Talk:English grammar/Archive 2

Archive 1

Archive 2

Archive 3

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

hypothetical question for discussion

Note: This section, being long and apparently unrelated to the improvement of this article, has been archived. It is still available, at <http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Talk:English_grammar&oldid=167850701#hypothetical_question_for_discussion>. —Ruakh_TALK 15:44, 29 October 2007 (UTC)

Note: Discussion re-archived 4 November 2007. Please continue this discussion on the talk page of the article where it originated in a more appropriate forum. CapnPrep 14:13, 4 November 2007 (UTC)

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)

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)

I am outraged

That you are using foreign names to explain english grammar, I do not understand why you are confusing foreigners trying to learn english by using names that have no relevence to english. Stop being politically correct, you are corrupting this country.! alex —Preceding unsigned comment added by Alexandre8 (talk • contribs) 19:49, 3 August 2008 (UTC)

What the devil are you talking about? I browsed through this (incredibly long) article rather quickly, and didn't notice any use of non-english names or phrases. Could you be more specific in your complaint? Indeterminate (talk) 02:27, 6 August 2008 (UTC)

Greetings Alexandre8 - as it stands, the article is in need of major surgery and so rather than make insignificant changes to names in the article why don't you spend a bit of time making constructive and useful changes? Just for the record, Alexandre8 went through the article changing all/some/many names into Henry, clearly under the impression that Henry is better suited as an example of an "English" name. I suppose that as a name pulled out of a hat at random, it will do, but apart from 8 English kings of that name, I can honestly say that I do not personally know anyone called Henry. Likewise Edward (8 English kings). I would suggest that Tom, Dick or even 'Arry would be far more apt. Or if you'll forgive me being just little teensy bit politically correct, maybe we could include names of women such as Sue, Mary and Jane. While we're at it - trying to improve the article, that is - the word English is written with a large E (3 strikes and yer out!). Oh, yeah, and... nah! Let's just look forward to more constructive edits in the future. Kind regards, --Technopat (talk) 18:40, 6 August 2008 (UTC)

Sorry Alex, but you misunderstand grammar. Foreign names (whatever that means) has nothing to do with grammar whatsoever. Henry kissed the tree, Candida kissed the tree, Ishmael kissed the tree, Su Hyun kissed the tree, Dam kissed the tree all have the same grammatical structure — the particular name occurring as in the noun in the noun phrase in subject position is irrelevant.

Furthermore, you misunderstand the article. The article is not describing any interlanguage of non-native speaker, it's rather a description of a general idealized native speaker grammar.

Additionally, English is used by people of many different nationalities and ethnicities. And it is not restricted to one country (or whatever "this country" refers). It is, in fact, one of the most common international languages.

Using only Anglo names can actually be considered ethnocentric. Since the article may be read by a large international audience consisting of individuals from several nationalities and ethnicities, being more inclusive for our audiences seems to be a kind thing to do.

So I reply: stop being nationalistic and damaging your country as well as yourself. peace – ishwar  (speak) 15:48, 7 August 2008 (UTC)

Right, thing was, OK, a proportional representation of native speakers would have been great, but it's not like i saw that in the artice, Henry is no specific reference to any king, just a the name of a few of my friends. The reason i complained was that because, you didnt really mix it up, i can safely say there was the use of this one arabic? name for the boy and the girl, Halib, and one begining with Sadaf, and there certainly wasn't any chinese, or eastern european. So please don't tell me you were considerate to other ethinicities, cos you wern't. Just this one arabic? name group. Please defend this articile by varying the use of the name Halib, and possibly change Sadaf to, i dunno, Sonja. Other after all the other changes, this really is the last thing on the list !! xD Alexandre8 (talk) 08:32, 10 August 2008 (UTC)