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Ending a sentence with a preposition
Why are people so stick up the ass about this again?
Comments
Because a lot of English teachers don't realize that languages change over time.
^ SINGULAR THEY IS A DEMON UPON THE EARTH! ...Despite people like Shakespeare using it.
Because neurotic people need something to complain about.
i see what you did there, bee.
And that's how english came to be the fucking mess it is. Letting descriptivism run rampant.
@vandro Yeah, how dare people treat the study of language as a science rather than a set of divinely given rules?
English would be a lot better in terms of consistency if it had a regulatory body. But it is what it is and whining about it seems rather unproductive, really.
just...let it not break further.
I don't oppose descriptivism as a principle, I am just describing what happened, i.e.: people changed things as they saw fit, that's being descriptive in the use of the language, if you have a better word, share it.
English would be a lot better in terms of consistency if it had a regulatory body.
I laughed so hard. French has that. It doesn't work.
So you're saying that French is as equally inconsistent as English?
It was too late, it had already lost lots of tenses, the sum-stato copula merged, the phonological evolution made it have a divide between written and spoken language...but it is still way more consistent than english
French is more inconsistent than English. And it HAS a regulatory body.
Details, please
It's really hard to explain (dunno how much you know about french). But French is really big on setting a rule, then having more exceptions than the rule itself. And those exceptions have their own rules too! Except the Exception's Exception, that has its own rules of course. Take simply conjugating past participles in french: it's a complex thing depending on the past participle itself, the transitive verb used to link it to the subject, and the kind of complement used to finish off the sentence. And that's just past participles. There's so many rules for verb conjugation in french, schools have an entire book dedicated entirely to that that does not touch the other aspects of grammar or spelling.
French Grammar is a nightmare.
Some of the prescriptive rules, such as "don't split infinitives" comes from attempts to make English more similar to Latin, which was basically thought to be a more perfect language because it was basically assumed that language deteriorated over time and older forms were better.
Here's something by Stephen Fry I saw linked a few days ago.
Now, I do admit to being bothered by certain "mistakes" and allow myself to point them out sometimes, but I generally try to point them out when their use allows for potential for confusion. I'd prefer people I know use "literally" more... literally, but that's more because it's a useful word that will leave unnecessary ambiguity if the speaker does not make the same discriminations. Also, I figure it's worth pointing them out when it seems the person is simply not aware that they are considered "incorrect" so they can learn to write more formally when need be.
I do think that it's silly to think of things in terms of correctness and incorrectness, but I think it can be appropriate to try to figure out whether a certain use of language is more socially appropriate or admirable depending on the social situation or dialect. The more I learn about how styles of languages are used, the more it seems to be that the comparison between it and fashion is apt. Styles go out of fashion over time, and certain kinds meet with derision or respect depending on the environment. It doesn't mean we should try to encourage snobbery, neither in terms of fashion or grammar, but it can help to make ourselves more aware of it so we can be more tolerant of the ignorant and individualistic, and better able to avoid upsetting others unnecessarily.
Bescherelle: "L'art de conjuguer" is a verb conjugation book every student learning french has seen. (It's a required text in most elementary and high schools in fact.)
I'm actually trying to look for a picture of a single page of the book to show how complex verb conjugation is in french. It's so bad then I learned English as a kid, for many of us it was like English is this super consistent language with almost no rules! The fact the past participle of like half the verbs is "verb+ed" was almost surreal. Sure, there's a ton of exceptions and almost all are unique. But compared to french? That's nothing. Heck, English has not even half the tenses french has. French has 2 future tenses and half a dozen past tenses. Oh, and we have like 6 kinds of persons (first, second and third, singular, and plural) for pronouns, and the third one has genders which may also require conjugating (ie: I and We in french require the verb to be conjugated differently).
Are you a native French speaker?
As long as I understand what someone's saying, I could care less about the nuts and bolts.
Anyway, back on topic of having an authority on the language. English I think benefits from not having it. It allows the language to evolve and shape itself to its people's needs. Some rules fall out of favor over time, new ones are formed. Loanwords and new words and neologism are formed and accepted. It gives English a fluidity.
French doesn't have that. Because there's someone who officially decides what rules are what, there's a disconnect that forms between proper french and how it is used. This leads to odd rules being formed where they aren't needed, or rules being only made official LONG after everyone's adopted them (A kind of "We can't beat them, so join them"). French has a ton of tenses for examples NO ONE USES. Yet they are taught because they are part of "the rules". You'll never, ever use them and people will think you speak gibberish if you do. But we'll waste school time to teach them.
Are you a native French speaker?
Yes
Okay. Maybe that was a dumb question.
I will admit to not finding French grammar that difficult when I studied French at school. Perhaps my teachers just deliberately missed out the bits that no-one actually uses in reality, and to be fair I suppose I wasn't being asked to write essays in it of the kind that I would have if it had been my native language.
The problem with the no preposition at the end of a sentence rule is that although it's stupid, once you've learned it you can't really shake it off. I generally follow it in my "writing", but then my "writing" is basically legal letters. Nobody expects them to be written in magnificent prose.
Although I still have the urge to correct written grammar.
^IMO, good grammar is good, but that doesn't automatically make bad grammar bad.
That's a strange thing to say. If X is good and Y is not, why couldn't you say Y is more bad than X?
No, but it does make it annoying to understand quite a lot of the time.
And while it may not be bad contextually, if used in different circumstances, the same bad grammar can make them get their point across less effectively, so correcting them now could help them later.
As a side note: I don't care if "irregardless" is in the dictionary, the "ir" defeats the "regardless" part, rendering the word meaningless and stupid.
Multiple negation occurs in many languages and several dialects of English. It's certainly obnoxious when used in standard English and its use could be taken to indicate minor ignorance, but it's by no means meaningless.
Is it because that Canadian French is very different from French French?
Is it because that Canadian French is very different from French French?
Partially that and partially they make it simple because it's a mandatory class, I'd imagine.