this to me.

High school english teachers are the worst! There was on high school english teacher in particular, in an attempt to prove something in a distopian novel (1984? brave new world? don't remember) indicated that the method the thought police would operate would be by forcibly eliminating functional/dangerous parts of language itself. Lacking the nouns and constructs, the mind would therefore not be able to think or concieve those same concepts. Duh.

My arguments that if words could not be wrapped around a concept, then a new one will arise. She said my argument was invalid because new words are never invented.

My other argument that people can construct complex grammatically correct sentences without knowing the *names* of those same grammatic rules just fine didn't fly. She insisted the name of something and the concept of something is one and the same. Argh. I think I got a horrible grade too.

Calvin

Agreed. It's terrible when teachers, schools, and textbooks spout false information.

Examples from my own personal experience:

- A grade-school teacher tried to argue with me that "Squirrel" was one syllable. I explained that not only was it two syllables, but the double-R is another grammatical rule indicating the location of the split between the two syllables. After I opened the dictionary and pointed it out to her, she didn't talk to me much after that.

- A high-school textbook claiming that, when you look up in the sky, if a star is not twinkling, then it is a planet. If it is twinkling, it is a star. It claimed that only actual stars twinkled because they generated the light, and that the reflected light from the planets would not twinkle. Fortunately, it was not an astronomy textbook.

- Grade school teacher teaching communism as a positive cultural and political model to impressionable Californian kids. This was before the collapse, of course. I actually got the school to clamp down on him for that one. For that matter, any teacher of Government or Social Studies who chooses to espouse a particular political philosophy without presenting the other side.

- Don't let me even get started with creationism in the classroom. I'll close the thread and point everyone to www.talkorigins.org instead.

If it's not twinkling it's probably an airplane! LOL!

Yep I have plenty of stories like that. I had one junior high school teacher hold up the communist manifesto explaining it was a wonderful read... also before the fall.

My girlfriend is a elementary school teacher, and pronounced Diploticus incorrectly and was promptly corrected by the 2nd graders. (It's a dinosaur, and not pronounced the way it looks, and kids somehow know this.)

Calvin

I thought it was spelled Diplodocus...

I'm not a speller. But you're right. Brownie points to the person who correctly pronounces it without asking for help from some kid.

Calvin

Hey, I loved dinosaurs as a kid. I pronounced it right from day one. Now pronounce Compsognathus.

I've always been fascinated by the British schooling system of O-levels, A-levels, etc. This is probably based on the fact that I don't really know what they are. Please break my fascination and explain this to me.

OK. The minimum school-leaving age in the UK is 16. The system used to be that at age 16 there were two ranges of exams available: O-levels (meant to be more "academic" and aimed at those planning to continue with education), and CSEs (meant to be less challenging but more "vocational" and aimed at those entering the workforce at 16). The brightest pupils would take up to eight or ten O-levels; a few would leave without so much as a single CSE. The lowest grade awardable for an O-level exam, just above fail, entitled you to a CSE in that subject instead. (Could you be awarded an O-level for a really stunning performance on a CSE exam? I can't remember, but probably not.)

This system was then done away with, starting with exams sat in summer 1988, in favour of a single set of exams called GCSE. A GCSE offered a wide range of grades, the top ones of which were deemed equivalent to O-level grades, and the lower ones to CSE grades. This was meant to simplify the whole system, although in practice exam boards tended to set a "basic level" and a "higher level" paper in each subject, which closely resembled the previous year's CSE and O-level respectively. Born in 1972 and sixteen in 1988, I was part of the first year of GCSEs.

There was a lot of fuss at the time about declining standards, and looking at the O-level and GCSE syllabuses for (say) mathematics did show a lot of material missing from GCSE. But it was (allegedly) replaced by greater practicality and applicability of the material that remained, which if true is, I guess, no bad thing.

Now, for those who didn't leave school at 16, the next two years were taken up by A-levels, exams usually sat at 18. Pupils were expected to specialise at this point, sitting usually between three and five A-levels. (Or their equivalent; there are things called AS-levels which count as half an A-level each and can be used to broaden the range of subjects studied.) The lowest A-level grade, just above fail, entitled you to an O-level in that subject. The A-level system remained the same even when O-level changed to GCSE.

Entrance to university is based on A-level grades: an offer of a university place would be conditional on achieving (say) three C grades, or two A's and a B, or whatever.

All this, by the way, is the English (and Welsh and maybe NI) schooling system. The Scottish system is different again.

Peter

Grade school teacher teaching communism as a positive cultural and political model to impressionable Californian kids. This was before the collapse, of course. I actually got the school to clamp down on him for that one. For that matter, any teacher of Government or Social Studies who chooses to espouse a particular political philosophy without presenting the other side.

I've got to ask, in the light of that last sentence, whether would you have felt it as important to "clamp down on" a teacher who chose to espouse capitalism as a positive cultural and political model to impressionable kids without presenting the other side...

Peter

Yes. Personal political preferences should be left out of the classroom, and only facts/history should be presented.

Yes. Personal political preferences should be left out of the classroom, and only facts/history should be presented.

I totally agree. Both capitalism and communism in their theoretical forms have great things going for them, but in practice both have some really bad points. I think that kids need to understand the principles and practicalities of both, and there is no better teacher than history.

Personal politics should not enter the equation. Like religion, a teacher should encourage kids to investigate, explore and understand, and even to take a stance, without ever telling them which to chose.

Okay, so lemme see if I got this straight. At 16, you could choose to leave school, and if you did so, then you could take O-levels or CSEs (or, after 1988, GCSEs) or neither. If you decided to stay in school, then you did so for two more years, and then you took A-level exams, and they functioned as college entrance exams. Is that right? The only place where I suspect I'm wrong is that the people that stayed in school from 16 to 18 took the O-levels as well.

And all of these exams are separate for each subject, right?

Just to compare, in the US, we have grades 1 though 12, usually divided up where 1 through 5 are ``elementary school'', 6 though 8 are ``middle school'' (formerly ``junior high school'', and 9 through 12 are ``high school''. Each year, you get a single grade, for lower grades, or a grade for each course, usually 6 or 7 courses per year, in higher grades. In order to graduate to the next grade, you must score well enough on the current year's grade. If you don't, you get ``held back'' and have to repeat the grade. Once you progress through all 12 years, you get a high school diploma. This is when you're 17 or 18. There is no final exam to get this, other than the final exams you'd take pretty much every year for every class. You can drop out of school when you're 16 here, as well, but you get nothing. You can later get a GED, which is a high school equivalency diploma, by taking a test or series of tests (I'm not really sure. As far as I know, I've never known anyone with a GED.). Oh, and there are CATs (California Achievement Tests) taken every few years or so throughout grades 1 to 12. These are standardized tests that, I think, have no bearing on your grades, but end up being used by the government to determine how schools are funded.

There are two standardized college entrance exams, the SAT and the ACT. I've got no information on the ACT; supposedly, it's more common on the west coast. The SAT consists of, IIRC, 5 exams -- 2 ``verbal'', judging language comprehension, etc., 2 ``math'', judging math skills (I think through basic algebra), and one other, either math or verbal, that's usually a test for the next year's exam, and doesn't count towards your score, but you don't know which one it is. These are all taken during one morning for 3 hours or so. The scores on these tests (you get one math score and one verbal score -- the individual tests are not counted individually -- each up to 800) are large deciding factors on college applications. You can take the tests as many times as you want, I think (there might be some limit, but you can definitely take them two or three times), but they cost some amount of money to take ($25 or so?). There are also AP (advanced placement) exams for individual subjects that don't really have any meaning on their own, but some colleges will let you place out of early courses if you score well on them. These exams are not given at the same time at the SAT (usually), but usually if you take multiple ones, they will all be on the same day.

The fact that you lumped Canada together with Boston in terms of pronunciation is almost enough reason to discount everything else you've written, no matter how articulate.

If you want pronunciation with flare you should be thinking Boston and New York. There is no "aboot" in "Canada." You might be thinking of a few fishing towns in the Newfoundland perhaps. Then of course you may very well have been corrupted by South Park...

If there was ever a more non-standardised language than English, I've not seen it. I'm still amazed that so many people can pick the language up at a later age (my parents for example). I started thinking about it the other night and was fairly amazed that I managed to pick it up and still hold on to Portuguese (I moved here just before the age of 4, not knowing a single word of English, but fluent beyond my age in Portuguese).

Should I bring up the point about the "t" being dropped in "often" - it does go against one of the points you made in your speech from the ass-podium.

Bruno

Proud not to know a preposition from a supposition from a contradiction.

I wasn't saying that Boston's and Canada's accents are similar, just that they're different from a flat midwestern accent or a southeastern US accent, largely in vowel pronunciation. (I don't think that there's a good way to say one is the standard that others are variants of, because that would have to be British English, and that's just not a good standard to base off of for North America.) I've never been to Toronto, but I have been in Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and PEI, and they definitely do talk like that there. Or at least the rural folks do. I suppose I should have said ``southeastern Canada''. No offense intended. (That Jamie Sale figure skater girl has an accent to me, as does Wayne Gretzky. Maybe they don't to you because of what you're used to? Just a guess.)

(In reality, the very first time I was up there, after I crossed the border from Maine, I almost immediately got lost, and stopped at a gas station. I had assumed that you were right in that there really wasn't that thick an accent. But when I told this guy that I was lost, the first thing that come out of his mouth was ``Well, weere ya goin' to, eh?'' I swear to God. It took a lot of effort not to laugh in his face, not because it was that inherently funny, but because it caught me totally off guard.)

New York could have easily been included in that list (or Chicago or Minnesota), except there are so many different accents in NYC. But that's kinda my point. These are just accents. Even if you have a thick accent, if you pronounce a word incorrectly, you're pronouncing it incorrectly. For example, you can pronounce ``forget about it'' with a thick Brooklyn accent and still be pronouncing it properly. But saying ``fuggeddaboudit'', with or without such an accent is wrong. (I'm inclined to say that Brooklyintes are saying the first, really, but you get my point.)

(And I assume you meant ``pronunciation with flair''. )

Which point does it go against? I don't think it does, but I could be totally wrong. (And, come on, ``ass-podium''? What kind of half-assed attempt was that? You could have at least called me a ``know-it-all bastard''. At least that would have been true. )

Also, pride over ignorance does not seem to be a good thing to me. I don't think that anyone should ever be proud about not knowing something. It's just that there's not necessarily any shame in not knowing certain things.

You said you were speaking out of your ass in that message, so I said you were speaking from the "ass-podium"

I agree that Sale has a bit of an accent. Gretzky does a bit as well - I think mostly from his time in the US though. People around here, for the most part, sound just like the people you watch on TV in network programming. That's just "normal" to me. Different areas will have their own little "isms" of course, but in Toronto there's nothing as distinct as Boston or New York. Not even close.

Eastern Canada can get pretty wild with the accents. At some points you might swear you'd crossed the Atlantic.

And no, I meant "flare" - a big red flaming one. Hey, cut me some slack, I was trying to get out of the office. Do you want that dictionary in the mail or dontcha?

Bruno

Hey, everybody, I've had a sudden change of heart and I've decided that pronouncing the `t' in ``often'' is just fine ... at least for the purposes of this conversation.

Not quite. Here's the complete educational timeline:

Infants school: 4 - 6 (5 - 6 in some cases)
Junior school: 7 - 10
Senior school: 11 - 15
College or 6th Form: 16 - 17
University: 18+

Everyone has to take at least some GCSEs (the modern version of O Levels and CSEs), over a period of two years at the end of senior school. At the end of that time (when most students have just turned 16) you can leave school altogether if you want.

If you want to continue your education you can leave school and go to college (NOT the american meaning of college) for two years to take A Levels or a vocational equivalent. Alternatively you can stay in school for two more years to take your A Levels, which is known as 6th Form for historic reasons. Over the last year or so most A Levels have been replaced with AS Levels, which are courses with about half the content of A's (so you do twice as many of them). That is in line with current thinking that 16 is too young an age to specialise.

After that, you can go to university if you think you can handle the beer.

Rob

After that, you can go to university if you think you can handle the beer.

Teehehehehehe..

Actually I've always heard that universities in most countries outside the U.S. are basically a joke... Is this true? Everyone I know who's studied abroad, including in England, has said that the difficulty level in Universities around the world is no comparison to that of any half-decent American university. My friend who studied at Leeds, for instance, spent far more time in pubs than he did doing any sort of work for class. Another friend who studied at Nanzan in Japan said that he could have gone there when he was 12 years old and still passed all of his classes. Any particular reason why secondary education is so much easier abroad?

The converse is that primary education (up through high school) in America is horrible, and in general, anyone who's completed our equivalent of high school (by age 18) knows more on average than an American of the same age. This makes for a pretty big shock for anyone who expects to skate through higher education. And it also makes the first couple years of college for any foreigner much easier since they've had most of the material at an earlier age.

Maybe your students find your universities (I've never heard anyone from the US use the term University before, it's uplifting) a bit more challenging because they were ill-prepared in grade-school (as you mentioned).

I've never heard that US Universities were any more difficult or challenging than those in Canada and Europe. Expensive, yes. Sometimes very difficult to get into, yes.

Bruno