Help With Grammar

[Olowkow]

Speaking of "Who" , "whom", I think I would recognize when they were used wrongly, ie who stands in for the personal pronouns "He or She" and "Whom" for "Him" or "her" but it seems like a nitpicky rule. It gives academics and proofers something to show their prowess. Also. let me pick on my favorite non sense call and that is "an" before vowels & "h" . If I said I need to find a hospital would that clang on your brain? Here is the kicker: "a" is used before consonant sounds and therefore in the example of hospital; it sounds like a vowel so use "an"

In American English, [hospital] begins with an aspirated /h/, which is a consonant. /a hospital/ is correct for me. There are a few exceptions such as "an historical incident", where the syllable containing /h/ is not stressed. cf: "a history lesson". For the British, "an hospital" is probably just fine.

These "rules" are only "nitpicky" to the extent that they are used to browbeat those who do not possess them in their particular dialect, and then judged as uneducated. I cannot say "whom else" in the following, even though it is in principle grammatical:

---Which composers did you like?
---Brahams and Satie.
---*Whom else?
(I used this example because I just heard Victor Borge get big laughs with it.)

Nor can I answer "whom" in the following:

---I really like Brahams.
---*Whom?

but the following are ok:

---Whom did you say you liked?
or
---You say you liked whom?

"who" should be nominative, and "whom" objective, but there are dialectal variants which are not consistent with this rule. For me, there are additional rules that apply to the surface structure that are difficult to state in purely syntactic terms and appeal to notions such as, "not acceptable as a one word answer", or even some local history of the utterance. Not elegant, but natural language is what it is.

However, when I hear *"I will take whomever wants to come with me", I suspect the speaker is trying to sound grammatical by modifying the syntactic rule. /whoever/ is correct as the subject of /wants/, and /whoever wants to come with me/ is an object phrase of /take/.

ETA:: So "I will take whoever wants to come with me" is preferred.

*Note, the asterisk (*) is commonly used by linguists to denote an ungrammatical utterance. Or, as Jim McCawley once said, "Linguists of the world unite! We have nothing but our AS-TE-RISK."

 

[Professor Yaffle]

The an before an h thing is weird, and seems to be dying out as far as I can tell. I suspect it was formalised as "correct" in an era and area where the H was usually dropped (which makes sense), but then later, pronouncing ones aitches became the proper thing to do, but the previous rule still lingered.

About the only time I ever hear it in spoken English is if a newsreader talks about "an historic occasion". I'll have to listen for BBC examples to see if they have dropped it.

The Guardian style guide says:

Use an before a silent H: an heir, an hour, an honest politician, an honorary consul; use a before an aspirated H: a hero, a hotel, a historian (but don't change a direct quote if the speaker says, for example, "an historic"). With abbreviations, be guided by pronunciation: eg an LSE student

http://www.theguardian.com/guardian-observer-style-guide-a

And an article from The Telegraph about the use of it in The Times:

http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/tomchiversscience/100168156/an-historically-ugly-way-of-speaking/

ETA BBC style guide says always to use "a" before a sounded "h".

 

[Olowkow]

In French, all the so-called aspirate [h]'s are gone from pronunciation, but remain as historical markers only, and must be learned as exceptions to the rule that elides or produces liaison with the articles /le, la, les/ (as well as other syntactic elements) and an initial vowel:

• l'aine vs. la haine
• l'auteur vs. la hauteur
• l'heure vs. le Havre
• je t'ai vu vs. je te hais

 

[aleCcowaN]

COCA: "a historical...", 2136 (216 spoken); "an historical...", 438 (77 spoken)
BNC: "a historical...", 294; "an historical ...", 190

COCA: "a historic...", 1793 (360 spoken); "an historic...", 472 (238 spoken)
BNC: "a historic...", 126; "an historic...", 159

 

[Rat]

But it is often used improperly in hyper corrections such as:

*(wrong, hyper correction) "If I were the thief, I would not leave my fingerprints."

The correct usage is "If I was the thief...."

However, "If I were a thief, I would not leave....." is correct. Explaining these subtleties gets pretty arcane.

I disagree. If I were the thief, I would not leave my fingerprints. If I was the thief, I would not have left my fingerprints. Had I been the thief, I would not have left my fingerprints.

 

[Olowkow]

I disagree. If I were the thief, I would not leave my fingerprints. If I was the thief, I would not have left my fingerprints. Had I been the thief, I would not have left my fingerprints.

Well, if you really think about it:
"If I was the thief" presupposes that there exists a thief, but I am not he.
"If I were a thief" is a hypothetical, and likely impossible to happen.

I agree with this:

The rule that I was taught is that was is for things that could be true but aren't, and were is for things that could never be true.


So, if I was an airline pilot is OK because conceivably I could retrain as a pilot, if I wanted.
But if I were you is right because I will never be you.

Having said that, I suspect very few speakers make this distinction, and "was" is just much more common.

 

[Professor Yaffle]

If I were a carpenter, and you were a lady...

The mood of the verb "to be" when you use the phrase "I were" is called the subjunctive mood, and you use it for times when you're talking about something that isn't true or you're being wishful.
[snip]
But "if" and "could" and similar words don't always mean you need to use "I were." For example, when you are supposing about something that might be true, you use use the verb "was." Here's an example:

There was a storm in Mexico. If Richard was in Cabo, he could have missed the call.

http://www.quickanddirtytips.com/education/grammar/subjunctive-verbs?page=1

 

[aleCcowaN]

Excellent posts, all of you. If I were a rich man (yaha deedle deedle didle didle deedle deeddle dum) I'd buy you all dinner in the city of your choice.

So far, indicative and subjunctive follow exactly the way of Spanish's except for "if I was the thief, I wouldn't leave my fingertips" (1) and "if I were the thief, I wouldn't leave my fingerprints" (3). The latter works differently with "a thief"(2) in Spanish:

1- Si yo era el ladrón, no dejaba huellas digitales.
2- Si yo fuera un ladrón, no dejaría huellas digitales.
3- Si yo fuera el ladrón, no dejaba huellas digitales

But I have now a new doubt: all sentences depart from me (or I?) not being the thief, but all three are completely different, at least in Spanish:

1- I criticize the thief for his sloppiness and lack of professionalism
2- What I would systematically do if I joined that ignoble profession
3- You are wrong by thinking I'm the thief. I wouldn't be so idiot as to leave my fingerprints all over the place.

Is there such a distinction in English?

 

[Olowkow]

Excellent posts, all of you. If I were a rich man (yaha deedle deedle didle didle deedle deeddle dum) I'd buy you all dinner in the city of your choice.

So far, indicative and subjunctive follow exactly the way of Spanish's except for "if I was the thief, I wouldn't leave my fingertips" (1) and "if I were the thief, I wouldn't leave my fingerprints" (3). The latter works differently with "a thief"(2) in Spanish:

1- Si yo era el ladrón, no dejaba huellas digitales.
2- Si yo fuera un ladrón, no dejaría huellas digitales.
3- Si yo fuera el ladrón, no dejaba huellas digitales

But I have now a new doubt: all sentences depart from me (or I?) not being the thief, but all three are completely different, at least in Spanish:

1- I criticize the thief for his sloppiness and lack of professionalism
2- What I would systematically do if I joined that ignoble profession
3- You are wrong by thinking I'm the thief. I wouldn't be so idiot as to leave my fingerprints all over the place.

Is there such a distinction in English?

From me.......or from my not being a thief. Never *from I not being...

It hurts to me the brain. I would say:

• Si fuera ladrón, no dejaría ninguna huella, y sería rico. Pero, como ya lo sabes, no lo soy.

• If I were a thief, I wouldn't leave any prints, and I'd be rich. But as you surely know, I am not. (Meaning #2 above)

But I'm not a native speaker of Spanish. And then,

• Si yo era (soy?) el ladrón (del cual estamos hablando), la policía habría encontrado mis huellas por todas partes.
• If I was (in fact) the thief (of whom we are speaking) the police would have found my prints everywhere. (Meaning #3 above)

I really don't have a good intuition for #1 above. I do know that often in Spanish the imperfect (dejaba) and the conditional (dejaría) are used interchangeably in certain cases. In English also, it is grammatical to say:

• In the summer, we would run (or used to run) through the fields.

Note that in French, this was/were business is not an issue:

• Si j'étais voleur, professeur, médecin, je gagnerais beaucoup plus.
• If I were a thief, teacher, doctor, I would earn much more.

• Si j'étais (en fait) le voleur de qui l'on parle, je n'aurais pas laissé des indices.
• If I was (in fact) the thief of whom we are speaking, I would not have left any clues.

Note: in French, it is important to get the tense sequence correct:

• Si j'étais.... je serais.... (imperfect in "if" clause, conditional in result)
• Si je suis..... je serai.... (present .... future)
• Si j'avais su.... n'aurais pas fait cela... (past perfect ....conditional perfect)

 

[aleCcowaN]

• Si yo era (soy?) el ladrón (del cual estamos hablando), la policía habría encontrado mis huellas por todas partes.
• If I was (in fact) the thief (of whom we are speaking) the police would have found my prints everywhere. (Meaning #3 above)

Si yo fuera el ladrón (del cual estamos hablando) ...

In Spanish, subjunctive is used because it is counterfactual and declaring it to be counterfactual -or insisting in that- is one of the main goals of the whole phrase.

On the contrary, no matter it is indeed counterfactual and that is not a minor detail, the sentence aims elsewhere:

1- Si yo era el ladrón, no dejaba huellas digitales. ("In his place, I wouldn't have left ...", "In a similar situation, I wouldn't leave ....")

That is what I understand when I read phrases like "If I was the thief, ...". But surely it's the other side of the coin with me wrongly expecting that English indicative behaves as Spanish indicative.

If I got it sort of right, in current English, "if I were the thief" suggests something counterfactual because of the "were" while "if I was the thief" suggests something counterfactual because of the "if" and the past tense, which would left us back in square one. In my thousands of posts -and no one-liners- in language forums, I always use "If I were ..." which American English speakers have mostly found to be correct and current, while many British English speakers considered it to be correct but a bit dated or too posh.

 

[Olowkow]

I see your point with "Si yo era el ladrón..." I would say, "If I was the thief...."

Maybe a little clearer would be:

• Officer, if I was the one who robbed the store, my alibi would not hold up.

(Somebody really did rob the store, but I am not that one person)

Again, I agree that the most common U.S. usage is to use "were" in any "if" type of situation, but this is because the real meaning of the subjunctive use of "were" seems to have been lost.

That is, "If I was..." just sounds wrong to most Americans because the "If I was/were..." distinction has been discarded...lost.

Just be glad you don't have to deal with the past subjunctive of the second person singular:

• (archaic) second-person singular simple past subjunctive of be  

If thou wert mine, I would be in heaven!

 

[aleCcowaN]

...

I cannot say "whom else" in the following, even though it is in principle grammatical:

---Which composers did you like?
---Brahams and Satie.
---*Whom else?
(I used this example because I just heard Victor Borge get big laughs with it.)

Nor can I answer "whom" in the following:

---I really like Brahams.
---*Whom?

but the following are ok:

---Whom did you say you liked?
or
---You say you liked whom?

"who" should be nominative, and "whom" objective, but there are dialectal variants which are not consistent with this rule. For me, there are additional rules that apply to the surface structure that are difficult to state in purely syntactic terms and appeal to notions such as, "not acceptable as a one word answer", or even some local history of the utterance. Not elegant, but natural language is what it is.

However, when I hear *"I will take whomever wants to come with me", I suspect the speaker is trying to sound grammatical by modifying the syntactic rule. /whoever/ is correct as the subject of /wants/, and /whoever wants to come with me/ is an object phrase of /take/.

ETA:: So "I will take whoever wants to come with me" is preferred.

*Note, the asterisk (*) is commonly used by linguists to denote an ungrammatical utterance. Or, as Jim McCawley once said, "Linguists of the world unite! We have nothing but our AS-TE-RISK."

This thread at Wordreference contains interesting comments about "who/whom do you like?", mainly from post #6 on.

Just be glad you don't have to deal with the past subjunctive of the second person singular:

• (archaic) second-person singular simple past subjunctive of be  

If thou wert mine, I would be in heaven!

I learnt German 6 years at K-12 and I don't remember a thing, but I remember I had no problems at all with verbs conjugations.

I would rather willingly welcome English to be a fully-fledged articulated language written in its proper Cyrillic-like alphabet, were it written the way it is spoken (not sure the grammar in this last phrase).

 

[Olowkow]

[ramble]

I should join that WordReference.com forum, but to be honest, my gripe with such discussions is that they always seem to devolve into a debate about what is more semantically appropriate in a cultural sense, rather than what subtle semantic principles result from these remarkably arcane syntactic options.

It took me one entire year of graduate classes to understand what the problem was that I needed to try to solve, when I converted from language teacher to grad student in theoretical linguistics. I quite honestly didn't get it. Then I came to understand that I was part of a group who, lacking a proper theory in this pursuit, purported to be writing transformational theory as we went along! We were hacking the human mind.

I had a working definition of "grammar" that was just not consistent with what professional generative grammarians meant by the word. I actually remember that eureka moment of finally understanding that we were actually studying and explaining human behavior, noting it in mathematical terms and calling it syntax; we were describing, neither proscribing nor prescribing linguistic behavior. We were really looking for the elusive "linguistic universals" which are supposedly true of any language.

We were scientists behaving like anthropologists or psychologists in a field whose only data, at the end of the day, were human opinions and native speakers' linguistic intuitions. For someone who considered himself a believer in the scientific method, the awareness that our data were so ephemeral made for a very scary scientific pursuit, I must admit. In the final analysis, it didn't work. Chomsky et al tried but failed to crack the code. Now, linguists throw massive computing power at the problem, and we have what passes for progress.

What an interesting problem though.

[/rant]

 

[aleCcowaN]

Ooh! I do like your post. Join wordreference.com but be aware that its purpose is providing reusable threads in support of language learning, translation and dictionary development. Like the example I linked, threads start meandering and soon they focus, resolve the point and come to an end; exactly the contrary of forums.randi.org where non-stop chatty threads diverge into the full narcissistic spectra: epistemological hedonism; my opinion is a fact; look how intelligent I am; every college drop-out (from an institution aiming to "average students" and subsidizing them) becomes here a PhD in many disciplines; I say nay to the best in the feel, hip, hip, hooray ... [mea culpa included]

Or wait a little and join "my" language forum, even stricter than wordreference [I can perceive thoughts: "yeah, go play elsewhere!". Wait! Telepathy! I should stay here. If I wear you, I apologize]

About what you describe in your "ramble", I experienced the same in an uneducated amateurish way while trying to translate our linguistic thinking into explanations regarding Spanish subjunctive. I even used some mathematical approaches as subjunctive includes certain operations that resemble the complex field (numbers) and even some sort of transform (operator) could be tested. But that made "teach them how to fish" a tall order, as native English speakers (and Norwegian, and Danish. And Dutch and Swedish to a certain point) seem to lack certain mental traffic signals in their linguistic hubs, so they regard the way commands are conveyed in Spanish, with one mood in the affirmative (¡Ve! -Go!) and another mood in the negative (¡No vayas! -Don't go!) as simple information ("buy your shoes in a shoe shop, but buy shoe polish in a supermarket) and not as a whole nother logic.

 

[Olowkow]

.....<snip> And Dutch and Swedish to a certain point) seem to lack certain mental traffic signals in their linguistic hubs, so they regard the way commands are conveyed in Spanish, with one mood in the affirmative (¡Ve! -Go!) and another mood in the negative (¡No vayas! -Don't go!) as simple information ("buy your shoes in a shoe shop, but buy shoe polish in a supermarket) and not as a whole nother logic.

I have not looked into this, but I always regarded it as just some kind of historical remnant. I would be curious to know how this arose though. Of course, object pronoun position is affected as well. ¡Vete! ¡No te vayas!

French is more straightforward, using the indicative for imperatives, but with some exceptions such as "Ayez, sachez, veuillez, etc." The pronoun position is similar to Spanish: "Dis-moi/ne me dis pas". I never spent much time with such historical questions.

 

[aleCcowaN]

I have not looked into this, but I always regarded it as just some kind of historical remnant.

French subjunctive has much less weight in the language. And English subjunctive is which qualifies as a historical remnant, not Spanish subjunctive. If Spanish subjunctive shouldn't offer an intrinsic logic both useful and inescapable, why would it have survived its imposition over hundreds of languages of dozens of families in five continents? Modern developments like losing future subjunctive are part of a human tendency to destroy future tenses and recreate them departing from periphrasis of present tenses. Future indicative in Spanish, French, Italian and Portuguese come from a verbal periphrasis in ancient Italian -wrongly called Vulgar Latin-, a periphrasis similar to "we are to -infinitive-", and not from Latin future which got lost. Latin -not the contemporary ancient Italian- amabo (I will love) would be replaced by the periphrasis amare habeo (strictly: I have to love), which would become amaré in Spanish, aimerai in French and amerò in Italian.

 

[Hlafordlaes]

The question in the OP has already been addressed correctly as an example of hyper-correctness.

There are some deeper issues, such as "me" being the base form for the 1P singular, as when occurring in isolation. "Who is it?" "Me." (cf. moi in French, possibly a borrowed feature).

Yet since English adopted word order to overcome the ambiguities from the declining value of case markers in word suffixes (Old English was as inflected as modern German), to a more strict S-V-O order usually, the interplay between case markings (I/me/my/myself) and word order has been slightly weird.

[This process of the destruction of case markings is normally attributed to retrogressive stress in germanic languages. To see it in action over time, compare the word "garage" in BE and AE. American usage favors conserving the word as borrowed, British usage has yielded to pressure from within the language and made it more native, with stress on the beginning.]

When the "me" gets nearer the verb, "I" sounds better, when it is far away, save for hypercorrectness, it sounds better.

Given that "me" can under some analyses be considered the base form, sentences starting with "Me and my friends..." are grammatical in linguistic terms, ungrammatical in prescribed standard speech.

While on the topic: "It is I" is often suggested as more proper, based on a meta-criteria of equating subject and object. This is an imposition of logic external to language. "It is me" is linguistically proper English.

Caveat: Ain't done no linguistics since 1984, my own self.

 

[Rat]

So who can tell me why "I am cold", for example, is not what I would expect it to be in German?

 

[Professor Yaffle]

So who can tell me why "I am cold", for example, is not what I would expect it to be in German?

What do the Germans say? Is it like French, who say something more like "I have cold"?

ETA a google tells me they something more like "To me it is cold".

 

[Rat]

If I remember correctly, which is possible if not likely, "Ich bin kalt" is not wrong, but it would idiomatically be "Mir ist kalt" (me is cold).

ETA: to respond to your edit, "mir" is dative, so "to me" is about right.