Re: Yet more boring stuff about English

[bloch%mandrill@ucsd.edu (Steve Bloch)]

Doug Alan <nessus@athena.mit.edu> writes:
>Regarding "correct" spelling, there was not even such a thing as
>correct spelling in English until the invention of the printing press.

As someone else pointed out, English spelling wasn't reasonably
standardized until LONG after that.  Printing presses became widely
used around 1500, and in the early 1700's people were still complain-
ing about the corruption and variation in English spelling (indeed,
they did so with an air of longing for "the good old days" when
everybody spelled correctly, although "good old days" seldom exist
until after they're over).  Samuel Johnson's dictionary was published
in 1755.

])oug then quotes from
>*An Introduction to Language* by Fromkin and Rodman (second edition, p. 10):
I can't blame guo<| for this, and I'm not a professional linguist, but
a lot of this stuff is hard to believe.

>     [something about Lowth's basis in Latin grammar]
>     Lowth, however,
>     decided that "two negatives make a positive" and therefore one
>     should say "I don't have any,"

The use of multiple negatives is more characteristic of the Romance
languages than of the Germanic languages like English.  

>     that even if "you" is singular it
>     should be followed by the plural "were",

But "you" is NOT singular; it's derived from the German formal second-
person, which acts like a third-person plural for most purposes.  Or
are we suggesting that another Lowth did the same thing independently
to German as this fellow allegedly did to English?  "Thou" is the
singular, corresponding to the German "du", but has fallen out of
favor.

>     and that "I" not "me",
>     "he" not "him", "they" not "them", and so forth should follow
>     "than" in comparitive constructions.

Only if the verb of which the "comparitive [sic] construction" is an
object happens to be "to be", which in English as in German takes a
nominative object.

>     Because Lowth was very
>     influential and because the rising new class wanted to speak
>     "properly," many of these new "rules" were legislated into
>     English grammar, at least for the "prestige" dialect.

I had heard of some grammar written about that time for people wishing
to sound sophisticated and upwardly mobile, but this account is very
different from the one I read.

"It's a long, long, lonely ride
To find the perfect lover for your lover..." -- Jane Siberry

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