In which we yet again post yet another ten thousand plus interesting or amusing -or neither- tweets

For me the best way to learn grammar was to learn another language.

 

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LOL they think the dude on the right looks like JD Vance…not even close

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Pronunciation and homonyms are just f********ed.

 

Polynesian languages are brilliant that way - no verb conjugations at all (the only time a verb changes is if it is passive, but in Rapanui that doesn't even happen). Tense/aspect/mood is indicated by a separate word placed before the "verb". They also do not gender nouns or pronouns.

On the down side, they usually have 11 subject pronouns, instead of gendering nouns and pronouns you have to "status" possessives and categories of verb/noun/adjective are fluid, given there is no verb "to be" or "to have".

 

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Esperanto or get ********ed

 

And then there's the past tense in English, which makes absolutely no sense.

In my Advanced Linguistics class when I was a graduate student, the languages I most hated were Luiseno and Diegueno (American Indian languages from California). Those languages were a nightmare for me to figure out when they were included in assignments.

 

My problem growing up is that mom was still new at speaking English and dad was not educated (dropped out of high school to go to war in Korea). Thus, bad grammar seemed ok to me. That's why learning another language was helpful for me to finally understand English grammar.

 

Naw, if anything, it's the opposite. Ask anyone who is learning English why "rough" "cough" and "through" aren't pronounced the same way. Cuff? Roo? Rawf? And then there is the "Pacific Ocean," where the letter "C" appears 3 different times but is pronounced differently each time. Hamburgers are not made of ham, nor do eggplants have anything to do with eggs. Then you get the same words that mean different things, like being too close to close the door, or the farm that could produce lots of produce.

Anyway, if you're even at a high-beginner level of learning another language and you see a word you don't know, you could take a guess and you'd have a very good chance of getting it right.

But a lot of Asian languages do make it easier, since there are no tenses. "Today I go to the store, yesterday I go to the store and tomorrow I go to the store."

 

Fair points…I was speaking of speaking and hearing English. The reading and writing is tough because you’ve got German words and Latin words mashed up together. As noted, the spelling of words is super erratic. You just have to memorize it.

 

Leftist? huh?

 

It's amazing to see my 5-yr-old (she's pretty smart) intuit a word she hasn't encountered, and she comes up with some very straightforward guesses that I have a very hard time explaining why it is not quite right. I often default to "It doesn't make sense. You just have to memorize it."

 

Here's how bad my grammar is: I have no idea what statusing possessives even means.

 

Doug wins the internet today.

 

English is a tough, tough language to learn from a grammar perspective. It's filled with inconsistencies.


Even small things, such as words being both a verb and noun, while written in an identical fashion.

We're building a building.

 

Of course there's also "Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo", which is grammatically correct.

 

lol, yeah, it's not something Western cultures do.

Here are some examples. the first vowel in a possessive is either ā (long vowels are indicated by the macron) or o. For example:

my = tāku, toku
your (singular) = tāu, tou
his/her = tāna, tona

(These are pretty universal in East Polynesian languages - so if you know it for one, it works for the others, although sometimes with consistent consonant changes - for example, Hawaiian changes t to k and k to a glottal stop).

If you had studied a Romance language, you might think those differences are to distinguish gender, such as in French:

my = mon, ma
your (singular) = ton, ta
his/her = son, sa

But in Polynesian languages it has nothing to do with the gender of the object possessed, given nouns don't have genders like they do in French. Instead, it depends on your relationship to the object possessed: the "o-vowel possessive" indicates you are submissive to it, while the "ā-vowel possessive" indicates you are dominant to it. Thus, in Rapanui:

my child = tāku poki
my parent = toku matu'a

The trick is to understand, based on the Polynesian worldview, how dominance/submissiveness works. Emotions control you, so those get the submissive o. Boats, cars, planes, horses etc transport you, so those get the submissive o. Pets (but not horses) get the dominant ā. Parts of things get the submissive o, but when in their entirety they can get the dominant ā.

By now you might see how the Western concept of "possessive" doesn't translate well, as sometimes you are submissive to what you "possess". Not surprisingly, individual property wasn't really a thing, as most things were collectively owned. Furthermore, because in many Polynesian languages the words for "to want" and "to like" are the same thing, if you tell someone you "like their hat", they will often give it to you because you are also telling them "you want their hat".

One more note, if the object possessed is in the plural, then just drop the initial t.

 

That's all Jabberwocky to me!

 

No, they're not. The people who turn their noses up at classical education end up being tech workers, destroying culture with their personalities.

The inconsistencies in English are astounding. But the only grammatical terms I know and can define, I know and can define because of Schoolhouse Rock. I arrive at my noun, and try to get my adjectives unpacked before the verbs start happening.

 

I posted a very detailed tweet on the Leon thread, but to make it concise, the main giveaways were:

1. The amount of money thrown into it
2. That he's using his burner account to talk about it.

 

You're right. I meant the people who arrogantly correct others, or sneer/ get upset when it is used incorrectly. Intent really does matter.