Talk:English grammar

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/Archive to end 2007

Contents 1 Gender 2 Adjective 3 On a somewhat related note... 4 I'm gonna crazy here - "had have to" 5 Merge 6 Linguistic Speculation 6.1 Fully mapped out languages 7 hypothetical question for discussion 8 Use of "An" 9 affect / effect 10 Standard English 11 clean-up 12 tenses 13 Problems

[edit] Gender

For comparison, speakers of German distinguish between the homophonous sie ("she"), sie ("they"), and Sie ("you", polite) with little difficulty.

How so, if they are homophonous? FilipeS 22:04, 30 April 2007 (UTC)

Presumably by context, no? —Ruakh_TALK 04:06, 1 May 2007 (UTC)

O.K. I understand the comparison now. FilipeS 16:53, 1 May 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Adjective

I'm ashamed of you wikipedia, there's not a single word on the canon order of adjectives in the English language. Shame, shame. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 193.25.222.131 (talk) 13:02, August 21, 2007 (UTC)

[edit] On a somewhat related note...

It is awfully generous of the authors of this piece to cite other's works; for if the average reader were to actually consult the cited works, then I am certain that such a reader would never return to the article again. To say that this article is confusing is a gross understatement. It was clearly written with English majors in mind. Nbahn 07:14, 1 September 2007 (UTC)

[edit] I'm gonna crazy here - "had have to"

Sorry, my English is not good enough to explain. This sentence:

"He'd have to say something to her"

What kind of sentence is it? I mean, in what tense does it written?

Thanks. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 89.138.107.174 (talk) 19:42, 15 September 2007 (UTC)

The present tense of the conditional mood, or the conditional tense of the indicative mood. He'd is short for He would. —Ruakh_TALK 20:37, 15 September 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Merge

I am suggesting that Disputes in English grammar should be merged into English grammar#Disputes so that it can be improved, tightened up and discussed in context. There was a deletion discussion on 9 August 2007. SilkTork *SilkyTalk 12:50, 17 September 2007 (UTC)

I'd support that. Currently both articles have a lot of problems; hopefully with a merge we could save the best parts of each. —Ruakh_TALK 15:51, 17 September 2007 (UTC)

No merge. There is no reason why Disputes in English grammar can not be "improved, tightened up and discussed in context" in its existing form as a separate article. Help:Merging and moving pages lists several reasons to merge a page, none of which applies to the article in question. Petecarney 15:01, 20 September 2007 (UTC)

No merge - English grammar is already quite long, and Disputes in English grammar is not short. If they were in the one article then people would suggest breaking down the English grammar into two or more articles. Why merge just to split again, especially when separating "accepted facts" from "disputes" is such a good way to separate these things? That's what I think anyway. Leevclarke 19:53, 3 November 2007 (UTC)

No merge - this article is already at the maximum length up with which I will put. JMcC 13:20, 9 November 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Linguistic Speculation

"No human language's grammar has been fully mapped out[citation needed]. That is, no set of unambiguous rules has been formulated that will always or almost always agree with native speakers on whether any given sentence is grammatical or not".

First, this really has nothing to do with English grammar. Second, I challenge this - for example, Latin grammar is complete, unambiguous, and without dispute on grammar. Ditto for Esperanto. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 66.14.104.198 (talk) 04:17, 28 September 2007 (UTC)

About latin: While now-a-days speakers are all highly educated and use strict grammar, the roman lower class would use Vulgar Latin, so they wouldn't agree on what is correct or not. As for Esperanto, I would argue that it isn't a human language (no native speakers), but this is not the place for a flame war--Yitscar 11:08, 29 October 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Fully mapped out languages

The article says that "No human languages have ever been fully mapped out". That's not strictly true - see List_of_constructed_languages#Engineered_languages, all of which are fully mapped, and some of which are human-usable. Loglan and Lobjan come to mind. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 146.171.16.9 (talk) 04:37, 23 October 2007 (UTC)

That's not completely true. In one sense, Lojban is fully mapped out; and in other sense, it has human speakers. But the instant humans started speaking it, it started changing, and the genuinely-spoken version is not yet fully mapped out. See http://www.unish.org/unish/DOWN/PDF/Nick_Nicholas(133~167).pdf for one example. —Ruakh_TALK 14:18, 29 October 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Use of "An"

I have seen the word "An" on television being used in front of "Hilarious" and "Historical" Does anybody know whether this is accurate?

80.189.49.121 22:53, 25 November 2007 (UTC)

Historically, this was quite common; nowadays, it's more common in the U.K. than in the U.S. (dunno about anywhere else). —Ruakh_TALK 01:17, 26 November 2007 (UTC)

I believe that you don't modify the article based on the object's adjectives, but based on the pronunciation of the object itself. thus:

"a hillarious skit" "an historical essay" "a ivy league university"

in practice it is often simplified to the adjectives though..

— robbiemuffin ^{page talk} 17:33, 21 May 2008 (UTC)

What is appropriate:

"There are a number of things"

or

"There is a number of things" ?

Googling both yields 700k pages for 'there are' and 800k pages for 'there is', so it seems like it's a tie there... 138.16.26.47 (talk) —Preceding comment was added at 20:28, 9 December 2007 (UTC)

Since 'a number' is singular, the latter is correct. --Wolf2581 (contribs · talk) 10:31, 12 December 2007 (UTC)

Sorry but the subject of the sentence is "a number of things", which is plural. Therefore the former is correct. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 86.138.9.89 (talk) 13:58, 8 January 2008 (UTC)

This section does not make sense to me. The examples given seem to contradict the rules stated. If "a" is used strictly before a noun with a consonant sound, then why was "a University" given as an example - University being a noun beginning with a vowel sound, right? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 121.44.225.201 (talk) 11:44, 28 December 2007 (UTC)

Although "university" is written with a vowel at the beginning, the "u" is not pronounced as a vowel sound, it's said "yu" rather than "un". The a / an distinction depends on the sound rather than the written letter at the beginning of a word, that's why we can say "an hotel" if we don't pronounce the "h" of "hotel" (as in slightly old-fashioned British English). Seonaid —Preceding unsigned comment added by Seonaidbeckwith (talk • contribs) 20:01, 29 December 2007 (UTC)

[edit] affect / effect

I was reading a WP article and thought that I found a wrong usage of affect / effect. So, I searched the phrase on Google: "an affect on" versus "an effect on" and found it to be ~ 50 / 50. Which, if either, is correct?100TWdoug (talk) 05:36, 18 March 2008 (UTC)

The idiom is usually "an effect on"—a cause usually has an effect on something, but Americans abroad sometimes affect an English accent. Used as a noun, affect usually means the psychological expression of emotion or desire. "Effect" usually means something that has happened. --Rhymworm (talk) 03:56, 20 March 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Standard English

I've added a link to the Standard English entry. Seems to me, though, that Wikipedia ought to at least attempt to offer an outline of Standard English usage. Thoughts?--Rhymworm (talk) 03:42, 20 March 2008 (UTC)

[edit] clean-up

someone really needs to clean this article up. Information is scattered in different areas. And, you really cant get the best picture of how English works from this article (for example, no one could figure out how to make noun phrase from this article). Too much attention is paid to a traditional type of description that is modelled after Latin grammar. It would be much better to approach it from a more modern description like Quirk et al., Huddleston's work, etc. Presumably, there are enough editors on wikipedia that are interested in English grammar, so I encourage you to pick up a grammar. – ishwar  (speak) 23:45, 27 March 2008 (UTC)

[edit] tenses

I find the tenses section actually very good as it is. Still, I drew up images which could be included if we wanted to rework the section: commons:User:Robbiemuffin/Using_English_Grammar_Graphics#The_Past_tenses. I also have a set of person images but I still have a couple of pages to do with tenses before I move on to that quality. Mmmm, on the topic, I for my own pruposes am wriitn up a second description of english tenses, through the lens of grammar in general rather than english in specific. Thus, it is based on the TAM chart, and it looks to cover these:

past
non past
modal/future
past perfect
no past perfect
past continuous
nonpast continuous

combinations are then obvious:

modal/future perfect
modal/future continuous
past perfect continuous
nonpast perfect continuous
modal/future perfect continuous

I could put a conditional in the top section, and the amny conditionals that sprout from that ... and that woud be in keeping with this article. But I am wondering if the conditional really is modal. If anyone could help me with that I would appreciate it. thank you. — robbiemuffin ^{page talk} 17:46, 21 May 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Problems

This article is a complete disaster. I partially agree with the 'clean up' comments above, but think the situation is more drastic. I don't see any way a struggling English student, college level or not, could competently use it to solve a problem. First, the general article under the heading "English Grammar" does not need to contain every single rule of English grammar. The English Grammar series and related articles can take care of that by themselves. If someone wants to learn about ellipsis, they can look up the article on ellipsis. As it stands now, the article is bloated, both with well-written sections and neglected parts that beg the reader to "improve" them. Do we really need all of this?

Second, even if some unfortunate student were to stumble upon this article in an attempt to find aid, he would be hard pressed to understand most of the terminology used here. For instance, consider the section on adjectives. Even with my experience as an English tutor, I've forgotten what a copular verb is. My spellchecker even thinks 'copular' is a typo, not a real word. There there are words like 'attributive' and 'predicatively' jammed in there too. This is an Encyclopedia aimed at general audiences, not a reference text for college English Professors. We've got to clean it up!

Err, with that said... suggestions? —Preceding unsigned comment added by ArchetypeRyan (talk • contribs) 06:40, 11 June 2008 (UTC)