Forum: Author Hangout

I was taught you use the words for all numbers under 100

Agree with the following exception. If the sentence starts with a number, it was to be spelled out. The difference maybe because of where EB and I were taught as I was taught in the US.

oncentrate on grammar and spelling and force the actual rules on all schools. This forces publishers of text books for school usage to use the rules or their books get banned from school usage.
Government agencies have to use correct grammar and spelling.
actual German orthography reform

The one that bothers me is the disappearance of -ly adverbs. My guess that was driven by advice from teachers who claim that -ly adverbs make the text "weak" and should be eliminated.

So it might be better to use the noun "giant" rather than the adjective/noun combo "tall man." The former's description is more impactful.

That would be dependent on how tall the man was supposed to be. Personally I would not describe anyone under 7 foot as giant.

A 5-yo boy might look up at a 6' man and call him a giant.

If he has a lot of 6' adults in his life, probably not.

"Giant" vs "tall man" has a more impactful noun.

It's more impactful because it implies a greater degree of tallness. Whether absolute or relative, giant implies something more extreme than just tall.

There will be vastly more cases where giant is simply not appropriate than where giant is an appropriate substitution for tall.

Try considering gigantic as an adjective vs giant as a noun rather than tall vs giant. Is there significant difference in impact between gigantic man and giant?

To make fiction literal is to make it dull.

As I said, it's about degree not metaphor vs literal.

Using an overly extreme metaphor is not an improvement.

Using an overly extreme metaphor is not an improvement.

Is metafive an improvement to metaphor? It is 25% more. (meta 5 compared to meta 4.}

The problem isn't finding a better verb to convey the thought. The problem is that people just substitute an adjective for the adverb. I see and hear it all the time.

teachers who claim that -ly adverbs make the text "weak"

They claim that weekly and weakly.

They claim that weekly and weakly

That reminds me of the three ages of Man: tri-weekly, try weekly, and try weakly.

My guess that was driven by advice from teachers who claim that -ly adverbs make the text "weak" and should be eliminated.

Have they ever explained how making it easier to understand, makes it weak?

As I understand the philosophy of that advice, the need for expansion may suggest there's possibly a better suited verb or phrase may exist. Or may not, but one is encouraged to rethink it and/or go for word hunt. Or something like that.

Also, it may be considered to be tellingly talking, instead of showingly writing, e.g. one might be rather supposed to convey the nuance in describing action rather than merely claiming it's there to taken on trust from the narrator.

Both of those interpretations may also invite unnecessary additional complexity if taken as gospel, i could imagine.

But what I know, I don't speak English.

is to try to find a more accurate noun or verb. The alternative for "unmarried man" is not "man" but "bachelor."

Hmm,

Noun
bachelor (plural bachelors)

1. A person, especially a man, who is socially regarded as able to marry, but has not yet.
2. The first or lowest academical degree conferred by universities and colleges; a bachelor's degree.
3. Someone who has achieved a bachelor's degree.
4. (Canada) A bachelor apartment.
5. (obsolete) An unmarried woman.
6. (obsolete) A knight who had no standard of his own, but fought under the standard of another in the field.
7. (obsolete) Among London tradesmen, a junior member not yet admitted to wear the livery.
8. A kind of bass, an edible freshwater fish (Pomoxis annularis) of the southern United States.

With this, "unmarried man" is probably more accurate. ;-)

HM.

An unmarried woman

"What is a female bachelor called?
Bachelorette (/ˌbætʃələˈrɛt/) is a term used in American English for a single, unmarried woman. The term is derived from the word bachelor, and is often used by journalists, editors of popular magazines, and some individuals. ... In older English, the female counterpart term to "bachelor" was "spinster".

However, "1 : a woman whose occupation is to spin. 2a archaic : an unmarried woman of gentle family. b : an unmarried woman and especially one past the common age for marrying. 3 : a woman who seems unlikely to marry."

In older English, the female counterpart term to "bachelor" was "spinster"

Hmm, 'spinster' is often used derogatorily, like 'old maid'.
As you cited 'bachelorette' is American English only,
however there is a – dated – general English term:

bacheloress (plural bacheloresses)

(dated) A female bachelor.

HM.

In other words, there really are no grammar police!

There are, but their authority is imaginary.

Not always.

Well, well, while it is true for English, French are not the only one concerned about purism of their languages and perceived dangers of the globalized world to endow institutions with purpose for conservation and police powers.

Latvian, being, not entirely jokingly, partially artificial language to begin with, do have an official Language Commission with legal and police powers that can issue fines for misuse of language (such as garbled transactions in product descriptions in a store, for example) and litigate over spelling of words -- including person names*.

Ours is populated by aging academics and mostly reactive, often trying to invent new words for already established loanwords in professional jargon and picking similar windmill fights, but not always futile. Analogous institution of Lithuanian language is more proactive and successful by analyzing trends and predicting needs.

* I think I have already mentioned that case when parents were sued over insisting their child name must be Otto and required to write it Oto in document on grounds that double tt isn't pronounced differently than single t. The case got public traction and significant part of general public seemed to disagree, but the Commission got their way. And yes, one of the pillars of purism is to defend the phonetic writing, thus transliteration of foreign words and names is legally required, including adding gendered endings if at all possible. If, for example, John and Joan Newyorker received Latvian passports, teir names would likely be spelled Džons Ņujokietis and Žanna Ņujokiete in them, and that spelling would be legally protected.

There was also dragged out public discussion should country name of Iceland be written with short or long i, so Islande or Īslande, and despite sizable resistance the long form won even if it wasn't in actual popular usage then, but they insisted that to be more correct transliteration of the original. It is now widely adopted in speech as a result.

One of latest controversies was about gender of the slightly irregular native lexicon word sāls = salt. The current ruling is that it isn't just a collision of male and female forms in nominative, but indeed the one and olny unique neuter gender word in the whole language. That makes some possible forms of the word formally ungrammatical.

Latvian, being, not entirely jokingly, partially artificial language to begin with, do have an official Language Commission with legal and police powers that can issue fines for misuse of language (such as garbled transactions in product descriptions in a store, for example) and litigate over spelling of words -- including person names*.

Count me skeptical that they are any more effective than the French at preventing unapproved evolutions of the language.

Not entirely, sure. It's not even completely the mission, at least not all of it. (And I'm not very knowledgeable how successful or not the French are by comparison.)

But they do have an impact, in some cases a measurable one (like the Islande/Īslande case). And given the pressure the language is under... That the new local Russian dialect (spoken at home by ~35% of population) now often use Latvian structures with Russian lexicon and has distinct pronunciation despite almost entirely existing in Moscow's information space with seemingly minimal exposure to the State Language (as almost anyone speaks Russian on stubborn enough demand) is a remarkable feat for a language spoken by barely two million people worldwide.

Latvian has quite long history of language changes by edict, and it works both ways -- sometimes the administrative changes stick.

One story is how palatized R (written with a comma underneath) was abolished by Soviet authorities together with the ch, with was a good idea in contrast (the H only occurs in loanwords anyway, the Middle Latvian dialect natively doesn't use the sound at all, and the ch was supposed to be hard while simple h could, in theory, be silent sometimes, but both were actually pronounced identically almost always).

Well, palatized R it is indeed an abomination nobody can possibly ever pronounce, and it was used in like, six or so word stems, and made no difference in all of those cases except dzert = to drink.

Thing is, one of few important spoken language features not preserved in writing in Latvian is differentiating between e and æ. Instead of using the later as it's own letter (or two, because of course we would need the long version too) there is a convoluted rule that postulate that all e should be pronounced æ unless a narrowing sound is encountered afterwards. Yes, it parses the word backwards. Palatized R was one of such narrowing sounds, a regular R isn't. Also, while that's not any official rule, there are also widening sounds that encourage use of æ unless explicitly negated, and one of those is U.

In result, dzert and most other forms, somewhat inexplicably even dzēru (= I drank) regains the implied palatized R and is spoken with narrow e, while dzeru (= I drink) is now spoken with æ more often than not. It's often presented as a joke, but there's an ongoing meanig split in: "Tee I dzeru, but vodka I dzæru! As such it bleeds back to infinite as dzært with, true, isn't even wrong if there's no palatized R, but some other forms would seem rather unwieldy at least for now, and the official line militantly defends the now seemingly wrong pronunciation. And, for example dzēri (= you drank) would remain narrow anyway, because of the i at the end.

Sure, English speakers wouldn't care (their language being a mess it is), but with the beauty of almost mathematical regularity Latvian grammar is, or supposed to be, that's a pain.

There are much more serious challenges, such as preserving the three intonation system... with in a way is one of those near-artifical aspects of the formalized Middle Latvian as none of the actual dialects had all three before that abstraction was introduced as official. It's also one of those few features of speech not preserved in writing, and is about how vowels are pronounced, making for example word zāles mean hols, weeds or medicine depending on how one manipulates breathing while singing out that long ā something like: (stretched) zAAAles = hols, (falling) zAales = weeds, (broken) za-Ales = medicine. While there's only few words with all three variations, every single vowel, even the short ones, have one of those three implied even when it doesn't change meaning; mistakes sound strange to a native anyway. (And yes, native Russian speakers are completely deaf to this.)

Latvian has quite long history of language changes by edict

pushing for changes is an entirely different thing from trying to prevent natural evolution of a language.

No, it's not pushing for changes, not quite. It's meant to be formalizing changes or rather organizing them, and doing it sooner than later is usually seen as a feature not a bug, because, yes, it offers opportunity to apply influence.

The example with the palatized R was of one gone wrong (and sometimes ascribed to malice), but even that looked quite right on paper: the letter was there, but almost nobody pronounced the sound anymore (try pronounce Y from York while pronouncing R), and removal made a mess with exactly one word stem. Unfortunately, that happened to be a very popular one having a verb (with all the hundreds of forms it entails) and countless derived nouns.

yes, it offers opportunity to apply influence.

Influence is not equal to control.

Their decisions are legally binding.

But just like about any other law, it's a fine line between arbitrary decision and popular support. If legislator fail the law is useless and unenforceable.

Maybe all languages have their weirdos. Italian does.

Sure there is. But they made -- or tried to -- already weird word weirder by edict for no particularly good reason. It used to be a member of small group of exceptions but consistent enough as one such. Seriously, I even have to go look it up to even know what in particular they accomplished...

And doing so indeed, I have to conclude that, that particular attempt apparently failed, despite me distinctly remembering all the noise, I can't even find solid references to all of it, and all trustworthy sources claim it's still officially male as was declared back in the sixties. The apparently current official advice is to use it in masculine form even in the one case (cooking salt) where traditionally the adjective was always used in female form.

And that's basically where the controversy is, that the cooking salt is feminine while chemical salt is masculine, even when we talk about the exact same substance, and people obsessed by terminology can't live with that.

Unless there's an adjective (with must agree in gender and count with its noun) making gender explicit, the only difference in singular is in dative: (m) sālim, (f) sālij all other forms collide, the plural differ broadly by gender, but there is ever only exactly one feminine salt, in one particular use case (in the kitchen or on the table), so feminine plural forms formally have no meaning... unless you go in flavored or fluoridated or whatever varieties, maybe.

Nobody ever fretted that uguns = fire is exactly the same way and is routinely used in both genders. There's no shortage of nouns where nominative is the same for both genders.

In the UK at the moment there's a controversial move to stop penalising bad spelling and grammar in exams unless they're specifically relevant (ie an English exam) because it discriminates against candidates who are not native English speakers.

Often it's the non-native English speakers students that have better spelling and grammar than the locally born as they would've had English as a Second Language (or similar) classes when they first started at school before going to regular English classes.

The whole point of the spoken & written word is to communicate. Doing so in a way that is clear & concise makes it possible to get your point/message/information across & understood as it was intended. Poor spelling and grammar can make anything from a bit difficult to totally impossible to understand what is being conveyed.

It doesn't matter what the subject is- if you can't make yourself understood, then it doesn't matter how brilliant you might be. Getting the spelling and grammar right is just as important as the facts in whatever subject it is that's being assessed.

This is true of every language*.
[...]
*The French government created an agency that nominally has such authority. However, even within France, the efforts of this agency to control the evolution of the French language has been an epic failure.

I don't think it's an epic failure, their problem is they tried to stop the tide, to force a "French" word for every new technology and created some awkward names. At least in school and in ads you'll hardly find the common English terms used. The fines for not using the proper French terms are high.

The German authorities go another way. They concentrate on grammar and spelling and force the actual rules on all schools. This forces publishers of text books for school usage to use the rules or their books get banned from school usage.
Government agencies have to use correct grammar and spelling.
actual German orthography reform

HM.