Dominion Strategy Forum
Miscellaneous => General Discussion => Topic started by: theory on September 17, 2013, 11:51:26 am
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It occurred to me recently that English has a very strictly defined order of adjectives (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adjective#Adjective_order). For example, you could never say "the French old tall man", but instead must always say "the tall old French man".
Does this adjective order rule apply in other languages? Is it perhaps less rigid, such that you still couldn't say "his young 3 cats", but you could say "his young red cats" or "his red young cats" interchangeably?
What fascinates me about this issue is that:
A) No native speaker seems to have actually spent time learning this rule;
B) Yet all native speakers have effortlessly mastered this rule;
C) And I've never heard someone mess it up;
D) Even though it is immediately and painfully obvious when the rule is broken.
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I've heard that this is a difficult aspect of English for non-native speakers to learn.
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German has some of this. There's a specific order for things like time, place, and manner. I forget though what the order is.
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Never learned this and never thought it was an actual rule. Some orders just *feel* wrong to me, so I guess I learned it subconsciously. Neat!
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I've never heard of such rule in Spanish, nor in English or French (I've only learned extremely basic French, though). Whilst speaking or writing English, no-one ever told me that I was ordering the adjectives in a wrong way, so either its quite easy to pickup the rule without knowing it, or not too many people care about it.
In Spanish there are some rules on whether the adjectives go before or after the noun, but I also don't know the rules formally.
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I guess I learned it subconsciously.
...Like all actual rules of grammar.
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In Finnish, there is no fixed word order - you can put all the words in a sentence in any order and it will always be grammatically correct. Different orders have slightly different meanings, though.
I'm still having trouble with the order of the expressions of time and place (EDIT: In English, just to clarify), and I didn't even know this was a thing. :-[
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I guess I learned it subconsciously.
...Like all actual rules of grammar.
Nah, plenty of grammar gets taught in elementary school.
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I guess I learned it subconsciously.
...Like all actual rules of grammar.
Nah, plenty of grammar gets taught in elementary school.
Yes, but only rules which either (a) have already been learned subconsciously by the students, and what they're actually being taught is just to describe, understand, and be aware of the rules, rather than to apply them (which they already knew); or (b) aren't actually rules of grammar, but rather just rules of formal style.
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I guess I should qualify that "only" with a "for the most part", just to be safe.
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I guess I learned it subconsciously.
...Like all actual rules of grammar.
Nah, plenty of grammar gets taught in elementary school.
Yes, but only rules which either (a) have already been learned subconsciously by the students, and what they're actually being taught is just to describe, understand, and be aware of the rules, rather than to apply them (which they already knew); or (b) aren't actually rules of grammar, but rather just rules of formal style.
Still not sure of this. I've helped a bunch of kids with homework and many of them seem to have trouble with these things. Their homework was certainly application.
I don't know. You're a linguist so you know way more about this than I do. FWIW, I'm in Canada and most of these kids I've helped are first generation Chinese-Canadians. I have the same background, where my first language is technically Cantonese but English is my primary language.
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I guess it depends on whether you would consider a sentence like "He don't know know any better" to be grammatically correct or not. I mean, is the verb improperly conjugated, or is this just the individual's dialect? There are plenty of communities where native speakers will use that sentence and understand one another perfectly.
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I guess it depends on whether you would consider a sentence like "He don't know know any better" to be grammatically correct or not. I mean, is the verb improperly conjugated, or is this just the individual's dialect? There are plenty of communities where native speakers will use that sentence and understand one another perfectly.
I would call that incorrect... is this incorrect of me? Is what I'm following not grammar, but just "rules of formal style"?
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I guess I learned it subconsciously.
...Like all actual rules of grammar.
Nah, plenty of grammar gets taught in elementary school.
Yes, but only rules which either (a) have already been learned subconsciously by the students, and what they're actually being taught is just to describe, understand, and be aware of the rules, rather than to apply them (which they already knew); or (b) aren't actually rules of grammar, but rather just rules of formal style.
Some rules, especially the esoteric and specific ones, are certainly learned consciously. Where to put modifiers like "only" in a sentence, for example. Or the difference between "who" and "whom", and "me" and "I". A rule like adjective order therefore seems quite remarkable: it's all learned subconsciously and I never hear anyone screw it up.
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I guess I learned it subconsciously.
...Like all actual rules of grammar.
Nah, plenty of grammar gets taught in elementary school.
Yes, but only rules which either (a) have already been learned subconsciously by the students, and what they're actually being taught is just to describe, understand, and be aware of the rules, rather than to apply them (which they already knew); or (b) aren't actually rules of grammar, but rather just rules of formal style.
Still not sure of this. I've helped a bunch of kids with homework and many of them seem to have trouble with these things. Their homework was certainly application.
I don't know. You're a linguist so you know way more about this than I do. FWIW, I'm in Canada and most of these kids I've helped are first generation Chinese-Canadians. I have the same background, where my first language is technically Cantonese but English is my primary language.
Okay, fair enough; I guess what I said above applies mainly/only to native speakers. That a non-native speaker of English would also acquire these adjective-ordering rules subconsciously and without instruction is pretty remarkable.
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I guess it depends on whether you would consider a sentence like "He don't know know any better" to be grammatically correct or not. I mean, is the verb improperly conjugated, or is this just the individual's dialect? There are plenty of communities where native speakers will use that sentence and understand one another perfectly.
Right, exactly. They learned, subconsciously and without trying, a rule of grammar that allows a sentence like "He don't know any better" to be constructed. And then in elementary school they learned a rule that that construction should not be used in formal style.
Everyone also learns some of the rules of formal style subconsciously and without trying also, by the way. But people who grow up with educated parents and in upper-middle-class neighborhoods and so on learn more of them, and learn to apply them in more contexts.
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Right, exactly. They learned, subconsciously and without trying, a rule of grammar that allows a sentence like "He don't know any better" to be constructed.
The best part about this is "He don't" is incorrect.
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I guess I learned it subconsciously.
...Like all actual rules of grammar.
Nah, plenty of grammar gets taught in elementary school.
Yes, but only rules which either (a) have already been learned subconsciously by the students, and what they're actually being taught is just to describe, understand, and be aware of the rules, rather than to apply them (which they already knew); or (b) aren't actually rules of grammar, but rather just rules of formal style.
Some rules, especially the esoteric and specific ones, are certainly learned consciously. Where to put modifiers like "only" in a sentence, for example. Or the difference between "who" and "whom", and "me" and "I".
The rules about where to put only are really, really not grammatical rules. They're advice about clarity.
The rules about whom have the structure of grammatical rules, anyway, but they're basically not meaningfully part of the grammar of anyone's English anymore. They're highly-artificial rules for particular formal genres of writing. The rules about I and me are also grammatical rules in structure, anyway—although they mainly boil down to 'don't use a certain subset of constructions in formal style', since the actual behavior of I and me in the grammar is much more complicated than that.
A rule like adjective order therefore seems quite remarkable: it's all learned subconsciously and I never hear anyone screw it up.
That's really true of most grammatical rules. The reason it's so remarkable, I think, is because it's so non-obvious that there even is a rule. I mean, it's pretty obvious that there's a rule for, like, where you put the object of a verb, and how to form a yes/no question, and so on. But the language could get by just fine without having any rules about adjective order, and it takes some effort to notice that there even is a rule.
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Right, exactly. They learned, subconsciously and without trying, a rule of grammar that allows a sentence like "He don't know any better" to be constructed.
The best part about this is "He don't" is incorrect.
In what sense?
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Whenever I have to type something like 'He wore the hat that that mouse had on.', it reminds me how hard it must be for non-native speakers to learn English.
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Right, exactly. They learned, subconsciously and without trying, a rule of grammar that allows a sentence like "He don't know any better" to be constructed.
The best part about this is "He don't" is incorrect.
In what sense?
"He doesn't" is the correctly conjugated form of the word, not "He don't."
Speaking of verbs, English conjugations are so much easier than Spanish conjugations.
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Right, exactly. They learned, subconsciously and without trying, a rule of grammar that allows a sentence like "He don't know any better" to be constructed.
The best part about this is "He don't" is incorrect.
In what sense?
"He doesn't" is the correctly conjugated form of the word, not "He don't."
The whole point of the above discussion is that, for many speakers of English, the grammar also makes "he don't" available. Whether it's "correct" or not for them to use it is then a question of etiquette and style, not grammar.
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Right, exactly. They learned, subconsciously and without trying, a rule of grammar that allows a sentence like "He don't know any better" to be constructed.
The best part about this is "He don't" is incorrect.
In what sense?
"He doesn't" is the correctly conjugated form of the word, not "He don't."
Speaking of verbs, English conjugations are so much easier than Spanish conjugations.
Not sure if serious :o
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Right, exactly. They learned, subconsciously and without trying, a rule of grammar that allows a sentence like "He don't know any better" to be constructed.
The best part about this is "He don't" is incorrect.
In what sense?
"He doesn't" is the correctly conjugated form of the word, not "He don't."
Speaking of verbs, English conjugations are so much easier than Spanish conjugations.
Not sure if serious :o
Totally. Spanish has 6 different conjugations for present tense. English has 2. And that's only factoring in present tense.
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Right, exactly. They learned, subconsciously and without trying, a rule of grammar that allows a sentence like "He don't know any better" to be constructed.
The best part about this is "He don't" is incorrect.
In what sense?
"He doesn't" is the correctly conjugated form of the word, not "He don't."
Speaking of verbs, English conjugations are so much easier than Spanish conjugations.
Not sure if serious :o
Totally. Spanish has 6 different conjugations for present tense. English has 2. And that's only factoring in present tense.
Well, Japanese has a bajillion different conjugations...
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Totally. Spanish has 6 different conjugations for present tense. English has 2. And that's only factoring in present tense.
But English has much more irregular verbs. Anyway, I agree (only by intuition) that learning just read/write English is easier than read/write Spanish. But Spanish pronunciation makes so much sense, to the point which is quite close to each letter having a single pronunciation. English writing and speaking seems close to totally unrelated, especially for beginners.
The "ough" ending has lots of different pronounciations: hicough, though, tough, borough, through are at least 5, and I seem to recall reading there were 8 different, but I cannot remember them.
Also noteworthy (relatively to this whole thread anyway) is that the difference between US English and British English (in word common usage, not in pronunciation) is almost nonexistent compared to the difference between Spain, Mexican, Argentinian and Chilean Spanish.
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Well, Japanese has a bajillion different conjugations...
Many of which depend on the relative social status of the speaker, audience and subject of discussion and the demographics of the speaker. And some of them are more like set phrases you apply to the verb - I'd love to know whose bright idea it was to decide that the way to say "I must do it" translates more directly as "If is not allowed to come to pass that I am to not do it".
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I don't think this is a rule. The first two examples you give definitely feel wrong to change, I am not sure that I would think a thing of the third one, but more than that there are a bunch of examples where it doesn't really matter:
My old dirty hairy brush
My old hairy dirty brush
My dirty hairy old brush
My hairy dirty old brush
My hairy old dirty brush
My dirty hairy old brush
Now, which one of these is right? A couple of them sound a little better to me, but not anything really clear.
Now, numbers pretty much always seem to come first - but I think that's because it's principally a noun. The class of word that French, Italian, etc. belong to (the name for which escapes my mind at the moment) *typically* feel like they should go last, but I don't think this is a hard-and-fast thing: given a lineup of 7 old men, saying "The French old man is the one I'm looking for." seems ok, though admittedly this has more to do with collapsing of "old man" into a single concept than anything else, and "Old French man" definitely seems fine and perhaps more normal.
I think for the most part, it has to do with how much differentiation each adjective gives you/how normal the combination is, and I don't think it's a hard-and-fast rule. Probably a style-guide kind of thing.
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The Wikipedia page (linked in OP) has a section on adjective order and how it works in English. Where the order isn't entirely clear, as in your example, it's probably because multiple adjectives belong to the same class and thus do not have ordering relative to each other.
For your example, I feel like these adjectives should be separated with commas... except maybe for "old" if it goes at the end.
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I wonder how much of this is influenced by phonetics as well. Certain combinations of word classes may "roll off the tongue" more fluidly on average than others, and perhaps that co-evolved with the development of the grammar.
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Now, numbers pretty much always seem to come first - but I think that's because it's principally a noun.
Naw, nouns do the opposite—they always come at the end. But numbers have a special position all their own between determiners (e.g. the, that, our) and adjectives. Well, maybe not all their own; there's a few other similar things that occupy the same position as numbers, like many, I think.
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German has some of this. There's a specific order for things like time, place, and manner. I forget though what the order is.
It has, but that's about words in a sentence, not about adjectives. In german "I was home alone yesterday" would be "I was yesterday alone home."
Adjectives have not that much of an order, but numbers are first usually.
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Totally. Spanish has 6 different conjugations for present tense. English has 2. And that's only factoring in present tense.
But English has much many more irregular verbs.
FTFY. Oh, the quirks of English.
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Huh, it is interesting to think about.
So, I remember from High School English it was drilled in our heads to separate "equal adjectives" with commas (commas substitute for the word "and"). So there's that.
antique rocking chair = antique (rocking chair) but not antique and rocking chair or rocking (antique chair). The fact that it is a chair that rocks is more important to the nature of the chair than it being antique.
jolly green giant = jolly (green giant). Green is more important than jolly. You could refer to a sad green giant later and be referring to the same giant but not if you refer to a jolly red giant. The color is more important.
smooth, glossy paper = smooth and glossy paper but not smooth (glossy paper).
So, is importance to the nature of the noun what defines the ordering?
We also used Elements of Style by Strunck and White in HS which gives the advice "write with nouns and verbs, not with adjectives and adverbs" if I remember correctly. Not using adjectives would definitely get around the problem. As a side note -- I read Stephen King's autobiography recently and he really takes this advice to heart in his writing.
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But English has much many more irregular verbs.
FTFY. Oh, the quirks of English.
What if I meant the verbs in English are, for the most part, more irregular?
EDIT: Spanish also has differences between countable and uncountable, so my only excuse are that the differences are expressed quite differently.
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Some rules, especially the esoteric and specific ones, are certainly learned consciously. Where to put modifiers like "only" in a sentence, for example. Or the difference between "who" and "whom", and "me" and "I".
The rules about where to put only are really, really not grammatical rules. They're advice about clarity.
The rules about whom have the structure of grammatical rules, anyway, but they're basically not meaningfully part of the grammar of anyone's English anymore. They're highly-artificial rules for particular formal genres of writing. The rules about I and me are also grammatical rules in structure, anyway—although they mainly boil down to 'don't use a certain subset of constructions in formal style', since the actual behavior of I and me in the grammar is much more complicated than that.
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So what's the difference between grammar and style? Can you give an example of each?
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antique rocking chair = antique (rocking chair) but not antique and rocking chair or rocking (antique chair). The fact that it is a chair that rocks is more important to the nature of the chair than it being antique.
"I went to the flea market and bought this rocking antique chair!" Still works, just has a different meaning. :)
But English has much many more irregular verbs.
FTFY. Oh, the quirks of English.
What if I meant the verbs in English are, for the most part, more irregular?
Irregularer!
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Some rules, especially the esoteric and specific ones, are certainly learned consciously. Where to put modifiers like "only" in a sentence, for example. Or the difference between "who" and "whom", and "me" and "I".
The rules about where to put only are really, really not grammatical rules. They're advice about clarity.
The rules about whom have the structure of grammatical rules, anyway, but they're basically not meaningfully part of the grammar of anyone's English anymore. They're highly-artificial rules for particular formal genres of writing. The rules about I and me are also grammatical rules in structure, anyway—although they mainly boil down to 'don't use a certain subset of constructions in formal style', since the actual behavior of I and me in the grammar is much more complicated than that.
So what's the difference between grammar and style? Can you give an example of each?
Grammar is the set of rules, learned mostly subconsciously in childhood, that controls how the brain produces and understands language.
Style is participation in a set of social conventions having to do with what linguistic behavior is considered more or less appropriate for what social conventions.
For instance, the English language has a suffix -ing, found in words like walking and talking, which is sometimes pronounced -ing and sometimes pronounced -in'. That's grammar.
The -in' pronunciation of that suffix is more likely to be used in informal situations than in formal or careful situations. That's style.
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How often do you get a chance to screw it up? I feel like I rarely use two adjectives on the same noun in conversation.
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How often do you get a chance to screw it up? I feel like I rarely use two adjectives on the same noun in conversation.
You did it right there. I'm not sure if it was intentional or not.
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How often do you get a chance to screw it up? I feel like I rarely use two adjectives on the same noun in conversation.
You did it right there. I'm not sure if it was intentional or not.
Wait, where?
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"the" and "same" are both adjectives.
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"the" and "same" are both adjectives.
The is not an adjective.
(I'm not 100% sure about same either, to be honest; if it's an adjective it's a pretty oddball one. But the is not an adjective. Seriously, there's absolutely no ambiguity about this.)
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"the" and "same" are both adjectives.
The is not an adjective.
(I'm not 100% sure about same either, to be honest; if it's an adjective it's a pretty oddball one. But the is not an adjective. Seriously, there's absolutely no ambiguity about this.)
Traditionally in English, an article is usually considered to be a type of adjective. In some languages, articles are a special part of speech, which cannot easily be combined with other parts of speech. It is also possible for articles to be part of another part of speech category such as a determiner, an English part of speech category that combines articles and demonstratives (such as 'this' and 'that').
Linguists today distinguish determiners from adjectives, considering them to be two separate parts of speech (or lexical categories), but formerly determiners were considered to be adjectives in some of their uses. In English dictionaries, which typically still do not treat determiners as their own part of speech, determiners are often recognizable by being listed both as adjectives and as pronouns. Determiners are words that are neither nouns nor pronouns, yet reference a thing already in context. Determiners generally do this by indicating definiteness (as in a vs. the), quantity (as in one vs. some vs. many), or another such property.
They are nevertheless part of the "adjective order" rule: they always go first in any list of adjectives. No one would say "same the noun", even though there's no reason the article has to go first.
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The is not an adjective.
Traditionally in English, an article is usually considered to be a type of adjective. In some languages, articles are a special part of speech, which cannot easily be combined with other parts of speech. It is also possible for articles to be part of another part of speech category such as a determiner, an English part of speech category that combines articles and demonstratives (such as 'this' and 'that').
Traditionally, in English, a whale is considered to be a type of fish.
They are nevertheless part of the "adjective order" rule: they always go first in any list of adjectives. No one would say "same the noun", even though there's no reason the article has to go first.
No, it's a separate rule, unrelated to the adjective-order rule. The adjective-order rule is about ordering elements of like type; the rule that determiners occur at the beginning of a noun phrase is about the relative order among elements of different types.
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You mean a whale isn't a fish? Well that blows.
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antique rocking chair = antique (rocking chair) but not antique and rocking chair or rocking (antique chair). The fact that it is a chair that rocks is more important to the nature of the chair than it being antique.
"I went to the flea market and bought this rocking antique chair!" Still works, just has a different meaning. :)
;D
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Huh, I never thought of articles as adjectives, but it does make a certain amount of sense. After all, you only use articles for nouns, so they have the same restriction as adjectives.
I'd say articles have greater restriction for the article would always precede the adjectives describing that noun. In fact, I would speculate that the grammatical definition of an article has to place it at the beginning of an adjective-noun combo.
It is interesting, though, how we just know that adjectives sound better in a certain order. I wouldn't say it's untaught, though. When we write papers, the teacher will tell us if a sentence sounds awkward or confusing. It's probably just a bit more subtle in how it's taught.
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Huh, I never thought of articles as adjectives, but it does make a certain amount of sense.
NO
IT DOES NOT MAKE AN AMOUNT OF SENSE
AAAARGH
It is interesting, though, how we just know that adjectives sound better in a certain order. I wouldn't say it's untaught, though. When we write papers, the teacher will tell us if a sentence sounds awkward or confusing. It's probably just a bit more subtle in how it's taught.
No, I'm pretty sure this is untaught. This isn't a kind of error a teacher would correct, because it's not the kind of error English speakers make to begin with. (Or at least, no more frequently than they break other untaught grammatical rules, just as a result of miscellaneous speech errors, losing track of what they're saying, and so on.)
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Huh, I never thought of articles as adjectives, but it does make a certain amount of sense.
NO
IT DOES NOT MAKE AN AMOUNT OF SENSE
Technically, "none" is an amount.
That said, as recently as 1990, high school students were being taught that articles were adjectives. Hopefully that's changed--it always did seem a bit silly, but I guess that's part of pigeonholing words into seven parts of speech.
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It's too confusing. Let's just stop using "the." (http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324412604578519370148793016.html)
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It's too confusing. Let's just stop using "the." (http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324412604578519370148793016.html)
/a/ has been doing this for a while already (https://archive.foolz.us/a/thread/93655151/#93655151).
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I was taught that articles are a weird category of adjectives, and while you clump them with adjectives, need to be treated differently.
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I was taught that articles are a weird category of adjectives, and while you clump them with adjectives, need to be treated differently.
That's basically like treating whales as a weird category of fish: the reason you need to treat them differently is because grouping them in that category was a mistake in the first place, according to the scientific criteria which are most useful for establishing classes of (words/species).
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Here's one:
Say
Feet/feed
Peace/peas
Late/laid
Beck/beg
Knack/nag
In each case there are two orak clues that the words are distinct: the final consonant changes from voiceless to voiced and the vowel sound lasts longer. Only one of these is spelled.
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Here's one:
Say
Feet/feed
Peace/peas
Late/laid
Beck/beg
Knack/nag
In each case there are two orak clues that the words are distinct: the final consonant changes from voiceless to voiced and the vowel sound lasts longer. Only one of these is spelled.
Gotta say this reminded me of:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oaGpaj2nHIo
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German has some of this. There's a specific order for things like time, place, and manner. I forget though what the order is.
Are you sure you don't mix up adjectives with adverbs here?
As a German native speaker, the rule never occurred to me but think it's stricter on attributal than on adverbial adjectives. That is to say: "der rosa große Elefant" would be highly unusual to the extent of being plain wrong, when compared with "der große rosa Elefant". Whereas "ich habe auf meinem Zimmer gestern nachgedacht" is a bit less usual than "ich habe gestern auf meinem Zimmer nachgedacht" but more a matter of stressing location or time.
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I just watched the video Grujah posted, and I couldn't understand either of them.
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I'm suprised nobody has mentioned this yet:
I am taking french now and we learned that there is an adjective order (or at least, somewhat)
Words that have to do with beauty, age, goodness and size all come before the noun. Other adjectives come after. At least, that's the way I have been taught
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I guess that's true to an extent, but the way I would formulate that rule would be that most subjective qualities come before the noun (which is a more general rule that what you said), and more objective and descriptive adjectives come after. So here, you would probably say "Le grand vieil homme français" (The tall old man French).
That being said, it's not really a rule. In fact, the example still sounds somewhat uncomfortable to me, because "grand" and "homme" actually are kind of an exception. It's ok here because there's another adjective between them, but "grand homme" definitely doesn't mean the same thing as "homme grand". The first one means "great man", the second one means "tall man". You might say that this goes pretty well with the general rule, except it doesn't work with, say, woman. "grande femme" or "femme grande" mean the same thing. I mean, you could use "grande femme" in a context where you obviously want to mean "great" by mirroring the masculin idiom, but you would need some context for it to be understood in that way.
I guess, going back to the example, that you could argue that "tall" falls into the objective half, but "Le vieil homme grand français" or "Le vieil homme français grand" both sound wrong. You might say "Le vieil homme français, qui est grand" (i.e. "The old French man, who is tall"), but that's a big long-winded.
Basically : there is a guideline, but as always in French, half of the cases you'll find yourself in might be arcane exceptions to the rule.
Which puts French in a similar position to that of English I think. Mostly, some orders sound "right" or "wrong", and it's gonna be hard to tell them apart if you're just learning the language.
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Exactly the problems I'm having with learning French :P It's like English, where there are a lot of exceptions to the rules (at least, it feels that way to me) but then you throw gender on top of that, and my little English-speaking brain doesn't have any idea what is going on...
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Exactly the problems I'm having with learning French :P It's like English, where there are a lot of exceptions to the rules (at least, it feels that way to me) but then you throw gender on top of that, and my little English-speaking brain doesn't have any idea what is going on...
Oh yeah, French is a mess, probably the hardest language to learn (among European languages, obviously I assume Chinese or Arabic are more difficult).
And it's not you, there really are exceptions everywhere. For example, you have to, as a child, learn a laundry list of nouns ending in -al that don't become -aux in plural form, rather -als (Bal, Festival, Carnaval, Chacal... and others that I've since forgotten). Same for words in -ou that become -oux rather than -ous in plural, and I could go on.
The gender thing is not specific to French (German is even worse, as it has a neutral gender), but French has those numerous incoherences that make it worse ...
But, you know, good luck learning it ;D
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Hahah thanks. I took 2 years of German in high school, and I actually found the gender things easier than french. In German, as I recall, you really only had to change "the" or "one" depending on the gender. French, you change adjectives based on gender and it just seems like there is a lot more that it affects than in German. Maybe I'm wrong, or maybe I'm just more confused because I know some German, but that has probably been one of the hardest things.
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Somewhere on slashdot, many years ago there was a topic about this sort of thing and someone wrote that the meaning of the sentence, "I am going to assassinate the president" ever so slightly changes when emphasis is placed on the different words. The exercise was to repeat the sentence placing emphasis on each successive word for each respective repetition. So, there I was, in my cube at work repeating in various ways the above sentence.
That adjective ordering can change the meaning or perceived meaning of a sentence is functionally the same as changing the intent of a sentence by altering which words are stressed. My French speaking friend was absolutely mystified when I explained this phenomenon to him. Apparently, at least in French, the stress of a word is irrelevant to the overall function of that word in the sentence.
For a safer sentence to repeat out loud try "That pizza tasted good".
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Well, surely it doesn't really change the meaning, just puts a different emphasis, right ? As in :
- THAT pizza tasted good (emphasizing the uniqueness of the pizza)
- That PIZZA tasted good (emphasizing the fact that it's a pizza, not some other piece of the meal)
- That pizza tasted GOOD (emphasizing that is tasted really good)
I have to admit that I'm somewhat confused here. Emphasis of course exists in French, as in any language I'd assume, but I fail to see how it would actually change the core meaning of the sentence ? Right ?
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Well, surely it doesn't really change the meaning, just puts a different emphasis, right ? As in :
- THAT pizza tasted good (emphasizing the uniqueness of the pizza)
- That PIZZA tasted good (emphasizing the fact that it's a pizza, not some other piece of the meal)
- That pizza tasted GOOD (emphasizing that is tasted really good)
I have to admit that I'm somewhat confused here. Emphasis of course exists in French, as in any language I'd assume, but I fail to see how it would actually change the core meaning of the sentence ? Right ?
"That pizza TASTED good" implies that there was something else wrong with the pizza, while all the others don't.
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"I didn't say you stole my money."
Try the above emphasis exercise on that sentence.
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Well, surely it doesn't really change the meaning, just puts a different emphasis, right ? As in :
- THAT pizza tasted good (emphasizing the uniqueness of the pizza)
- That PIZZA tasted good (emphasizing the fact that it's a pizza, not some other piece of the meal)
- That pizza tasted GOOD (emphasizing that is tasted really good)
I have to admit that I'm somewhat confused here. Emphasis of course exists in French, as in any language I'd assume, but I fail to see how it would actually change the core meaning of the sentence ? Right ?
THAT implies maybe there was other pizza that wasn't as good. It emphasizes a specific subset of possible pizzas for reference.
PIZZA implies that it is specifically the pizza amongst other possible things that were tasted that tasted good.
TASTED implies that the taste may not have represented the whole of the experience. Maybe I ate so much of it I got a stomach ache or maybe I am allergic to some ingredient but ate it anyway because of the taste. Maybe the pizza was inordinately expensive.
GOOD emphasizes the traditional meaning of this sentence were there no emphasis placed elsewhere. It could imply that a stronger word than good may have been more appropriate to use in this instance.
In any of the instances above a message is conveyed that is either not clearly conveyed without the emphasis or that simply cannot be conveyed in that sentence alone without the emphasis. In general, the emphasis requires the listener to have participated in some degree in the events surrounding the statement so that emphasis bears a metadata context. It is in this way that the method of communication is clearly superior than simply the means. That is, words alone are perfunctory while delivery is more crucial.
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Well, surely it doesn't really change the meaning, just puts a different emphasis, right ? As in :
- THAT pizza tasted good (emphasizing the uniqueness of the pizza)
- That PIZZA tasted good (emphasizing the fact that it's a pizza, not some other piece of the meal)
- That pizza tasted GOOD (emphasizing that is tasted really good)
I have to admit that I'm somewhat confused here. Emphasis of course exists in French, as in any language I'd assume, but I fail to see how it would actually change the core meaning of the sentence ? Right ?
You're almost there. "THAT pizza tasted good" means that another pizza did not taste good. "That PIZZA tasted good" means that something other than the pizza did not taste good.
An analogous concept is the placement of the adjective "only":
You have been entrusted to feed your neighbor’s dog for a week while he (the neighbor) is out of town. The neighbor returns home; something has gone awry; you are questioned.
“I fed the dog.”
“Did you feed the parakeet?”
“I fed ONLY the dog.”
“Did anyone else feed the dog?”
“ONLY I fed the dog.”
“Did you fondle/molest the dog?”
“I ONLY fed the dog!”
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Here's another one: "I don't think he should get that job." (http://esl.about.com/cs/pronunciation/a/a_wordstress.htm)
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Exactly the problems I'm having with learning French :P It's like English, where there are a lot of exceptions to the rules (at least, it feels that way to me) but then you throw gender on top of that, and my little English-speaking brain doesn't have any idea what is going on...
Oh yeah, French is a mess, probably the hardest language to learn (among European languages, obviously I assume Chinese or Arabic are more difficult).
And it's not you, there really are exceptions everywhere. For example, you have to, as a child, learn a laundry list of nouns ending in -al that don't become -aux in plural form, rather -als (Bal, Festival, Carnaval, Chacal... and others that I've since forgotten). Same for words in -ou that become -oux rather than -ous in plural, and I could go on.
The gender thing is not specific to French (German is even worse, as it has a neutral gender), but French has those numerous incoherences that make it worse ...
But, you know, good luck learning it ;D
My first language was technically Cantonese, but my primary language is English. I usually think in English, and though I am capable of conversing in Cantonese, there are many topics in which I am unable to communicate effectively (and I'm also Chinese illiterate). I took French from grades 7-12 and I barely remember any of it.
I'm pretty sure English is harder to learn than French. French has exceptions, but it is, for the most part, very structured. It just doesn't feel that way to native English speakers, but English is just a disaster. I mean, have you ever tried reading The Chaos (http://ncf.idallen.com/english.html)? I think I can get through most of it, but seriously -- English is lunacy.
As far as writing goes, French was difficult for me because I had trouble remembering all the conjugations. But there are rules and relatively few exceptions to them. Speaking French should be simpler because many things are pronounced the same, and native speakers will often take shortcuts (e.g. I think, at least in some places, Francophones will drop the "ne" in negative phrases, since the "pas" is enough to get the meaning across). English is confusing all around. Cantonese... well, reading/writing is tough because of the lack of an alphabet. With English, at least you can muddle through. :P
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I'm pretty sure English is harder to learn than French. French has exceptions, but it is, for the most part, very structured. It just doesn't feel that way to native English speakers, but English is just a disaster. I mean, have you ever tried reading The Chaos (http://ncf.idallen.com/english.html)? I think I can get through most of it, but seriously -- English is lunacy.
As far as writing goes, French was difficult for me because I had trouble remembering all the conjugations. But there are rules and relatively few exceptions to them. Speaking French should be simpler because many things are pronounced the same, and native speakers will often take shortcuts (e.g. I think, at least in some places, Francophones will drop the "ne" in negative phrases, since the "pas" is enough to get the meaning across). English is confusing all around. Cantonese... well, reading/writing is tough because of the lack of an alphabet. With English, at least you can muddle through. :P
I strongly disagree. MAYBE pronouncing English while reading is harder than doing the same in French for non-advanced speakers, because French pronunciation is closer to its writing. But everything else is worse in French. I learned both as second languages (well, only starting with French, but still remember what it was starting English). English has a LOT less words to learn than French. Even if its pronunciation makes less sense relative to its writing, it still feels like there is a shorter list of things you have to know by heart. French has LOTS of cases and English only has a few. Also, English has more variations around the world (British, US, Australian, Indian, just to name a few) that people is used to mispronunciation, to the point that I would say that lots of rules are flexible in practice. In French, some slight mispronouncing may make the other person not understand.
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Oh yeah, French is a mess, probably the hardest language to learn (among European languages, obviously I assume Chinese or Arabic are more difficult).
It depends on the person learning the language. French is an Indo-European language, so it's still probably easier to learn than any of the Uralic languages in Europe for someone who's speaking an Indo-European language as their first language. And you're correct in assuming that Chinese and Arabic are more difficult for someone who's speaking an Indo-European language, but for someone speaking an Afroasiatic language, Arabic is relatively easy.
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I'm pretty sure English is harder to learn than French. French has exceptions, but it is, for the most part, very structured. It just doesn't feel that way to native English speakers, but English is just a disaster. I mean, have you ever tried reading The Chaos (http://ncf.idallen.com/english.html)? I think I can get through most of it, but seriously -- English is lunacy.
As far as writing goes, French was difficult for me because I had trouble remembering all the conjugations. But there are rules and relatively few exceptions to them. Speaking French should be simpler because many things are pronounced the same, and native speakers will often take shortcuts (e.g. I think, at least in some places, Francophones will drop the "ne" in negative phrases, since the "pas" is enough to get the meaning across). English is confusing all around. Cantonese... well, reading/writing is tough because of the lack of an alphabet. With English, at least you can muddle through. :P
I strongly disagree. MAYBE pronouncing English while reading is harder than doing the same in French for non-advanced speakers, because French pronunciation is closer to its writing. But everything else is worse in French. I learned both as second languages (well, only starting with French, but still remember what it was starting English). English has a LOT less words to learn than French. Even if its pronunciation makes less sense relative to its writing, it still feels like there is a shorter list of things you have to know by heart. French has LOTS of cases and English only has a few. Also, English has more variations around the world (British, US, Australian, Indian, just to name a few) that people is used to mispronunciation, to the point that I would say that lots of rules are flexible in practice. In French, some slight mispronouncing may make the other person not understand.
Fair enough. Perhaps it is easier to get by with poor English. But the fact that people can understand English even with mistakes is not a testament that it's easier to learn. :P
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I mean, have you ever tried reading The Chaos (http://ncf.idallen.com/english.html)? I think I can get through most of it, but seriously -- English is lunacy.
That's a fun poem.
I am so glad hiccough is now usually spelled hiccup. Is there any other word in the English language where "ough" is pronounced "up"?
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I mean, have you ever tried reading The Chaos (http://ncf.idallen.com/english.html)? I think I can get through most of it, but seriously -- English is lunacy.
That's a fun poem.
I am so glad hiccough is now usually spelled hiccup. Is there any other word in the English language where "ough" is pronounced "up"?
Dunno.
Reading the notes at the bottom of the page is interesting.
how many will know what a "studding-sail" is, or that its nautical pronunciation is "stunsail"?
...I did not know. Stunsail?! English!!
(A more common one that still weirds me out is "lieutenant".)
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I mean, have you ever tried reading The Chaos (http://ncf.idallen.com/english.html)? I think I can get through most of it, but seriously -- English is lunacy.
That's a fun poem.
I am so glad hiccough is now usually spelled hiccup. Is there any other word in the English language where "ough" is pronounced "up"?
Dunno.
Reading the notes at the bottom of the page is interesting.
how many will know what a "studding-sail" is, or that its nautical pronunciation is "stunsail"?
...I did not know. Stunsail?! English!!
(A more common one that still weirds me out is "lieutenant".)
Colonel?
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Fair enough. Perhaps it is easier to get by with poor English. But the fact that people can understand English even with mistakes is not a testament that it's easier to learn. :P
What is "English" then, if not the intersection of what all English speakers understand? Probably in the UK the way any educated person from the US speaks would be deemed as "poor English". Even more so its writing, with your theaters in the center and the like. Would you say teenagers do not speak English? They do not write English in tweets, SMSs, etc?
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They do not write English in tweets, SMSs, etc?
Hv u nvr had need to rd a txt fr a teen? Srsly they look lk ths. lol
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That being said, it's not unreasonable to suggest that the information content of an English sentence is significantly less than one unit per character, or even one unit per syllable, and that SMS notation simply increases the information density per character.
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They do not write English in tweets, SMSs, etc?
Hv u nvr had need to rd a txt fr a teen? Srsly they look lk ths. lol
I'm a teen, and my dad talks closer to that in a text than me...
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They do not write English in tweets, SMSs, etc?
Hv u nvr had need to rd a txt fr a teen? Srsly they look lk ths. lol
So I'm actually teaching a class on electronically-mediated communication this semester, so I have this information right at hand: in a 2005 study of texts from teenagers, a total of 6.5% of words were abbreviated.
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That being said, it's not unreasonable to suggest that the information content of an English sentence is significantly less than one unit per character, or even one unit per syllable, and that SMS notation simply increases the information density per character.
English text has fairly low entropy. In other words, it is fairly predictable. Even if we don't know exactly what is going to come next, we can be fairly certain that, for example, there will be many more e's than z's, or that the combination 'qu' will be much more common than any other combination with a 'q' in it and the combination 'th' will be more common than 'z', 'q', or 'qu'. Uncompressed, English text has about one bit of entropy for each character of message.
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They do not write English in tweets, SMSs, etc?
Hv u nvr had need to rd a txt fr a teen? Srsly they look lk ths. lol
So I'm actually teaching a class on electronically-mediated communication this semester, so I have this information right at hand: in a 2005 study of texts from teenagers, a total of 6.5% of words were abbreviated.
That's certainly interesting, but an eight-year-old study about a field that's not even fifteen years old could not even be described as stale.
I mean, that's like talking about how there are only a few dozen known exoplanets right now based on 2005 data. Or let me talk to you about how sequencing a particular person's genome would be incredibly expensive in 2005...
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They do not write English in tweets, SMSs, etc?
Hv u nvr had need to rd a txt fr a teen? Srsly they look lk ths. lol
So I'm actually teaching a class on electronically-mediated communication this semester, so I have this information right at hand: in a 2005 study of texts from teenagers, a total of 6.5% of words were abbreviated.
That's certainly interesting, but an eight-year-old study about a field that's not even fifteen years old could not even be described as stale.
True, but:
(1) it's not like there are many more recent studies of this particular question out there (though I do have one of IM messages from 2008, which found 2.4% abbreviations and "characteristic IM forms");
(2) at least it gives us a baseline for a quantity that we can calibrate our expectations around;
(3) the stereotype embodied by your example above was no less prevalent in 2005 than it is now;
(4) there's no particular reason to suppose that the rate of use of abbreviations in texting has substantially increased since 2005, and many reasons to suspect it may have decreased with the advent of smartphones with features like autocorrect;
(5) at the end of the semester I may be able to give you an update, since one of my students is writing his term paper on the use of abbreviations;
(6) in a cursory random subsample of 400 words of the corpus of text messages my students have collected, I found at most 15 abbreviations, counting as generously as possible.
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Instant messaging is a lot different than texts, because it's harder to type on a phone than on a keyboard.
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Instant messaging is a lot different than texts, because it's harder to type on a phone than on a keyboard.
True. Note the 2004 texting data had about two and a half times the rate of abbreviations as the 2008 IM data.
That said, a random subsample of my students' IM data had 17 abbreviations in 400 words, vs. 15 in 400 words of text-message data, so the hypothesis of difference at least isn't borne out in the amount of checking I was willing to do in five minutes.
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Definitively interesting data. Anyway, I was not just talking about abbreviations, but also things like using z instead of s for plurals and lots of slang words that I guess are as not proper "English" as a beginner's pronunciation or Capitalization.
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Fair enough. Perhaps it is easier to get by with poor English. But the fact that people can understand English even with mistakes is not a testament that it's easier to learn. :P
What is "English" then, if not the intersection of what all English speakers understand? Probably in the UK the way any educated person from the US speaks would be deemed as "poor English". Even more so its writing, with your theaters in the center and the like. Would you say teenagers do not speak English? They do not write English in tweets, SMSs, etc?
I was referring more to egregious errors in grammar rather than chat speak/abbreviations. For example, my mom will mess up tenses and word order sometimes, but I can still figure out what she means. English also allows for "mistakes" like verbing nouns.
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English also allows for "mistakes" like verbing nouns.
Yeah, verbing weirds English.
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Fair enough. Perhaps it is easier to get by with poor English. But the fact that people can understand English even with mistakes is not a testament that it's easier to learn. :P
What is "English" then, if not the intersection of what all English speakers understand? Probably in the UK the way any educated person from the US speaks would be deemed as "poor English". Even more so its writing, with your theaters in the center and the like. Would you say teenagers do not speak English? They do not write English in tweets, SMSs, etc?
I was referring more to egregious errors in grammar rather than chat speak/abbreviations. For example, my mom will mess up tenses and word order sometimes, but I can still figure out what she means. English also allows for "mistakes" like verbing nouns.
I love that when you're talking about verbing nouns, you're actually verbing a noun! :o
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English also allows for "mistakes" like verbing nouns.
Yeah, verbing weirds English.
No, verbing weirds language. Have to get the quote right.
http://www.gocomics.com/calvinandhobbes/1993/01/25
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English also allows for "mistakes" like verbing nouns.
Yeah, verbing weirds English.
No, verbing weirds language. Have to get the quote right.
http://www.gocomics.com/calvinandhobbes/1993/01/25
Hey, I actually said language at first, but edited it because English sounded better.
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English also allows for "mistakes" like verbing nouns.
"'Mistakes'"?
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Four pages on adjective order. This thread is so f.ds
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Four pages on adjective order. This thread is so f.ds
Nah, there isn't enough Alchemy math.
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English also allows for "mistakes" like verbing nouns.
"'Mistakes'"?
Well, I guess the quotation marks are inappropriate there.
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English also allows for "mistakes" like verbing nouns.
"'Mistakes'"?
Well, I guess the quotation marks are inappropriate there.
…Okay, in all honesty you've lost me. I don't know what you mean by this, or whether you're joking, or what.
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English also allows for "mistakes" like verbing nouns.
"'Mistakes'"?
Well, I guess the quotation marks are inappropriate there.
…Okay, in all honesty you've lost me. I don't know what you mean by this, or whether you're joking, or what.
I meant that you can intentionally (or accidentally, I suppose) make "mistakes" by verbing nouns. Such usage could be considered incorrect, but meaning can still be interpreted with ease (which is why I said English allows for it). Since it is still understood and may be intentionally done, maybe such cases shouldn't be called mistakes, which is why I used quotation marks there.
Does that make sense, or am I way off base?
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English also allows for "mistakes" like verbing nouns.
"'Mistakes'"?
Well, I guess the quotation marks are inappropriate there.
…Okay, in all honesty you've lost me. I don't know what you mean by this, or whether you're joking, or what.
I meant that you can intentionally (or accidentally, I suppose) make "mistakes" by verbing nouns. Such usage could be considered incorrect, but meaning can still be interpreted with ease (which is why I said English allows for it). Since it is still understood and may be intentionally done, maybe such cases shouldn't be called mistakes, which is why I used quotation marks there.
Does that make sense, or am I way off base?
I just don't understand in what sense verbing nouns per se can be considered either a "mistake" or a mistake.
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English also allows for "mistakes" like verbing nouns.
"'Mistakes'"?
Well, I guess the quotation marks are inappropriate there.
…Okay, in all honesty you've lost me. I don't know what you mean by this, or whether you're joking, or what.
I meant that you can intentionally (or accidentally, I suppose) make "mistakes" by verbing nouns. Such usage could be considered incorrect, but meaning can still be interpreted with ease (which is why I said English allows for it). Since it is still understood and may be intentionally done, maybe such cases shouldn't be called mistakes, which is why I used quotation marks there.
Does that make sense, or am I way off base?
I just don't understand in what sense verbing nouns per se can be considered either a "mistake" or a mistake.
Would you not consider it a mistake to use a verb (or any word) that is not found in any dictionary or even used in any dialect? Verbing a noun can mean entirely novel constructions, like nonsense words, except that the root noun allows someone to interpret the meaning.
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They are mistakes in the sense that they are not found in the standard lexicon of English vocabulary. Microsoft Word would draw a red squiggly line underneath them.
They are "mistakes" in the sense that while they might not be technically correct, everybody knows what you're talking about anyway, and isn't that the point of language to begin with?
Hopefully this understandablizes the point a bit more.
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They are "mistakes" in the sense that while they might not be technically correct, everybody knows what you're talking about anyway, and isn't that the point of language to begin with?
This argument bothers me. It is like saying, "Well, this code is written poorly, unextensible, undocumented, etc., but it works, and isn't that the point of the program?" There is usually a reason for technical rules.
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They are "mistakes" in the sense that while they might not be technically correct, everybody knows what you're talking about anyway, and isn't that the point of language to begin with?
This argument bothers me. It is like saying, "Well, this code is written poorly, unextensible, undocumented, etc., but it works, and isn't that the point of the program?" There is usually a reason for technical rules.
Didn't mean to bother you theory! Unfortunately a lot of my code does end up looking like that :-[
It's not as if I was completely bucking the technical rules either. For example, my faux word "understandablizes" follows the basic grammatical form of English; I took a root word and added some suffixes to it in a logical and coherent way. I would guess that most people reading it knew exactly what I was talking about immediately. On the other hand, if I had written "xkjwo(&W&$ifjwos", well that would be a syntax error for sure. This lack of rigidity makes the language more extensible, not less!
I understand the importance of precision in certain contexts. To take an example from music, if I'm playing a Bach concerto, it's really important whether that note was a B or B flat. If I'm rocking some 12 bar blues, I can wing it...but if I stray too far from the overarching rules then I'm not playing the blues anymore. In computer programming or formal mathematics every little semicolon matters. When talking informally to a flexible associative network of 100 billion neurons that evolved in a noisy environment--not so much.
It is also my belief that in the future, computer programming and operation will be much more linguistic in nature, while still allowing for rigor. I think the progress from punch cards to FORTRAN to scripting languages supports this theory, and you can catch a glimpse of the future in something like IBM's Watson project. I imagine that in a couple generations I'd be able to describe what I want my program to do in plain English, and the compiler could basically just figure it out and do all the hard work of optimization itself. Maybe you find this idea to be abhorrent. But I find it to be awesome!
All that being said, it secretly annoys me when people use "John and I" when they should have used "John and me." >:(
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I just don't understand in what sense verbing nouns per se can be considered either a "mistake" or a mistake.
Would you not consider it a mistake to use a verb (or any word) that is not found in any dictionary or even used in any dialect?
Not automatically! Consider the following sentence:
"It's not a good idea to build an engine around Tribute because, even though it can act as a village, its nonterminalness is unreliable."
Was it a mistake for me to use the word nonterminalness in that sentence? if so, why?
Verbing a noun can mean entirely novel constructions, like nonsense words,
On that level, almost every linguistic act is an "entirely novel construction". The noun isn't novel, and the act of verbing nouns isn't novel; though the act of verbing a particular noun may be novel, language is all about combining a finite set of elements into an unlimited number of novel constructions.
except that the root noun allows someone to interpret the meaning.
Yes. So why should it be considered a mistake?
(Note: I'm not contending that any individual instance of verbing a noun might not be a mistake for one reason or another. But "English allows for 'mistakes' like verbing nouns" makes it sound like you're saying that verbing nouns can be characterized in some sense as a mistake in general, which is what I take exception to.)
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They are "mistakes" in the sense that while they might not be technically correct, everybody knows what you're talking about anyway, and isn't that the point of language to begin with?
This argument bothers me. It is like saying, "Well, this code is written poorly, unextensible, undocumented, etc., but it works, and isn't that the point of the program?" There is usually a reason for technical rules.
It bothers me too. A closer approximation to the fact of the matter might be: they are "mistakes" in the sense that, while they are technically correct, some people have made up additional rules that they falsely claim apply, and they don't obey those.
"Everybody knows what you're talking about anyway" isn't sufficient for something to be grammatical. Everyone knows what Cookie Monster means when he says "Me want cookie," but that doesn't make that an actual sentence of English.
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Cookie Monster is simply speaking a different dialect of English. Certainly it is comprehensible and self-consistent. To call it ungrammatical would be insensitive and quite frankly a bit racist.
http://theleagueofnerds.wordpress.com/2013/08/13/talk-like-a-monster/
;)
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Cookie Monster is simply speaking a different dialect of English. Certainly it is comprehensible and self-consistent. To call it ungrammatical would be insensitive and quite frankly a bit racist.
Well, everyone's a little bit racist sometimes.
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Cookie Monster is simply speaking a different dialect of English. Certainly it is comprehensible and self-consistent. To call it ungrammatical would be insensitive and quite frankly a bit racist.
http://theleagueofnerds.wordpress.com/2013/08/13/talk-like-a-monster/
This was about 1000 times more interesting than the lab report I'm supposed to be writing right now. I need to study some linguistics.
Cookie Monster is simply speaking a different dialect of English. Certainly it is comprehensible and self-consistent. To call it ungrammatical would be insensitive and quite frankly a bit racist.
Well, everyone's a little bit racist sometimes.
I'm in a production of Avenue Q right now :)
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Cookie Monster is simply speaking a different dialect of English. Certainly it is comprehensible and self-consistent. To call it ungrammatical would be insensitive and quite frankly a bit racist.
http://theleagueofnerds.wordpress.com/2013/08/13/talk-like-a-monster/
;)
That was a wonderful article.
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I just don't understand in what sense verbing nouns per se can be considered either a "mistake" or a mistake.
Would you not consider it a mistake to use a verb (or any word) that is not found in any dictionary or even used in any dialect?
Not automatically! Consider the following sentence:
"It's not a good idea to build an engine around Tribute because, even though it can act as a village, its nonterminalness is unreliable."
Was it a mistake for me to use the word nonterminalness in that sentence? if so, why?
Verbing a noun can mean entirely novel constructions, like nonsense words,
On that level, almost ''every'' linguistic act is an "entirely novel construction". The noun isn't novel, and the act of verbing nouns isn't novel; though the act of verbing a particular noun may be novel, language is all about combining a finite set of elements into an unlimited number of novel constructions.
except that the root noun allows someone to interpret the meaning.
Yes. So why should it be considered a mistake?
(Note: I'm not contending that any individual instance of verbing a noun might not be a mistake for one reason or another. But "English allows for 'mistakes' like verbing nouns" makes it sound like you're saying that verbing nouns can be characterized in some sense as a mistake in general, which is what I take exception to.)
Well, that is why I put "mistake" in quotation marks. :P
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Well, that is why I put "mistake" in quotation marks. :P
So I still don't understand what you meant by "Well, I guess the quotation marks are inappropriate there". (Or, with the quotation marks, according to who it's supposed to be a mistake.)
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Well, that is why I put "mistake" in quotation marks. :P
So I still don't understand what you meant by "Well, I guess the quotation marks are inappropriate there". (Or, with the quotation marks, according to who it's supposed to be a mistake.)
I don't know either anymore. :P I put the quotation marks originally because maybe it shouldn't really be considered a mistake, and then your question made me question my thinking... so yeah. I don't know! ;D