DailyDirt: English Curiosities
from the urls-we-dig-up dept
The English language is one of the hardest languages to learn. There are countless irregularities and significant differences between written and spoken English grammar that can trip up almost anyone. Here are just a few linguistic analyses of slightly older versions of English .- A method of diagramming English sentences was invented 166 years ago as a way to teach English grammar in a simpler way. Imagine if this was invented today.... [url]
- Linguistic anthropology looks at how language has changed and influenced social life. Some words have changed their meanings more rapidly than others, and here's a chart showing some of the words that have stayed the most consistent with time. [url]
- The most significant change to the English language is... the progressive passive. People used to say sentences like: "The house was building" instead of "The house was being built". (And long ago, it was "The house is a-building" or "The house is on building".) [url]
Thank you for reading this Techdirt post. With so many things competing for everyone’s attention these days, we really appreciate you giving us your time. We work hard every day to put quality content out there for our community.
Techdirt is one of the few remaining truly independent media outlets. We do not have a giant corporation behind us, and we rely heavily on our community to support us, in an age when advertisers are increasingly uninterested in sponsoring small, independent sites — especially a site like ours that is unwilling to pull punches in its reporting and analysis.
While other websites have resorted to paywalls, registration requirements, and increasingly annoying/intrusive advertising, we have always kept Techdirt open and available to anyone. But in order to continue doing so, we need your support. We offer a variety of ways for our readers to support us, from direct donations to special subscriptions and cool merchandise — and every little bit helps. Thank you.
–The Techdirt Team
Filed Under: diagramming, english, grammar, language, linguistic anthropology, progressive passive, sentences
Reader Comments
Subscribe: RSS
View by: Time | Thread
on topic
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re:
'the house is a-building' means the house in under construction
'the house is a-dwelling' would indicate it is no longer being build but is not finished and has people living in it.
it's a bro-brec moonec, neck, neck nannoo
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
An azinmag fcat cncenornig rdaneig...
Ptrtey cool, huh.
art grlliuea
aka ann acrhy
eof
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Well, shit
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Well...
But I'm working on it...!
(On the Functionality and Identity of Language.)
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
The most significant change to the English language is...
You may have even seen people do this and not even noticed it, but then when you thinked about it later, something striked you as odd. I'll admit that it drived me nuts at first, but then I sleeped on it and it growed on me. Suddenly, it all maked sense. Why learn complicated alternate spellings for past tense words when you can just add "ed" to the end of a word? Isn't that betterer? ;)
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Waste of my time in 9th grade
In the article one sentence did stick out to me: "Parsing was almost insufferably tedious"
In this class I remember leaning over to my friend and saying: I hope the guy that invented this diagramming thing is dead, because if not, I�m hunting him down and force feeding him pencils until he dies of lead poisoning.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Waste of my time in 9th grade
I hadn't thought of the diagramming part in years till I saw that picture, but I still subconsciously break down sentences into their parts when I read them. Nouns, Verbs, Adjectives, Adverbs, Prepositions, Conjunctions, I'm almost 40, why the hell do I still do that!
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Waste of my time in 9th grade
Doing a couple sentence diagrams throughout the course of learning about grammar would be fine -- but the focus should be on developing a keen intuitive sense for English grammar, and knowing the basic idea of how to do things more scientifically only when needed (which it rarely will be for most people). But, of course, you can't test intuition...
It's very similar to what's wrong with math class. Students are given a solution upfront, then made to use it over and over and over again until they memorize it, without ever checking to see if they understand it. And nothing is more baffling to a student than being forced to prove or solve the obvious -- tools, like a sentence diagram or a piece of mathematical notation, should emerge from problems. That's how we created them. No human being ever diagrammed a sentence until someone was faced with some really complex language and had a reason to want to parse it out in detail, just like no human being did long division until they had some numbers they couldn't divide with their brain and a few fingers.
If anything, the best way to teach sentence diagrams would be to first get students to spend a day examining sentences of increasing complexity, and encourage them to use pen & paper to help separate out the elements and draw it all out in a way that makes sense. Then, after they've developed a dozen of their own quick methods for sentence diagramming and are discovering the limitations of them, show them the standardized solution (but let them keep using their own if they like it better). Of course, such a process wouldn't fit into a standardized testing model at all.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Re: Waste of my time in 9th grade
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
[ link to this | view in chronology ]