Why Do Experts Always Defend Language Mistakes
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 18 พ.ค. 2024
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So often linguists seem to be defending language errors simply because they're all 'woke'. In this video we look at prescriptivism and descriptivism, standards, language 'rules', arbitrariness and the way emotions can control our thinking about language.
0:00 Quiz and introduction
1:50 Broad perspective & Ground News
3:30 Ferdinand de Saussure & arbitrariness
4:51 Standardness
6:13 Prescriptive & descriptive
6:44 Unconscious complexity
8:50 The value of standards
9:40 Language is rule-governed
11:10 Precedents
12:11 Covert and driving
13:16 Mistaken reanalysis
14:20 Emotion
16:17 Evidence against them
18:04 The power of association
22:56 Lingerie
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You're suggesting that writing "it's" instead of "its" is perfectly fine because you're using the possessive "apostrophe s" on a... possessive. But that possessive happens to be a pronoun. Writing "linguistic form has a logic on it's own" is like writing "I have a logic on I's own".
@@gabor6259 You need to take like 20 steps back and re-assess what you're even trying to do.
You are a descriptivist 'expert' though. So, by definition, you are a little woke and will defend almost anything.
Talk about the Frankfurt school and Franz Boas corruption of the soft 'sciences'
Your globalist anti tradtional 'snobbyness' shines through you, it's so palpable. You don't have to be a wokist and educated. Be a realist.
The British drive on the left; the Americans drive on the right; being a Canadian, I compromise and drive in the middle.
And being from Saskatchewan when it is usually winter except for that brief period when it isn’t, we just follow the car in front. We get somewhere in the end.
@@karenm2669in Nunavut there isn’t a car in front to follow… or a road, usually.
Literally started dreaming of a city-state that functions with only one-way roads. Could it be done?
As is the natural order
Aussies drive below
The safest side of the road to drive on is the one that other drivers expect you to be driving on
I assume the experiment is we randomly cause someone's car to drive either on the right or left. A demon forces us to make this choice, left side or right? If we are utilitarian, right is correct. But, say your mother may be driving in traffic in London, pick left, in case her car is picked (but you are a bad human for doing so, endangering the majority).
@alexmac2551 this is the only correct answer
I guess I am dumb but for some reason I thought he was talking about different lanes on one side of the road 🤣
Like some people drive in the passing lane; others drive in the lane that has all the exits and entrances (on a highway).
(Some people drive like continuously 5 m.p.h. in the passing lane for eons. But others go 900 m.p.h (excessive IMO), which makes me scared to use it to pass someone going 3 m.p.h in the slow lane.)
Are you named after the 1994-1998 Nickelodeon TV series titled _The Secret World of Alex Mack_ ?
Yeah, I thought this was the point he was going to make!
It's not about correctness, but consistency!
Reminds me of this gem I saw online ages ago:
People who don't know anything about linguistics: The plural of memorandum is memoranda, why can't people get it right?
When you know a little about linguistics: The plural of memorandum should just be memorandums because that's how people naturally say it, memoranda is just prescriptivism.
When you know a lot about linguistics: Oh my god? So certain English words borrowed from Latin and Greek have competing plural forms, with one form using the English plural -s and the other using a borrowed Latin or Greek form? Do you realize how crazy that is - a language borrowing from *inflectional morphology* from another language? And here the two competing plural forms have become markers of education, expertise, and social class, isn't that incredible?
When you have a degree in lingustics and dgaf anymore: memorandibles
I love that comment so much
When you have a degree in linguistic and English isn't your first language: Memoranda-memoranda
pronounced mem-or-and-i-bless of course.
Oh, beautiful! 🤣
Octopus, octopopolis!
There is a legend when the first person to speak the first sentence in modern English, the person next to them corrected their grammar!
As the linguist said to the amateur language scold, “What makes you Saussure?”
I salute you Monssure
High intelligence pun
My magic all knowing flip flops that give me eternal power to be sure about everything
@@mitchelmodine9197
I found Swiss linguist Saussure with an internet search, but could not find any internet reference to "Monssure". Please explain, if you would be so kind.
😂
I thought the answer to the car question was going to be "whatever direction the other cars are going, because otherwise you'll crash!" - highlighting the importance of language just as a means of communication, so that you'd say whatever goes along with those that you talk to rather than whatever is "optimal", I guess
Well you're wrong 🤷♀️
I'm sorry that's rude. I'm looking to fight. It probably has to do with the fact I just dropped the apple I have been waiting all day to eat, bitten side down.
That's a lie I didn't do that I just like arguing online with people and lying.
@@al3xa723Arguing with no one I see. Maybe you should take a break from the internet
@@BryanLu0 No maybe YOU should take a break. I argue with plenty people.
I noticed a long time ago that if I'm driving in the slow lane, I get annoyed at someone who expects me to move over for them without checking, but if I'm on an onramp, I get annoyed if someone doesn't make space for me to get in. And the 2 different things can happen 2 minutes apart without the hypocrisy jumping out at me. It's astonishing how much we assume virtue on our own parts.
Hi, Cat! Fellow language nerd! (First time I've ever bumped into a friend in TH-cam comments.)
@@sharonminsuk Hi Sharon! First time for me, too. I was just thinking about you the other day - sorry I don't see you at bi-f anymore. Would love to catch up sometime if you have the time.
@@Cat_Woods Definitely! Been forever. (Been meaning to do that for awhile.) I just emailed you... assuming the old email I have for you is still current.
Tell me about it!
"Everyone driving faster than me is a maniac. Everyone driving slower than me is a moron."
I feel like we all do this sometimes, and it's a perfect example of unconscious bias in action.
The message of this video holds true about far more than linguistics.
Agreed. I like the way your mind works
My favorite Lingthusiasm quote: "Not judging your grammar, just analyzing it."
Every time I read that I always think they missed a trick there by not writing: "Not judging you're grammar; just analyzing it." Just to troll. 😉
@@zak3744 Not jujjing your spelling, just analyzing it.
@@gabor6259 not djadjing yor speling; djast änälaizing it.
@@Idkpleasejustletmechangeitnöt dxudxıq jór sbêlıq; dxust änëlujzıq ıt.
Edit: found one error - changed iq to ıq
@@brighthades5968 ok, þät djast das not iven häf äni internal konsistensi änimor.
Sims ai wos rong. Ai probäbli djast did not päi enuf ätenshon. It dos definitli häf internal konsistensi.
In brazilian Portuguese, the combo "why" + "because" has four different forms, "por que", "por quê", "porque" and "porquê", all of which have the exact same pronunciation, and the situations in which they are used differ quite subtly:
"Por que" means "why" and is non-terminal.
"Por quê" means "why" and is terminal (i.e. used at the end of a sentence).
"Porque" means "because".
"Porquê" means "reason" or "motive".
This is infamously an object of frustration for students and language teachers alike, and most people when writing informally (and sometimes formally) just can never get it right (for self-evident reasons).
Recently I discovered that european Portuguese only has two forms: "porque" and "porquê", with the former covering all first three use cases of brazilian Portuguese. (To be precise, "por que" does exist in european Portuguese, but it's more like "by which", so another beast entirely.) Since then, I have never even subconsciously tried to follow the brazilian way. Don't care. I'm right. The rules are wrong.
Yes!!! Some rules are just outdated. I know Portuguese but I'm French Canadian and we have a lot of written distinctions nobody cares about in speech
Every time I write I end up having to look those rules up because I can never remember which is which, it's just the worst
Exactly the same thing happens in Spanish (except the first one usually has an extra word in the middle so it's not common) and most people just write "porque" every time, to the point that Google autocorrects my "por qué"
Good for you! I'm not a Portuguese speaker but if I were I would do the same!
Well, there is a difference between porque and porquê. One is stressed and the other is not.
I always just say, "If you understood well enough to correct, you understood well enough to not need to correct." The rational response to a language mistake would be "I don't understand" or "I'm having trouble understanding you, did you mean [rephrase]?" The emotional response, of course, is to gatekeep language and negatively stereotype speakers/writers who are different from you. :) Only time I correct language is when it's clearly ESL, and then it's in the form of "I would say that as [rephrase], if you're looking for that kind of feedback."
Well, sort of. But, there's gatekeeping in any community or tribe. That gatekeeping is part of what gives a group an identity of its very own.
I find myself in the situation a lot of times where this is not the case. The way I interpret something another person wrote made them seem like an unreasonable person or otherwise rude, and I would prefer to give them the benefit of the doubt and they're a nice person that made a typo or grammatical error instead of giving them the benefit of the doubt and they meant what they said. I'd rather point out how they're being interpreted and see if that was their intention. Like, specific phrasings could make "peak" and "pique" mean opposite things; if spoken, you either get non-verbals to distinguish them or you'll end up choosing the one that doesn't make you feel bad, and you might not get that chance if you see written out that somebody has reached their capacity to be interested in what you have to say.
@@creativecravingWhat?.. You can have identity without gatekeeping other people
Yeah English has rapidly lost variation, mostly only retained in differing vowels, so I don't get why minor variation that has no impact on intelligibility gets people so emotional. Some people are so keen to be in the position of the criticiser that they even mistakenly claim a spelling is wrong when it is standard spelling in another country. And they're not expressing a preference or being tongue-in-cheek about it, they genuinely haven't registered that different widely accepted spellings can exist. You have to wonder how inflexible they are in their thinking and education in other areas.
I don't like this response, because what happens when someone actually doesn't understand? This happened to me directly: I was reading an article and there was a line that, read literally, meant the opposite of what it was supposed to mean. However, I didn't know that when I was reading it, and I was very confused because it seemed to go against the message of the article. After finishing the article I scrolled down to the comments and saw someone make the correction on the line that confused me, to which someone else gave the "You understood it so it was fine" response. But I only ended up understanding it because someone made the correction. Did it not need to be corrected?
A major humbling moment for me was when I found out that shortening "the car needs to be washed" to "the car needs washed" was a feature of my local dialect despite the fact that I had always assumed I spoke the most objectively correct and popular form of American English. From there, I have slowly been learning to appreciate language from a descriptivist perspective rather than a prescriptive one, and it's made it a lot easier for me to appreciate the idiosyncrasies of this language :)
This is my most current bugbear.
How about using "the car needs washing"
I come to this channel to learn about driving, sir, not to have my biases and arrogance thrown in my face
Such a good comment. Respect! 😂
😂😂😂👍
the subject is about language mistakes and you came to learn about......driving?
@@rayoscrost6062 I'm not sure the subject is mistakes.
Only the perception of mistakes.
@@stephenlee5929 it's about mistakes, as i said. perception of mistakes also involves mistakes therefore making it about mistakes.
we can't even set folk in the pillory anymore for not knowing their latin declensions... because of woke
ROMANE ITE DOMUM
The person called "Romanes" he go the house?!
Romanes eunt domus!
@@mattchtx Conjugate the verb!
Nah that's just a practical thing, each person you teach Latin grammar requires a Roman palace to practice on. That's prohibitively expensive.
My journey from being a total grammarnazi to finding mistakes not only fascinating but also reflective of our own language's contradictions and shortcomings has been incredibly enriching and powerful for many other aspects in my life. A language is certainly a whole worldview!
This video reminded me of a piece of wisdom from my first year Communications professor. He was teaching a course to improve the oral and written communication skills of specifically Computer Science/Programming students. As a final piece of advice leading up to the last week before the course's main project was due, he asked us: "Are you aiming to be accurate, or are you aiming to be understood?"
Being a young, naive student in a very technical and jargon filled field, I was completely floored by the question. I had never even considered it, but it immediately made so much sense to me. It immediately re-contextualised every single flame war and petty argument I had seen through a decade of having grown up with social media in my adolescence. Being accurate and being understood are often correlated, but there are so many times where they can be mutually exclusive. Driving on the left side of the road might be scientifically better, but if you tried to do that in a right-sided country you'll most definitely cause an accident. You are technically correct to say "cah-vert", but if you actually did that most people will look at you like they've just seen an alien.
I currently work in a position where I'm a "middle-man" between engineers and business. If the engineers spoke accurately to business, they'd never be understood. However as someone who is trained in a field the engineers are, they are able to speak accurately to me with mutual understanding. In order to then relay this to business I sometimes would have to introduce "inaccuracies" and intentionally use the "wrong" language - but to the people in business, this "wrong" language is the "correct" one, because that's the one they understand.
I wish I could teach this lesson to every single "educated" person who is so certain of being better than others. It's ok to be "wrong", as long as communication is successful at the end, right?
the people in business should actually get off their ass and do their part to actually understand what the engineers are saying
@@rhael42 I agree, but thats just how the world spins. People are going to have their own version of a language and there'll be misunderstandings. We gotta do what we can to make sure were understood.
I agree with the argument that communication, and more specifically understanding, is the point. That's where I veer to the side a bit.
Yes, many mistakes, especially common ones that are part of a local dialect, still allow communication and understanding to occur. This is especially true in the spoken language, when you often have other clues to help sort meaning. It is less true in written language - which is partly why emoticons are so often useful.
Further, written language is far more frequently used to communicate with people who aren't local. Many people around the globe speak English, but across a wide variety of nations, cultures, dialects, and so on. Using a standardised form, and doing so according to certain norms, allows for better communication and understanding. Especially when trying for nuance, the transmission of complex ideas, precision of meaning, etc.
I hate having to go over and over a written communication, in part or in whole, because their use of English is so inexact, so jumbled and full of 'not really errors' that their meaning is unclear. Worse still is a written communication that seems clear in its meaning but which contains 'not really errors' that in fact alter its meaning so that the writer means one thing, but the reader understands something different.
If I've paid money for a book (or other written communication) that has such traps and pitfalls on almost every page, I not only resent it, it is so painful that I may not finish it - and I'm unlikely to buy more of their works. Writers who wish to make a living from it should surely try to avoid that happening.
Informal and/or casual written texts fall somewhere in the middle.
For the record, I don't perceive my version of English to be superior, nor myself to be superior to others by virtue of a higher level of formal education (if I even have that) or any other skill, bit of knowledge, or trait. I just value clarity, precision, and comprehensibility.
The problem is that, like you said, you have introduced inaccuracies by making sacrifices in the way you speak. These inaccuracies could then lead to misunderstandings.
The reason we have developed complex language is for the purpose of accurately conveying complex ideas without having to compromise on the message. This is why it's important for people to be educated and sufficiently literate.
It's true that you shouldn't be overly obtuse and purposely use complex language when you know that more understandable language will still get the job done. But similarly we should also not be so accepting of illiteracy that we then end up promoting the destruction of our language and our ability to express complex ideas to one another.
It's good to correct people and teach them proper terminology and grammar in the long term for the sake of preserving the usefulness of our language. But in the short term you need to make some sacrifices to be understood in certain contexts.
@@NihongoWakannai I certainly wouldn't disagree with that!
I said what I did, but my team also makes a conscious effort to attempt to train business on what the correct definitions and terms are for the project. It's an excruciatingly slow process that they still get wrong all the time, but it gets better everyday because like you said - if we allowed these inaccuracies to continue happening forever it could easily bite us back one day.
Fabulous video - thank you! We have a fascinating thing happening here in South East Wales where the largely English speaking population use "non-standard" Welsh pronunciations for local place names. This is an area that lost its Welsh quite rapidly during the industrial revolution and also happens to be one of the more working class, low income parts of the country.
Growing up, we frequently got called being "lazy" or accused of "bastardising" the Welsh language. This still happens now. I carried this judgement most of my life and am ashamed to say that, once I became more fluent in Welsh, I was part of the movement that looked down and corrected people on how they said places like "Pencoed" or "Treoes".
I was well into my 30s before I learned that these "mispronunciations" are actually the ghosts of the local Welsh dialect - y Wenhwyseg / Gwentian - that thrived here before the 1800s. This was well before either "standard" Welsh or English graced these lands.
Ironically, the English-speaking native residents are retaining the original Welsh pronunciations, not the other way around.
Gosh, I love language ❤️
Welsh is particularly tricky, given it nearly died! Whilst it is pretty essential for bringing the language back, the standardisation has sadly killed all those dialects that existed before.
Love that, just goes to show one should never assume that the taught way is the 'right way'.
That was, in fact, only to be expected..After the initial adaption to the phonetic repretoire and phonotaxis of the borrowing country - which, admittedly, can be quite thorough - the pronunciation of loan words often changes less in the "borrowing" language than in the "donor" language.
same thing with African American English!!
Let me guess it's the Welsh language converts who get really really upset about it?
It’s incredible how much this overlaps with my work in educating viewers on recipes
Hey, fancy seeing you here. You and Dr. Geoff are both pretty outstanding in your niches imo.
The ultimate goal of language is to communicate effectively. The ultimate goal of cooking is to eat something appetizing and nourishing.
I still buy Rao’s sauce.
wait, what? hello shaq. I request a video on indian curry luv u
It's incredible how much this overlaps with my work on educating people about subscriber farming! ✌️😆
As someone cross-dominant, I object to the referenced source’s conflation of hand dominance with eye dominance
Yes! I found their reasoning to be very confusing. As a right handed left-eye- dominant person, I have to wonder just how often are those things in agreement?
My eyes and hands don't correlate either, I don't think there is any evidence that they would.
At one stage of my life, as a new secondary school teacher, a head of department showed me round my new school. The library had a long wall of bookshelves, floor to ceiling. He gestured and said, "Isn't that terrible?" I looked but couldn't see it so he pointed out a small handwritten notice which said, "Biographies are in alphabetic order of the person written about." "Preposition at the end of a sentence!" he said. He was nightmarishly rigid in many other ways too😞
"is a grammatically sound phenomenon in West Germanic languages, but not in Latin."
This is the sort of pedantry up with which I (and Churchill) will not put.
Since I became a language nerd, this is the scariest thing that I've learned. Mistakes and changes are baked into the language and often become the new norm when enough people start making them.
As long as the other person understands you with no problem, your language is correct, no matter what the dictionary says.
Amen!
That isn't entirely true. An English sentence such as "me store hungry go" is not correct in any kind of English yet you still understand it. "Me film goed" is something you would understand but it is not correct, however, if Native English speakers began speaking English this way then it would become correct.
@@thinking-ape6483Usually when the mistakes happen, they're made by many people, so it's very understandable to them, and slightly less understandable to people not making the mistakes.
I don't think people would be saying "me store hungry go" because of how hard it is to parse, but I could see them possibly doing that for "me hungry go store"(stereotypical caveman speak). The latter is easy to say for those making the mistake, and easy to understand for those not.
Likewise, "me go film" or "me goed film" is much easier to understand than "me film goed". Though there would probably be confusion over whether you're watching a movie or filming a movie.
what makes you call it scary. If this wasn't the case, then we wouldn't have all the dialects and even languages we have.
“The new norm” can be strange. Just in my own lifetime (~60yrs), I’ve noticed the pronunciation of the word “Monticello” change from the ‘c’ having an ‘s’ sound, to a ‘ch’ sound and now more recently, the favored pronunciation seems to have gone back to the ‘s’. The new-old form.
(an especially strange example, being a proper noun but..🤷♂)
* reads the word 'lingerie' *
My mouth: lonzheray
My brain: * whispers * linger-eee
It's like my mouth agrees with the standard pronunciation, but my brain just can't accept it.
The first time I say the brand "Titleist" I was thinking, "Tit lice? What the hell?"
My brain does that with a lot of words so I can spell them the standard way. Wed-nez-day. Miss-aisle. S-chew-ll. Sky-ence, but also, con-science.
I pronounce lingerie un-der-wear because it avoids the two vital challenges of figuring out how to pronounce it and having to say a French word.
Nanny Ogg used "lingerry" that fits my home accent so well that it's my brains default and I now just avoid saying "lingerie" out loud.
@@yurisei6732 It doesn't actually mean "underwear" though. Edwardian lingerie dresses were outerwear for summer, garden parties and other outdoor events.
When I nearly corrected someone pronouncing "either" in one of its two ways, I realized that my behaviour wasn't at all about being correct, but just adhering to my own 'house style' as it were.
I've heard it either way.
I have the other issue: I don't know how to pronounce it! XD SO I am always second guessing myself, is it ee-ther, or aye-ther?
Lol where I'm from both fly, there's a saying? expression? "either, either" which I find really neat. Anyone correcting either would just be looked at as a bit of a lune cause both are fine lol.
Wa-a-ay back in 1958 this young seven-year-old lad changed schools in Staffordshire, England. The headmaster gave my class a talk one day and mentioned the county. He said, 'Notice I say "Stafford-shy-er", because I don't like the lazy way of saying "Stafford-shee-er".' While I'd sometimes wondered myself about the discrepancy between the spelling and the (usual) pronunciation, I didn't know then it's a survival from before the Great Vowel Shift; but that's another story. A little experimentation in front of a mirror confirmed my suspicion that the 'lazy' way exercised more muscles than the phonetic way.
I believe it was at this point I began to realise that grown-ups are not early as clever as they like to think: some sixty-six years on, I can say my experience bears this out! (If I'd had my wits about me I'd have asked him about Worcestershire.)
I find they're not too clever _lately_ either. ;)
@@KindredBrujah can confirm. Im one of them 😂
Or the surname "Featherstone-Haugh", commonly pronounced 'fanshaw'...
I have a hand-written recipe where the person wrote 'add a dash of whats-this-here sauce'
The first thing I noticed about the traffic footage was that they put a two-way bicycle lane in the median of a very busy arterial road, without any physical barrier between the cyclists and the cars. That is just terrible road design...
Integrating bike lanes into preexisting motor vehicle roadways is so disgustingly halfassed.
This is such a woke opinion, did you not take into consideration the possibility that killing cyclists is intentional?
@@yurisei6732 If it worked, we'd have a perfect world
Well, it keeps them away from the pedestrians
@@CoryPchajek Jesus there's no satisfying you guys. They added the bicycle lanes without spending many more millions, and shutting down the road for a significant amount of time, at least they added them. I don't even see how this is much more dangerous than riding a bicycle on the side of the road, maybe a bit.
As a right-driving, left-handed contrarian, your answer made me happy.
right hand drive, left handed here too! what a vindication after all those years of being discriminated for being left handed! :)
As a semi-ambidextrous who can't drive, I'm glad I can always blame it on the side of the road I'm driving on
Being a right-driving, left-handed writer, right-handed in all else, left eye dominant kinda person, I drive sideways leading overtly with my left side
ditto
I'm one of the lucky ones, I have two hands and two eyes.
As a Brazilian ESL teacher I must say: I love your videos! They are so enlightening, Geoff, so well-produced and thought-provoking. Thank you for sharing so much on TH-cam.
growing up as a "smart kid" i was always very quick to look at others in disgust when they made spelling, grammar, and pronunciation mistakes and feel so much holier than thou because i knew my there/their/they're. i still have some knee jerk reactions and personal language nit picks, but ive come to realize it really, really doesnt matter. i dont even care to properly capitalize and punctuate my writing most of the time (as shown) because it really, really doesnt matter! the only thing looking down on others for perceived mistakes does is enrage yourself and distance yourself from others. great video, incredibly well put, and put a lot of things in perspective for me.
I was honestly expecting the "Which side is it safer to drive on?" to be a "The side your region drives on" sort of trick question -- Like, here in the US driving on the left is certainly more dangerous, because it means diving into oncoming traffic.
And I would imagine in the UK driving on the right is similarly unwise.
Yeah, there was an ambassadors wife who made that mistake sadly.
@@Elesario Intelligence officer, ironically.
The airbase, RAF Croughton, is in a country area - it's much more unlikely to happen in town with all the extra cues.
"The greatest wisdom becomes pure folly in the opposite environment" - W. Ross Ashby
I learned more about my own language when taking German in school than I did about German itself, I think.
Same here, except with French instead of German. Learning another language really seems to offer opportunities to notice things you take for granted about the language(s) you know.
I worked for many years as a languages teacher in a high school and I can assure you that when members of the English department wanted to know anything about English grammar they used to head to our department for help.
I learned more about English grammar (beyond the basics like parts of speech) from Spanish than I ever did from English.
Same here. They never taught us English because they assumed we could speak it already, but French and German lessons introduced all sorts of grammatical concepts that were a revelation.
Studying German taught me that English modals are a mess, and that a preposition is a perfectly respectable thing to end a sentence with.
it doesn't matter how much you explain this, people will never understand. I believe the only people who actually watched this video are the people who already agree with you
I used to be a "grammar snob" and now I understand how silly that was. I don't know when exactly I changed, but one day I must have changed my mind. Or more likely, had my mind changed by someone. I don't think it's quite that hopeless!
@@br3669 Maybe! Sorry I sounded hopeless there, I just meant that a lot of people wake up to this realization pretty early, and I think those people often go on to study something involving linguistics including something like programming. There is a Malcolm Gladwell book where he states that people either are or are not programmers, and the whole test that determines this is whether they understand that variables change. People who see language as everlasting or set in stone have a certain kind of stupidity that is not easily overcome.
I wasn't necessarily talking about Grammar Nazis but I actually consider myself to be one, because I find certain things very annoying. Just last night I heard someone say "shined" instead of shone and it drove me mad because they are words that are being lost, very beautiful words, like slept, dreamt, learnt, sought etc.
I know language can change I just want American English to revive some of these beautiful lost words
Sadly that may be true
Ovet the years I've come to love and cherish these little differences and changes in the languages we use. Except for "would of". For some reason that gives me irrational conniptions.
Quite right too.
For some reason "would of" and possessive "it's" bother me a lot more than any unusual pronunciation does (assuming the accent is comprehensible). Maybe because spoken language is more innate so I can automatically adjust for variations while written language is taught so I expect everyone to conform to the rules I learned.
Would"ve
@@christopherellis2663i can't tell if this is a joke or if you need to watch the video again
The comparison to covert seemed odd to me. By the sound of it covert's pronunciation changed through a "wrong" re-analysis of it being c + overt. But "would of" would be a re-analysis of how to write the pronunciation. So one was a change in pronunciation, but the spelling remained, whereas the other is a change in spelling, but the same pronunciation.
It doesn't feel right to me to point at these two and say it's the same, even if they are both the results of a different re-analysis.
@@giddycadetguy makes a video and is automatically irrefutable
@@knowledgeispower9736 i think you're more saying nuh uh than actually refuting him
It's fun to see how people don't even describe academic writing the same way. In undergrad, I was told by my chemistry professor to write only in 3rd person passive. Yet when I actually began reading papers, first person becomes much more common. Heck even the 1975 Nobel prize-winning paper by Kohler and Milstein uses first person.
Eventually I think many of us learn that the only rules that really matter are those found in the style guide of whatever organization is giving you the money to pay your bills.
First person and third person are fine. But when you really want to confuse people for a laugh you write in second person.
It’s not that confusing if you write it correctly.
“To replicate the experiment, you add 15ml of ammonium acetate to 170ml of supercooled sulfur hexafluoride. You then slowly heat the mixture to 18C. Then you…”
@@DeltaEntropy Then you observed that the resulting substance exploded and spread yellowish brown stains over your labcoat that you simply could not clean out.
when one of my professors was like "actually I encourage you to use first person pronouns because you're the one doing the research" my brain absolutely could not comprehend (communication/media studies)
The only saying I refuse to accept is "I could care less." You just told me you care some amount greater than zero, which us the opposite of your intention.
There's some evidence that the original phrase was even more sarcastic:
"I could care less, but I'd really have to try."
It was then shortened to "I could care less", then the original was lost, and finally people began to correct the shortened form in a way that it could makes sense by itself.
But the evidence is scant. I think it's a great story, but we may never know the truth. What we do know is that both forms have existed for a very long time.
There's a similar question about being "Head over heels". Was the original "Heels over head" (which would make more sense), and then someone reversed it to make it sound more "fresh", and then that version quickly overtook the original?
Thank you for your illuminating presentations. Many years ago I was the convenor and chair of Australia’s SCOSE, the standing committee on spoken english, a creature of the Australian Broadcasting Commission. I now recognise, with some hilarity and also a touch of regret, how much time we wasted!
"Don't worry, my love! I'm just doing some vital research for my next video!"
*screen absolutely plastered with lingerie models*
🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣
I had to minimise my screen full of lingerie models to come and watch this video.
Yes, it shouldn't surprise us that a major human identifier is deeply associated with prejudice. The way we speak is fundamental to who we are, and there's no more fertile ground than that to grow distaste.
We have a very keen ability to hear differences in speech. That ability is how we learned to speak in the first place, how we picked up on all the nuances of speech we learned growing up, and is, in a way, used against us when people speak differently to us. If you're an american and someone says aluminium, it jumps out at you instantly.
We're definitely good at noticing differences in speech and they can definitely tell us something about which social groups someone might be a member of. But I'd wager to say that most language-related wars are actually fought over spelling issues, which are entirely learnt. Both spelling variation and actual language differences are subjects about which we have a ton of normative ideas. So it is not per se our ability to notice differences that leads to prejudice, but rather that we're trained to adhere to language norms to the point that it stans out like a soar thumb when someone deviates from these norms. I'm not saying we shouldn't acquire such norms, but we fo sho aint learnin a lotta nuance and appreciation for deviating forms alongside this. The prejudice is not a direct consequence of noticing differences, it is a consequence of people feeling superior about their own variety, because it aligns better with their own language norms.
Also, most official standard forms of languages are politically motivated in one way or another, from creating a unified culture across an empire, to identifying class or caste interlopers for punishment.
@@Vinemaple case in point: official russian spellings of several countries differ between academic ones, which were used before 2014, and new putinist ones, even their dictator switched, they do it deliberately, and for some whatever reason West complies and now russian language Wikipedia lists Belarus as byelorussia, says "on Ukraine" instead of "in", and any attempts to change back to proper grammar get you instantly banned. They only make exceptions for direct pre-2014 quotes, but it's insane how much they bend over for a criminal regime. Language is very political, always has been.
I took some Linguistics-related classes in college when I was 18 and they blew my mind forever.
I've enjoyed this channel for a while, partly because of the interesting linguistic issues brought up, but there's a bigger reason why this is one of my "top 10" channels: it helps me to learn about learning, to think about thinking, to speak about speaking.
It's hard to examine our many unexamined assumptions, in the same way that it's hard to smell the air or taste our own tongue. However, certain educators (like Dr. Lindsey) seem to have the knack for uncovering these assumptions, and even helping us understand why a field of study might change over time.
These are general skills, and can potentially teach us how to do this in our own fields, and help bridge the gaps that seem so large in our small world. Thanks again, Dr. Lindsey!
bless your recognition of AAVE. here's a couple of my favorite "language mistakes":
>I watched an anime (dubbed) in middle school and a character pronounced "lingerie" as "laundry." being a child with no familiarity with the word "lingerie" anyway, I was very confused as to why anyone would be interested in taking photos of a woman with dirty clothes.
>duplicated words like "chai tea" (EDIT: I FOUND THE TERM FOR THIS it's "pleonasmic translation," AKA a "redundant phrase" AKA a "bilingual tautological expression")
last is not a "mistake" so to speak, but on the topic of stereotypes: my dad is British but I have a valley (USA) accent, and the reactions to me saying very british turns of phrase in a valley accent are never not funny.
The video isn't about that. 😂
I mean, the last one is not really a duplicate. Tea is the word for tea in English. Chai is the word for tea in other languages. In English, chai tea refers to a particular sort of tea.
@@andyarken7906 Even better than that, nearly all countries who say some variety of 'tea' first received tea by sea, whereas nearly all countries who say some variety of 'chai' first received chai by land.
Entirely just down to who it came from and how the word proliferated. I love that.
Ebonics, or AAVE, has been well-documented as being 17th Century Rural Wessex dialect, or Redneck/White Trash as it is also known here. Naturally enough, slaves picked up their English pronunciation from the English speakers that talked to them, the overseers and workers whose jobs they eventually took over.
@@Nakia11798 you are the most confusing person ive seen in the comments of this video
Fantastic! I've been beating this drum ever since I started my degree and first understood the principle of linguistic descriptivism. I fear, though, that you'll need a follow up to explain exactly how most nonstandard usage doesn't result in miscommunication, and how most mistake that do hinder communication are nothing to do with non-standard usage.
Hear, hear! I second this request for a video topic!
Most might not, but one non standard usage mentioned in the video, double negatives, definitely can, especially in writing. Look at "I don't see nothing" for example - standard English would understand this as meaning someone does see (probably someone who sees very little, with emphasis put on the 'nothing'), whereas if you thought double negatives didn't cancel out, it would mean someone who was completely blind.
@@Revacholiere //Look at "I don't see nothing" for example - standard English would understand this as meaning someone does see//
I find it very hard to imagine a fellow native English-speaker who would read this and, even without context, actually think this was an attempt to say that the person could see something.
Were I to read this, I would immediately assume it was simply an example of a dialect in which the "double negative 'rule'" isn't of much concern. I don't think it would be reasonable to assume otherwise given how rarely such double negatives intend to express a positive.
@@DrunkenHotei double negatives should only matter in mathematics. Usually, using double negatives in language is to add emphasis.
@@jokeassasin7733 Exactly. The fact that so many people think that double negatives are usually interpreted as a positive illustrates well how prescriptivist most people's approach to their own language is, despite them not following their own logic in how they actually interact with such language.
I recently learned that “draw” and “drawer” are homophones in England English. When I expressed shock, my english friend said “it’s our language not yours”.
That’s interesting. I’m not a native speaker, I’ve learnt and always pronounced it as a two syllable word. Oxford dictionary lists one or two syllable pronunciations depending on the meaning.
BrE /drɔː(r)/ NAmE /drɔːr/
a part of a piece of furniture such as a desk, used for keeping things in. It is like a box in shape and has a handle on the front for pulling it out.
BrE /ˈdrɔːə(r)/ NAmE /ˈdrɔːər/
a person who produces a drawing or design
BrE /ˈdrɔːə(r)/ NAmE /ˈdrɔːər/
(formal) a person who writes a cheque (= a printed form that you can write on and sign as a way of paying for something instead of using money)
Cambridge dictionary on the other hand doesn’t make this distinction, it gives only monosyllabic pronunciation for all the meanings, and it gives the two syllabic one only as a US variant.
I noticed an author using "would of" and "should of" in a novel, and at first I thought it was an editing mistake. But no, she did it only for particular characters as a way of expressing their youth, informality, and lack of education. I found that really cool! It's not a distinction that exists in spoken English, but when deliberately chosen in writing, it clearly conveys something about the speaker. Really taking advantage of those unconscious associations we have.
My instantaneous reaction was the safest side of the road to drive on is of course the one that everyone else is driving on. Which is maybe evading the point, but at the same time still ends up being a really good analogy for usage of language.
Same here, and remember that sometimes the left side is the right side.
Your video on ask/aks made me change how I think about people who use the latter pronunciation. I used to think they were uneducated or ignorant but not any more. Thank you.
Like, how?
I usually hear of overt/covert actions and covert surveillance. It's usage is within a security/intelligence context.
The older pronunciation would confuse me with archaic verb to covet and the usage described seems uncommonly rare. The people I hear say hidden or discreet or in a hidey-hole.
I just assume they're mega fans of Terry Pratchett 😉
That sounds great, but be honest. Everyone I've met that pronounced it that way was uneducated and ignorant
Well ask/axe seems similar to people saying Asterix instead of asterisk, some of them for fun, some by habit perhaps mishearing something they haven't read, others are optimising out careful annunciation speaking rapidly.
It's clearly featured in regional dialects so those presuming ignorance are snitching on themselves.
I used to be a pedant. The reason for this was very simple:
I felt that being one made me smart and I was an arrogant d***.
As I discover more of the world I've learned two things:
1. language's only important function is to convey information. If you succeed in conveying your intended meaning, regardless of whether the sentence you used "technically" means something else, you have successfully used language.
2. Regardless of how smart you may or may not be, a d*** is still a d*** regardless of how "justified" you may feel in being one. Be nice to people. You'll be happier for it. Seeing everyone as stupid may make you feel superior, but that outlook does not bring joy - only misery. The "curse of intelligence" is usually a lie. It's just the curse of arrogance 'excused' by real, or in some cases merely perceived, intelligence.
1. I'd rather be arrogant than ignorant
2. Having standards doesn't make you a dick.
@@irliamthischool
1. You can be neither arrogant nor ignorant.
2. having pointless standards and insulting people who don't meet them does.
My comment wasn't even directed at all pedants, it was an explanation of my own experience. If you felt called out by that you probably need to reflect on why.
@@alansmithee419 not all standards are pointless though. I will judge someone that writes 'would of' instead of 'would have' as it evinces illiteracy.
@@irliamthischool Well, that's on you.
@@irliamthischool It evinces nonchalance with matters that deserve its application.
You understand exactly what it means so the standard is pointless.
The only standard I hold on to in language is the correct (and without too great ambiguity) communication of meaning.
"Would of" vs "would have", while I would never write the former myself, is not a useful distinction to make.
I can understand wishing to avoid it, but to insult people for a simple mishearing (or as it has now likely become - learning the standard method of speaking in the place they were raised) is arbitrary and elitist.
I'm a native Finnish-speaker, and honestly it's funny realizing how much which things that some English-speakers do but not everyone does I've picked up come from the fact that Finnish is my first language and I'm trying to make speaking the foreign language easier for myself.
Like, when I speak English out loud I tend to drop the r sound whenever I can, simply because I never quite got the hang of the English r, so if I keep the sound in it tends to come through as the sort of sharper Finnish r, and while i have no illusions that I'd ever sound like a native English-speaker, I do find myself trying to obscure some of the more blatant parts of my foreign accent where I can.
And whether I'm writing or speaking, I often find myself using "y'all" in certain places, just because I'm used to having separate singular and plural second person pronouns, so I like to be able to have that clarity of whether I'm addressing one person or multiple people, and using "y'all" seems like the better option compared to learning and starting to use "thou" out of spite and returning "you" into a plural...
Yous? I like using yous. Like use but it's plural you.
Yous.
I like yous.
@@galdoug8918 yeah yous seems nice too, I guess it's just that a lot of my informal English I've picked up from online circles where I happened to run into y'all first and more frequently than yous
it's very interesting coming from a region where plural second person pronouns are taken for granted how much revulsion some native english speakers express towards the options that have been introduced to english. more utility is good as far as im corncerned. come to think of it, i guess it's another expression of the same phenomenon on display when people here in sweden get super upset about singular nongendered third person pronouns.
But actually, "thou" is the familiar form of the singular pronoun (compare French _tu_ and German _du_ ), while "you" is the formal version of the singular pronoun as well as the plural form of both (French _vous_ and German _Sie_ ).
@@ib9rt yes i am aware, and my first language also uses the second person plural as formal/polite form. And when I'm chatting with online friends, or really even strangers online, I definitely would not address them formally, I don't do it when talking in my first language either
My first thought about the left/right driving thing was "There's probably no unbiased data."
As a writer and someone who has discussions online, I care about pronunciation mainly in how it affects people's writing. People tend to write the way they speak, and this can get really confusing if they're also bad at grammar and spelling. Then they'll say "you know what I meant" when you point out the confusion, ignoring the fact that even if people figured out what they meant _this time,_ it probably took extra time and effort, and might not happen next time.
When they claim, "You know what I meant," just inform them that you, in fact do not. You only know what they said (or wrote). While there is some responsibility on the listen/reader to make a good faith effort to understand what someone said/wrote, they are ALSO under a good faith effort to be understood. If they can't do that, you shouldn't be forced to try and untangle what they meant from what they said.
@@SlimThrull That reminded me of the related thing that people do online: say something, then claim it's not what they meant and blame the reader for responding based on what they actually _said_ and not what they claim they meant. For some reason this always seems to happen after someone proves what they said wrong.
@@Bacteriophagebs Yes. This is where I first developed this idea. I've found it works very well offline, too.
Though, I don't understand why people online get upset. I can literally scroll up and quote what they said. Not paraphrase, but quote. C'mon, we both know what you wrote. It's in black and white. Don't lie by telling me something else when I can literally quote you.
Some people are dumb.
There’s data for soccer penalty shootouts, and data that fighter pilots use to pick a direction to beat a surface-to-air missile, based on people’s slight preference to reflexively jump to one side. This informs head-on collisions but is a wash in the statistics of safety.
@@SlimThrullsometimes people don't proofread or they write too quickly or they say something without meaning to imply what they did
I remember being taken aback the first time I heard a midwesterner say that something "needs painted" instead of "needs *to be* painted." You can't just leave out words like that! Those words serve a function! And that function is... Uh... Oh. Maybe they've got the right idea 🤔
Wouldn't you just say needs painting?
@@nicholasvinen I wouldn't.
@nicholasvinen that would be correct, but English speakers love to be incorrect.
@@Nakia11798In my experience those making these kinds of mistakes are also idiots. It's practically a strereotype that racist Englanders are also semi-illiterate and don't know their own language but demand it of foreigners.
@@Nakia11798 Didn't watch the video yet, I take it?
I find that taking up a completely new language quickly "cures" one's pedantry, as they realise the variety linguistics has to offer, but also, as you've very well pointed out, the subjectivity of it all. A good example would be gendered languages. One noun might be neutral in one language while it might be of the female gender in another, while both languages merely refer to an inanimate object.
But, even more importantly, the "offences" people might commit in the languages you are most versed in become a topic of fascination, as they might tell you things about their own language.
"would of" made me think of another thing I've been noticing which is "what does that mean?" getting pronounced very much like "what is that mean?"
I haven't seen that in writing yet but maybe it'll happen one day.
i use "what's that mean?" in writing, so there's confirmation that it eggsists at least
I remember my phonology teacher using the term "natural attitude" to describe attitudes to pronunciation - that our own accent seems natural, even god-given. Other varieties are unnatural - either foreign, a sign of bad education, or upper-class affectation.
My only quibble with this analysis is it is too limited - it can apply equally well to most aspects of language and culture.
When I run into people decrying the "woke" and "cancel culture", I ask them to check out the origins of the expression "sent to Coventry" and the term "boycott".
basically your argument is: it's okay when you do it
@@ventriloquistmagician4735 No. The point is that social rejection as a means of expressing political views is nothing new to humanity. It goes way back.
Doctor, great video and gives much to ponder about for those of us in the language education field. Whilst teaching I avoid saying something is wrong; rather that it's different. I like to empower students by telling them it's a wide world and ultimately they can choose what works best for them. It's also a humbling experience when I learn that a grammar rule, spelling of a word, or the pronunciation of a word has more than one acceptable way.
Off topic, I've lived and spent significant time driving in countries on the left and right side of the road. As much as I try, I cannot escape the muscle memory I attained when first learning to drive. Ultimately, I will mistakenly turn on the windshield wipers when I intended to turn on the blinker, especially in situations where there is a lot of traffic, etc. That's just something that adds to the adventure of life!
Good timing. I mentioned prescriptivism recently to a friend and had to explain the idea. Language has been an interest of mine for so long that I forgot what concepts were well-known by others outside the interest.
Hey Dr. Lindsey,
Fantastic explanation! As a fellow math educator, I'd like to clarify a point in your video that seems ambiguous to me.
Contrary to popular belief, the butterfly effect has nothing to do with cause and effect, besides the name. The flap of a butterfly's wings doesn't ultimately cause a tornado.
The real issue of the problem has to do with unpredictability. Normally, in a physical system, we can neglect tiny variations to perform reasonable calculations and get a very good estimation of the answer. However, unfortunately, we can't do that to forecast the weather a week in advance. Our estimations can be so inaccurate that we might predict a sunny day, but in reality, we end up with a tornado.
Even though the weather's behavior follows a deterministic model, our current computational power falls short. It's impossible to predict the weather after roughly 3 days. That's the real butterfly effect. The flap of a butterfly's wings can cause an enormous discrepancy between theoretical results and reality.
Keep those insightful videos coming!
We could predict the weather for years in advance, just give me precise measurements and analog computers...
That's the point he is making, though. Linguistic change are ultimately deterministic because everything on a macroscopic scale is deterministic. But it's impossible to predict and *practically* random and arbitrary (because it's chaotic); thus trying to assign cause is a fool's errand
"Contrary to popular belief, the butterfly effect has nothing to do with cause and effect, besides the name. The flap of a butterfly's wings doesn't ultimately cause a tornado."
I think that's either incorrect or, at least, misleading. You can (in some scenario) say that the flap of the butterfly's wings *does* cause a tornado in the following sense. Take two initial conditions which differ in whether the butterfly flaps its wings at a certain moment or not. Now these systems will eventually diverge noticeably in their evolution. The can (after enough time) differ in whether a tornado forms at a particular place and time or not.
What do you think about Geoff's implication that arithmetical mistakes aren't regular in the same way as pronunciation ones? I would have thought there would be quite a few common patterns in how people miscalculate.
Let's get this out of the way: the safest way to drive is how you were taught, lest you get in a head-on collision by inevitably drifting back to habit. My father taught English for over 30 years in a high school where most students did not speak what we'd call the "standard" dialect of American English, and he was fond of pointing out that the purpose of language is to communicate. So long as you can understand each other, it's a job well done.
Many language mistakes do decrease the ability of people to understand each other. Besides, the ability to understand the literal words that each person is saying is not THE ONLY function of language. Language has many functions, and they include things like making ingroup/outgroup distinctions, communicating status and place in society, show respect or disrespect, and on and on. There are many ways people can use language wrong and still be understood perfectly. The problem with both the dumb prescriptivists and the "woke" people is that they don't take all of this nuance into account and just want a simple rule that applies to all situations.
I was taught to drive on the left. The safest way to drive when I went to the Philippines was on the right, because otherwise I would have crashed into the cars and bikes that were driving on the right.
@davidonfim2381 if you're still understood and the syntax is consistent, how is it really a mistake? And how are those "mistakes" a bad thing? Enough "mistakes" and you have a new dialect, which isn't a bad thing
It's also strange how you chose to say prescriptive vs woke instead of prescriptive vs descriptive, because that is the real distinction. Seems like you're trying to imply something negative of descriptive language and being "woke" at the same time. Not to mention, woke is a relatively new word, but you seem fine with using it here.
Pronouncing "February" as "Feb-yoo-ary" communicates. Saying "imply" to mean "draw a conclusion" does not merely fail to communicate; it MIScommunicates.
@@msjkramey Let me give you an example. Let's say you email your doctor about the medical tests you just had, and their email very consistently (they weren't typos or one-time mistakes) uses "would of" instead of "would have", "their" instead of "there" or "they're", as well as a number of other "mistakes". None of those mistakes affects your ability to understand the content of the email one bit, and you don't feel any confusion whatsoever about what they were trying to tell you.
Do you continue going to that doctor? If that happened to me, I'd run like hell in the opposite direction. I'd ignore every single thing they said or did, and I'd get all the tests re-done and re-analyzed. There is no way in hell I'd trust my health to someone like that, and I'd wonder if they were real doctors or if they had just cheated their way through med school (and all other levels below that too)
This is just an extreme example, and I'm not picking on "uneducated" language. Try speaking like a harvard professor giving a lecture, but to a low-socioeconomic status community, and see how that goes. Even if they understand the content perfectly, you are still making a massive linguistic mistake. Using certain words or language in certain contexts is absolutely 100% wrong. There IS such a thing as language mistakes, and we are all strong "prescriptivists" if you take context into account. It's only if you ignore all nuance and all context that you can be at that "woke" end of the spectrum.
As for my choice of words- that was deliberate. I am not arguing against descriptivism, and I would consider myself a descriptivist. True descriptivism acknowledges the fact that there ARE right and wrong ways of using language in certain contexts. It acknowledges the fact that there IS such a thing as language mistakes that need to be avoided depending on the context, and that language absolutely does not exist JUST to communicate the denotation of words. It's only against the "woke" version of so-called "descriptivism" that I'm arguing against. It's that common framing that implies (whether by explicitly stating so, or through the omission of a discussion about the context) that anything people say or write is just as valid as anything else, and that there is no objective way of distinguishing between different ways of using language.
(it's also worth noting that I've avoided the most trivial examples of how using language can absolutely be wrong. 4 exumple eef eye speek laik dees, you can probably still understand me... but I'm pretty sure even the strongest "woke descriptivist" would say that that's not real English and that it's improper or wrong).
When you are involuntarily taught English in school, then harshly judged by your performance and then native speakers tell you what you "should of" done...
Thank you so much for making this video. Subbed for this - I work in the language services field and the frequency people don't understand that grammar isn't a set of rules for how to speak but rather a way of describing how people *do* speak is disheartening, and addressing the inherent bias of our brains wanting to think we're sensible and right all the time is much needed.
I feel a little weirdly unique now in that when I first encountered a linguist at a university I found myself pleading with him to explain why *my* accent is considered so strange to my fellow countryfolk who consistently wonder if I'm somehow foreign.
Where are you from?
@@ikbintom I'm Australian!
Now i am curious. Did he come up with a possible explanation?
@@a.h.9902 I honestly can't remember. If I answered it would probably just be a impression of what I'm pretty sure he said.
When I was a child (I'm 73) covert was indeed pronounced "cuvvert" when it meant secret or stealthy, but when it was a noun, describing a small wood usually, the T was silent.
i used to be a huuuuge stickler for “correct” grammar and punctuation, and i still have a few pet peeves regarding certain spellings. for example i’m a bit of a hater when it comes to the use of “would of/should of”, but i’ve come to realize that as long as it’s clear what is meant, then there’s no harm and no foul. letting go of little nitpicks like that makes it easier to just get on with your day and not argue about silly shit
Analysis over judgement is a mindset I wish more had as a literary critic myself. Thank you for this!
It's hard, especially when the two inevitably overlap. i mean like LOL you know my parents keep telling me that i will never get a job if i don't type right but im a leftie smh
As if it was possible to like you more! Great video. I always find the outrage at such common 'mistakes' so interesting because, even as someone very passionate about the English language and all of its technicalities, I can't imagine getting so worked up about the way someone else talks... then I remember that, as a child, I was always correcting people's English based on what school had taught me was correct. I hated the idea that I'd spent all of that time learning the 'right' way to talk while others just ignored the rules. I suppose some people don't grow out of that mindset and I can see where they're coming from. I do still feel a _little_ bit pleased when I find that the British version of a word is 'correct' though hahah.
Far more commonly, the core driver behind language policing is a feeling of discomfort or irritation at the incongruent sound. "I had to learn this so you should too" is more often the justification created later on for telling the person the "correct" way to speak. There's nothing you can do to get rid of the discomfort, it's a physical reaction, you usually just have to learn by experience that correcting people doesn't accomplish anything.
I'll never forgot how my piano teacher got mad at me for saying "yeah" insisting its not a real word and asking me to spell it then getting angrier when I did
@@tubthungusbychumbungus that's ridiculous hahah
I frequently drive on both sides (relax, in different countries), and I find a far more important safety consideration is knowing which side everyone else nearby is on.
I'm an ambidextrous driver - the only time I've got confused is in the USA because they mix British sensibilities (ie not Napoleonic) with RHT. And throw in insane laws favouring drivers over ever other road user.
And another thing (cont pg 69)
Dr Lindsey, I adore the way you drop shade in your videos. It's just the best. Including when it applies to me, those are the funniest 😂
Great video. As a child in Pennsylvania, I have a very clear memory of my English teacher saying "Never say ain't, ain't is always wrong!" Now I use it a lot!
When I was in an intermediate German class, we were learning a subjunctive that's mainly used in formal text and the teacher mentioned that it historically was also used in English in what we associate with old fashioned or pirate speak like "there be treasure". It was only when I was working through the exercises and thinking about what it would look like to use the infinitive that way in English that I realised it's still used all the time actually just nearly always in Black vernaculars.
People get tied up in racist knots about how people using a Black vernacular are too stupid to conjugate verbs properly when really it's a form of grammar that they just never learned. It's only registered as legitimate in archaic speech like "blessed be thy name".
Stuff like this is why history and more generally context as a whole is so important.
It's easy to make assumptions about the modern world, and people seem to do it particularly easily about black communities - oh they don't know how to speak properly, they're poorer on average because they deserve to be, or their communities have more crime because they're aggressive - when in reality it's all just missing context: they speak differently because of historical development of language in different areas, they're poorer because they were historically oppressed (and in some ways still are), and their communities "have more crime" *because they're poorer* and because police patrol them more frequently and with less lenience.
These "racist knots" as you call them are everywhere.
But on linguistics people just desperately need to realise that someone speaking slightly differently to you is not a personal attack on your intelligence. Theirs being a legitimate way to speak does not make yours illegitimate, nor does it invalidate your intelligence. Being a d*** about it however very much does.
This may be coincidence, as subjunctive forms are largely exactly the same as the infinitive form.
What I do find interesting on this topic is that past subjunctive is mostly the same as past tense, but not completely - but when I insisted to an Irish lady that it should be "if I were rich", she was completely unaware that this is a thing, and insisted on "if I was".
@@alansmithee419 what I find interesting about AAVE is that the special past forms ("I done finished" and others) are much more complex than it appears at first. There are more possibilities than in standard English, but there are clear rules when to use which one. It can't be a matter of being "uneducated" when they use a more complex system.
The subjunctive use of 'be' instead of 'is' would occur in sentences such as 'it is vital that he be on time'.
@@andyarken7906 This reminds me that in an English class for accountants as part of my master-level studies, a class everyone had to take in order to make sure people could write "proper" English, the instructor was unaware of the fact that contrary-to-fact conditionals should use the subjunctive, as you stated. I understand it's a totally arbitrary rule, but she "taught" us so many other completely arbitrary rules that we were supposed to follow, I was very surprised when she didn't realize that was such a rule.
People are always fast to correct me if i say "me and my brother went to the shop"
But when i correct them for sayin "the rules were explained to my brother and I"
They look at me sideways like i dont know whats what 😂
Classic example of "hypercorrection". Also things like "I don't know whom did it"
to things like that I always say "well, you knew exactly what I meant, so language successful"
I heard somewhere that the prevalence of "the wrong pronoun form" in such formations is evidence that the pronouns don't actually work the way we are taught that they work. If "me" is not always an object form but sometimes a subject form, and "I" is not always a subject form but sometimes an object form, and the switch is for different reasons, that could explain some of the oddities and how they've stuck around so long.
An intriguing idea.
@@Arkylie French recognizes "stressed" pronouns that work this way, and some of them sound like their accusative counterparts. It's bizarre that we don't use the same idea in describing English.
To....me
"A win for the team I happen to be on" is a great observation, haha.
I spent a fair while in linguistics, experienced plenty of unthinking anti-prescriptivism, and I have settled on the view that you can use all the slang, misspellings, historically inaccurate forms or Americanisms you want in daily life, as in fact I do. However, I also strongly believe that we should all at least *know* the prescribed forms, and that they should continue to be taught, and indeed prescribed (otherwise how would one justify their teaching to the students)? It's possible to be aware of the follies of strict prescriptivism while simultaneously wanting to preserve a certain tradition. One of the related points I always like to remind myself of is that in many cases, the very academics propagating the idea that it's OK to speak and write nonstandard English rarely have any trouble speaking and writing it themselves, which could be used to argue that they are perpetuating inequality, if one objected to such a thing.
We have to be speaking the same language
For me the most interesting thing is that even mistakes have rules. There are good reasons why people make mistakes and they follow a certain logic
So if someone wrote say "the dog is in it's kennel" (mistakingly using it's instead of its, as is quite common) what certain logic would that follow?
I don’t know the linguistics behind this, but I feel it’s enough to say that if so many people are writing it that way then it’s probably fine. Yes, etymologically speaking it doesn’t make any sense to write its as it’s, but it’s fine. The world won’t end. You know what they meant. There’s tons of now-standard grammar and spelling we use nowadays that used to be regarded as incorrect just like the its/it’s thing.
@@stuartbeacham Dr. Lindsey mentioned that exact example in the video you're commenting on. The logic is extending the rule for possessive nouns (which do use an apostrophe) to possessive pronouns. Compare "it's kennel" to "the dog's kennel".
@@JonathanSharman I get what you're saying but it's a bit dubious to say the least. 'Its' is the possessive form of 'it' in the same way that 'theirs' is the possessive form of 'their'; and you never see 'theirs' written with an apostrophe.
@@stuartbeacham I admit I don't see it as often, but you can readily find grammar guides that caution against "their's", which I think indicates that at least some people make that mistake. That said, I think the fact that the word "it's" actually exists (though with a different meaning) and *looks* like a possessive noun contributes to those being mixed up more often. In contrast, forming a possessive from "they" analogously to nouns would produce "they's", which I don't think any native speaker is likely to do. On the other hand, I seem to recall certain L2 English speakers for whom "he's" and "his" are homophones use the former when they meant the latter. That feels like a very similar kind of error to "its" -> "it's". Anecdotal, but I do think there is a logic to this kind of mistake, as the OP said.
My (American) reaction to your answer about driving on the left being safer was "Ah, we should do it that way, then, if that's true. Of course, changing it at this point would be too difficult an adjustment for most drivers." No annoyance. If the science really said it was safer, I'd simply lament that we were doing it wrong.
I'm pretty sure the science on that is flimsy AF. My guess would be that it makes no difference. If it really did we would all drive on the same side because it would be obvious how much safer it is.
honestly the "safest" side of the road to drive on is the one you have the most practice with, and if people still crash more often in the states vs europe then I'd call that a flaw with our road design (there's a lot) and with our education (also a lot)
I was slightly annoyed cause I expected there wasn't any real research in trivial stuff like this and if there were I would be outraged we don't even try and conform to the scientific consensus. 😂
I recall hearing an experiment of having Americans driving on the left and everything eent as usual. The thing about driving on the left being safer though just sounds like BS.
Changing it would be far less safe than any real or imagined benefits of driving on the opposite side. Not only would everyone have to learn to drive on the wrong side at once, it would take literally decades for all the cars to switch over. It's less safe driving in a car designed for the opposite side of the road it drives on.
What a fantastic essay on the topic! Your videos are always a delight!
There are other words like covert that are spelled with o but originally had a u vowel, like conduit, bombast and dromedary, because English was often influenced by French spelling conventions, and French often used o to spell its u sound. This applied to some native English words too, like love, come, some. These words never had an o vowel in English (as opposed to words like mother and brother, which did once have a long o which raised to long u and then shortened). Because words like conduit are more likely to be encountered first while reading rather than speech, their pronunciations have adjusted to their spelling, like covert (adj.), while common words like love, some and come are heard enough before being read that their pronunciations are not influenced by their spelling.
Whenever people try to argue in favor of a pronunciation based on spelling, I have to wonder how far they would apply that consistently.
Left or right safety, whichever side everyone else is using
I agree. If all the traffic is coming directly towards you, you are probably unsafe.
Pssh. Sheep.
It's a great analogy because that's also the answer to the first question. The "correct" pronunciation is the one everyone else is using so everyone can be understood.
What I love about the analogy is that it shows conflict when we don’t agree, and harmony when we pick a side. I don’t actually want this for cultural life, but it would apply to technical standards.
Let's make a compromise. Everyone drives in the center (or centre, if you prefer).
We've had the Lindsey-Roper cross over. And now you have opened the door for a Lindsey-Crawford cross over. And I am totally here for it. :)
How I reacted to your answer of left vs right? "That's bait." :)
What about...
... a Lindsey-Roper-Crawford crossover, the SuperWhoLock of TH-cam linguistics?
@@Leofwine I'm up for it... but it might be too much for the Internet to handle. ;)
I just recently discovered your channel and I just wanted to say that you are making great videos! Thanks!
I really love this video!! Juxtaposing linguists with physicists was really clever and it made something click in my head. Obviously we don't tell physicists: "we want the result to look like this, so make your equipment measure it a certain way" so why would we think that the approach to language should be any different?
The analogy to cars was also spot on: I myself felt a little disappointed when you showed the research as someone from a right-side driving country. Really made me think!!
Alright back to watching, I still have about 5 minutes of the video left!
The approach to language maintenance needs to be different to the approach used by phycisits because the latter are attempting to understand unchanging natural laws whereas language users need to ensure that their tool for communication does not become entirely blunt.
We do not simply describe how our homes deteriorate with items being left at where we last used them and dirt accumulating everywhere, do we?
Sometimes care is needed to maintain utility and enjoyment.
We kind of do do it that way in natural science, though. "You need do test it exactly like this so we can see if you get the same result I did." The difference there is that scientists are testing things to learn about them. Linguists are examining things to learn about them.
I was taught that language evolves over time, so I try not to police spelling and grammar. I’m certainly not an authority on the subject. My dad was terrible about policing grammar, and he sometimes got it wrong. If I can understand what you’re trying to say, that’s good enough for me. As always, I enjoyed the video. Thank you!
Not to mention, as a matter of etiquette, it’s probably best to ignore “mistakes” other people make.
A lot of English could be improved.
Personally, I'm a big fan of the far more phonetic spelling of English the Malay/Indonesians use.
Meet me at KL Sentral.
Ahhh. It just feels more correct.
@@myne00 There have been _many_ attempts at spelling reforms in English, but since pronunciation continues to change as Dr. Lindsey mentions about the word "covert," they always wind up becoming useless and even adding to the lack of consistency in the spelling patterns of English.
@@DrunkenHotei yeah, I know. But it's nice to dream. Don't you love that "mistake" of using "but" after a period? My English teacher would CRY - but it is convention now!
On the topic of spelling, I argue that if you say a word like "enough" with a Scottish accent, you can hear the deep throated "ogh" that justifies the spelling. I wonder if that's why it's like that.
Enough, rhyming with loch, not enuff rhyming with fluff.
@@myne00 Haha indeed! How wrong my primary school teachers were about so, so many things related to language...
And yeah, most spelling issues have some convoluted historical explanation that can sometimes be partially explained by looking at pronunciations in different dialects. Everything went so cattywampus after the great vowel shift though that I feel any attempt to rectify English spelling is doomed.
I once saw an old chain email that explained a way to make English spelling consistent, and it wound up making English basically look like German. You can read it yourself by googling _"An old chestnut. In its globalized incarnation below, via Steven Gearhart."_
dr lindsey, I love how much psychology is involved in your videos!
Covert and overt, although they came to English through different routes, are actually distantly related, from Indo-European *hwer (to shut, cover) through Latin (co)operio, (co)opertum (to cover; etymologically, put the cover on something) and aperio, apertum (to open; etymologically, take the cover off something) -- and then through French couvrir, couvert and ouvrir, ouvert (Latin intervocalic P regularly became B then V in French).
absolutely here for you roasting your own commenters, haha. some of the comments on the "aks" video were staggeringly offputting
also, fun story: i live in the US, but there's a single diverging diamond interchange (that i know of) in my city - a highway overpass where the lanes temporarily switch places, so we drive on the left for the length of the bridge. supposedly it's better by almost every measure, regardless of which side you normally drive on.
Now this made me think of discussions about the German language happening in Germany. Of course, people try to simplify the language when speaking, which enrages a certain group of "highly educated" people. They complain about how people forget how and when to use the Genitive and use Dative instead. Which I get, because the Genitive sounds better to me but I also understand why people rather use Dative. After "wegen" you are supposed to use the Genitive: "Wegen des Hauses" but it's far more easier to say "wegen dem Haus" and everyone understands what you are saying. Yes, the Genitve is slowly dying out but should be really try to stop that from happening if it's just the natural way that German develops?
Another example is the distinction between "Weil" and "denn". Both words mean something like "because" but the sentence structure following the words differs. You say "Ich habe Hunger, *denn ich habe nichts gegessen*" or "Ich habe Hunger, *weil ich nichts gegessen habe*" (both meaning "I'm hungry because I didn't eat anything"). After "denn" comes a main sentence structure, after "weil" comes a side sentence structure. But because the main sentence structure is more intuitive, people tend to say "Ich habe Hunger, *weil ich habe nichts gegessen+", which is wrong but also pretty understandable, why people do it.
In Italy there is a similar complaining about subjunctive being slowly replaced by the imperfect "Credevo che tu fossi arrabbiato" -> "Credevo che tu eri arrabbiato". It's so annoying. For everyday conversation imperfect works like a charm... Validating its usage in informal contexts doesn't mean subjunctive should be removed from school and in writing, or formal contexts.
The "natural way" is often the path to the least common denominator. Why should human kind allow the least able language users to drag down language for all of us?
@@coolcat23 I would like to know what you mean by "dragging down" a language because, even though I'm no expert, I would guess that it has happened before multiple times in the history of German, which lead to the language we now use and which we are afraid it will get dragged down, even though it might have already happened.
I get your point but I do wonder what the alternative is? Letting an elite of very able language users decide how other people should talk? I think, should language naturally develop because of these mistakes, it's because the majority of people makes them, and then, I don't think the natural change of a language is a disaster at all.
@@Leo-qw4gh I'm sure that in some of the historic changes to German, the language lost some of its richness/beauty. That does not mean that we should surrender to future onslaughts, does it? For sure, some change may be for the better and then could be adopted, but I do not think that dropping a case belongs to this class of improvements. I don't see the need to put a small elite into power, we just shouldn't normalise all mistakes people tend to make. FWIW, I think it is better to give people the opportunity to rise to a challenge (using a non-trivial language) then to give in into the laziness or inability of casual users. N.B., dialects and informal oral conversations have a role to play in making it easier for people to communicate. I'm not suggesting that these should be eradicated; I'm just arguing that official German should not be eroded from the bottom up.
@@esachanThe imperfective form is also a lot more natural for some speakers because it allows you to drop the "you" ("credevo che eri arrabbiato") by removing the ambiguity between different person forms (che io legga, che lui legga, che egli legga vs. leggevo, leggevi, leggeva) thus putting it in line with all the other verbs in the language :)
But driving on the right side of the road, my dominant eye better catches oncoming FOOT traffic, which may be more important as it is a higher fatality risk.
Yeah, I realize that the point of the driving question is to make you reflect... but the idea that the dominant eye is better used on the big, brightly-lit vehicles that tend to stay in their lane instead of on the smaller, darker things that tend to enter directly into your lane from the other side is... questionable.
the thing is dominant eye has nothing to do with dominant hand, the first thing you do in archery classes is to find your dominant eye
My thought on driving sidedness was: "Well... as a left-handed person, it's a great day to drive on the right." 🤣
This discussion of the descriptive view of language is compelling, but there are at least two contexts I can think of where a prescriptive view is necessary: as an individual, I feel I have to force a prescriptive view onto myself when either writing something in my native language, or when learning a language I do not speak. In both cases, the need to conform outweighs anything else, because it is hard enough just to be understood.
I'm not an expert, but I know enough to understand that language is very diverse, with many dialects, slang, jargon, individual styles, &c, and also languages are living and thus in a near constant state of change and development. Languages only become set in stone when they are dead languages. Standards are useful to aid communication in various circumstances, but living languages will always change "irregardless." 🙂
I'm not saying one way or the other which side of the road is best to drive on, but the logic of that study is flawed, as eye dominance doesn't necessarily match hand dominance. I'm right-handed but left eye dominant, and so are many others. And vice versa.
Thank you for setting the record straight.
One of the best adverts I have seen on a youtube video. Good job!
I have had a fascination with linguistics for many years now. I have always loved words, and English class was my only area of expertise when I was in school. I wish I could turn back the clock and get a degree in what I'm most passionate about now. Thank you, Dr. Lindsey, for being on TH-cam and teaching me what I should have studied in college.
So funny, thank you! Laughed out loud at the 'debate in the comments'.
As someone who failed learning driving, I don't think any driving is safe ;)
We even do triple negative like _Я не вижу никаких негативных последствий_ often too, and now I'm trying to add more negatives there just for fun.
12:35 - Dead wrong. The etymology of "overt" is French "oeuf vert", from the medieval poem "Oeufs verts et jambon", ("Green Eggs and Good Jam") which the poem's standard-issue medieval mythic hero named "GWDLGEAH" doesn't like. Or maybe it's the entire saga that we don't like. It was never included in the great compilation "Mots D'Heures: Gousses, Rames".
I've noticed that British people consistently use the "wrong" tense of verbs, specifically when the correct tense is continuous:
"I'm stood next to this tree" instead of "I'm standing next to this tree"
also when talking about the past:
"I was sat on the bus" instead of "I was sitting on the bus"
Does this phenomenon have a name? I've heard it with Australians too but associate it mostly with Brits
One of my lecturers challenged the teachers in a school she was working at to speak for a day without saying 'am/is/are/etc' after the teachers complained about Aboriginal students dropping those words out of laziness. If it were really laziness that made them drop those words, anyone should be able to do it without thinking!
For the aboriginal students, it is a matter of laziness. Not learning the language of those around you because it would be difficult is lazy.
@@NotRexButCaesar Scroll up to the video and reset it to 0:00, and press play again.
@@NotRexButCaesarYour comment doesn't refute the second sentence. If it is just laziness, why is it hard for native speakers to drop it?
@@NotRexButCaesar Those who speak English as their first language speak Aboriginal English as their first language, not Standard Australian English. Many of them speak Kriol, Yumplatok, etc as a first language (I don't remember the specific language ecology at that school, so speaking in general about rural Aboriginal kids).
The refusal of educators to acknowledge that Aboriginal students must be taught (Standard Australian) English before they can be taught *in* English is one of the single biggest causes of educational disparaties between Blak & white Australian kids.
Many studies have demonstrated the unsurprising fact that Aboriginal kids' learning outcomes are immensely improved when they are taught in their First Language first. You almost can't overstate how much of an improvement it makes.
In other words, you're just being racist.
@@NotRexButCaesar surely that means all the colonists/settlers were the lazy ones, because they didn't learn the language(s) of the Aboriginal population
I mostly watch your videos for the fantastically informative content, but a definite secondary benefit is the calm (no R!) and non-judgmental acceptance of language in the real world. It’s good to keep in mind that no matter how strict one tries to enforce rules, people will speak however people will speak.
There’s no point in feeling personally insulted over unpredictable inevitability.
But despite my best efforts, th fronting still drives me a tad bonkers!
I love this topic. It forces me to do some introspection and reset some opinions, making me wonder when I was arguing for something stupid recently without anything but emotion behind it
This is good explanation of the differences between how experts in any field and youtube commenters think.